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Projects & Workshop

Experiential learning is integral to the school’s mission.  Projects and Workshops each incorporate the components of technology, communication, community service, and entrepreneurship.  The demands and complexity increase with each Level. 

Projects & Workshops are designed to meet the following criteria:

• Provide service to an individual, group, or community external to the project;
• Integrate required competencies from the Commonwealth's Curriculum Frameworks;
• Be designed, or at least selected and driven, by SSCPS students;
• Provide leadership and supporting roles for the students;
• Be an ongoing, multi-year endeavor;
• Be entrepreneurial and experiential;
• Provide opportunities to encourage students to reflect upon the project’s value in order to build students’ skills initiative, teamwork, and critical thinking;
• Be a rich intellectual endeavor which connects the student’s coursework to concrete, real world situations. 
  

Projects & Workshops provide opportunities to apply academic lessons and introduce students to the concepts of governance and leadership.  Importantly, they require long-range planning and organizational skills.  Students learn to take risks, make mistakes, and learn from those mistakes.  Students also learn about conflict resolution and ethical behavior.

SSCPS believes that even the youngest child can do real work that has a positive effect on the world around them.  A community service ethic is embedded into every project, which may be why our students are unusually compassionate and concerned.  The work our students perform is important for the here and now, and not just a preparatory step toward becoming adults.  Overall, projects offer a level of expertise, responsibility, and social consciousness started at the youngest grades and maturing as students move up to the high school. 

At the high school level, the students enroll in “workshops” that while similar to projects, have a more academic element to them.  In a “master/apprentice” model, students explore an area of interest in-depth.  It is possible for students over the course of their high school career to gain enough skill in a particular area that would enable them to take an AP exam that particular field. These workshops still maintain many of the features of the projects in earlier grades such as community service and communication.  Some of the areas of focus for our high school workshops are: art, biology, filmmaking, engineering, journalism music, and theatre.