Curricula Frameworks

The various disciplines of knowledge are a unique illumination of the Divine truth. Education is pastoral work. And Catholic education especially is meant to instill virtue, to raise the eyes and the mind upward, and to help students discover the unique vocation God has in store for them.

General Principles and Goals

1. The theory and practice of the Church’s social teachings are embedded into the curriculum.

2. Sacred Scripture, sacred Tradition and Catholic intellectual tradition are used in all subjects to help students think critically and ethically about the world around them.

3. The moral and spiritual life of the class, through its culture, climate, and curriculum, is designed to help students identify, define, and live in accordance with core principles of Catholic social teachings and habits of mind that aid in the development of strong moral character.

Goals in Instructional Design

 4.  Classroom instruction is designed to help all students’ strengthen and grow their multiple cognitive intelligences, meeting the needs and capabilities of all students and their individualized learning needs.

 5.  Classroom instruction is designed to engage and motivate all students through the implementation of rigorous, standards-based instructional objectives, activities, and assessments aligned to best practices in cognitive learning science.

 6.  Classroom instruction is designed to intentionally address Catholic habits of mind and the affective dimensions of learning, which include emotional, social, moral, spiritual, and motivational development.

Striving Toward a Holistic Curricula 

 7.  Curricula prepare students with the knowledge, understanding and collaborative skills to become creative, reflective, literate, critical, and moral evaluators, problem solvers, and decision makers.

 8.  Curricula prepare students to think and to learn within and across all academic disciplines to better uncover God’s revelation.

 9.  Curricula prepare students to become socially responsible global citizens by providing access to learning experiences within and across core subject areas (English language arts, mathematics, religion, social studies, science) that address questions of how to live morally in our current society.

Interdisciplinary Learning Opportunities

 10.  The classroom provides students the chance to use the engineering design/problem solving process (i.e., ask, imagine, plan, create, and improve) to develop meaningful solutions to challenges through the lens of the Catholic worldview.

 11.  The classroom provides students with opportunities to become expert and responsible users of technology; students are enabled to create, publish, and critique digital media, and respectfully communicate in ways that reflect their understanding of content, Catholic culture, and technology skills.

 12.  The classroom provides students with opportunities to express Catholic culture and faith through visual, audio and performing arts.

Gaudium de veritate, so precious to Saint Augustine, which is that joy of searching for, discovering and communicating truth in every field of knowledge. In Catholic education, a privileged task is "to unite existentially by intellectual effort two orders of reality that too frequently tend to be placed in opposition as though they were antithetical: the search for truth, and the certainty of already knowing the fount of truth"