Content Rich Curriculum

Our school offers rich, interesting liberal arts content - not a test-prep curriculum. We believe that the best preparation for state tests is a strong education, not narrowly-focused instruction. While no public school is immune from the pressure to align itself to the state tests, we do our best to not compromise our focus on providing a classical education while still performing well on mandated assessments. The charter application defines the school's mission, vision, operational expectations, and initial curriculum. Click here to read exerpts.

Employee-Led Solutions

We know that education is a challenging profession, and we hope to create a manageable, livable work environment. We believe that the people closest to the challenges in their profession are the ones best suited to solve them. In addition to the procedures outlined in the FCTA, FASSE, and FCASA negotiated agreements, employees at the Frederick Classical Charter School have an additional informal mechanism to resolve concerns and make suggestions. The school employs General Electric’s Work-Out process to empower employees to identify problems and unleash their creativity, energy, and expertise to develop and implement solutions. The point of Work-Out is not to create an additional formal, top-down bureaucratic process for resolving issues, but to encourage an informal, simple, fast, and employee-led way of operating that respects the fact that the people closest to the issues are more likely to have the knowledge to resolve them.

Valuable Professional Development, Not Fads

Our extensive professional development is delivered by the best in their fields, and provides practical training based on mainstream education research and cognitive science that makes a real difference for students. We plan summer and in-service training that also meets Maryland certification requirements, so that the time spent in professional development helps teachers maintain their credentials. Though our teacher satisfaction survey, we continually improve the professional development offerings so that teachers get training that is useful to them. We continually increase the school's capacity to deliver professional development, transitioning from using external consultants for professional development in the first few years to developing in-house trainers whose expertise is sought at the school, county, and, eventually, national levels.

Focus on Students

Our school regards well-written and well-delivered lesson plans as the heart and soul of improving education. In subjects where research-based lesson plans are available, we seek to utilize them so that teacher can spend less time planning lessons and more time helping students. In areas where validated lessons are not available, we seek to provide teachers with resources from which lessons can be developed, and give them support over a period of several years to complete a full set of field-tested lesson plans that can be adjusted to meet students' needs.