Approaches to Learning
Students develop skills that have relevance across the curriculum that help them “learn how to learn”. Approaches to learning skills can be learned and taught, improved with practice and developed incrementally. They provide a solid foundation for learning independently and with others. ATL skills help students prepare for, and demonstrate learning through, meaningful assessment. They provide a common language that students and teachers can use to reflect on and articulate on the process of learning.
Open to students in grades 9-12 that would like support with AP/IB courses. Students earn an elective credit.
Contact Natasha_L_Ezerski@mcpsmd.org or Kimberly_M_Becraft@mcpsmd.org for more information.
Connections
The Connections course is designed to provide students with opportunities for developing and improving their executive functioning skills in order to be successful both academically and personally. These skills include: planning, organization, time management, metacognition, working memory, self-control, attention, flexibility, and perseverance. We also provide academic support and intervention. Students are able to work on both their daytime and credit recovery courses.
We also offer Math Connections for students to receive directed math support and ELD Connections for students in our ESOL program.
Open to students in grades 9-12. Students earn an elective credit and can take it more than once for credit. Contact Farolyn_Taylor@mcpsmd.org or your child's counselor for more information.
Developmental Reading
This course will focus on building engagement with literacy in hopes of developing lifelong readers through the means of differentiated and direct instruction, instructional software, and high-interest literature. Instructional methods will include whole-group, small strategy groups, 1:1 conferences, independent reading, and book clubs. Students will have choice in text selection and goal-setting. Students will build comprehension, reading, writing, phonological and vocabulary skills.
Students will learn to think with their “heads and hearts” (Beers & Probst, 2018) by learning strategic questions that can be applied to any text. Ultimately, these questions will not only develop core reading skills but also empathy and self-discovery. Students will learn to think authentically about text, by examining the plot, characters, themes, main ideas, key details, text features, and style choices. Doing so will build their foundational reading processes: visualizing, monitoring for meaning, activating prior knowledge, predicting, questioning, determining importance, summarizing, inferring, and synthesizing.
This course will also serve to support students in their writing tasks for their English classes in the areas of argument, analysis, narrative, and informative.
Open to students in grades 9-10. Students earn an elective credit.
Contact Jacqueline_A_Kruft@mcpsmd.org for more information.