Brilla Public Charter Schools seek to educate students to lead lives of excellence, virtue and purpose. Our goal is to ensure that every student achieves!
Our Virtues: Courage, Wisdom, Justice, Self Control
Our Curriculum
At Brilla, Common Core standards are the foundation of what we do. We collaborate to build a rigorous standards aligned curricula. Our curriculum is backwards-mapped against end-of-year standards and vertically aligned to prepare our students for college. The Brilla team (teachers, principal, and deans) work together so our instructional leads have the top curriculum resources at their disposal.
Our Instruction
Bite-Sized, measurable, standards- aligned classroom objectives: Every class has a bite-sized, measurable and standards aligned daily objective. The objective is what drives what is delivered in the lesson. Teachers use a multitude of assessments, teachers track their students mastery of the objectives and measure the students progress towards reaching the instructional goal.
Model and guided Practice: Teachers introduce the objective by clearly modeling a strategy to master the day’s objective. Then, the teacher directs the class into a guided practice of the objective, during this time the students model their own answers and thought process. Teachers want to ensure after this process that each student has gathered enough information to use the skill or their own during independent practice.
Independent Practice: Students spend the majority of time during a lesson working on their independent practice. We want to make sure that students get multiple opportunities to practice the daily objective on their own. We want our students to be doing the majority of the thinking and having many chances to build their minds until they get it right.
Standards- aligned assessments, data driven analysis and planning: Our curriculm is split into five cycles. Each cycle concludes with a interim assessment where students demonstrate mastery of the standards they have learned during each semester. We have a school-wide professional development day following each cycle, where teacher analyze data and create unit plans, target their small and whole group instruction. The data-driven mindset teachers take provide teachers with the flexibility to curtail the curriculum to fit students needs and support any challenges that may arise.
Professional Development
We believe at Brilla that teachers are the key to ensuring that all of our students achieve. Each teacher receives weekly professional development. All teachers have a coach. Coaches provide teachers with individualized plans to help them attain their learning goals for each of their students. Our support as a school stems from excellent modeling, lesson observation and feedback, and collaboration. Teachers also meet weekly in content teams to discuss the content and adjust lessons to meet students’ needs.