WHAT ARE THE DESIGN PRINCIPLES OF ANIMAS HIGH SCHOOL?

Personalization (Knowing each student as an individual)

• Small school environment fosters personalized attention and supports students in learning at their unique level.
• Advisory groups in which every student is known well and encouraged to develop personal strengths and interests.
• Individualized conferencing where faculty develops individual goals with each student, specific to their needs in each course.

Adult World Connection (Understanding the relevance of high school studies to the “real world”)

• Taking students outside the school: Internship requirement for all students, completed in junior year. Feature opportunities to solve adult-world problems using classroom-learned skills.
• Bringing community members to the school: adults participating in the life of the school and making contributions that improve education for students.
• Developing a curriculum of place: learning through tangible engagement in local issues.

Common Intellectual Mission (Linking the hands and the mind)

• Rigorous project-based learning - Learn by doing, creating, thinking, and presenting. Establishing relevancy of subject matter to real world. Team and individual project work mimic real life.
• Technical and academic integration. Teaching across disciplines helps to integrate learning. The traditional “college prep” curriculum is infused with high levels of technology, encouraging students to think from multiple perspectives and utilize technology in appropriate ways.
• Individualized assessment using rubrics, public exhibits of work, and digital portfolios. Performance-based evaluation that assesses both process and product.
• A culture of excellence, developed through “habits of heart and mind” and strong guiding principles to undergird school management and student attitudes and behavior.