Curriculum

Innovation Studio is a multi-disciplinary design studio that teaches responsible innovation and entrepreneurship that benefits the world. It is a substantial part of the program for students in grades 6 through 12. Students inherently have curiosity, intellect, and desire to learn. NEIA meets students with an environment that provides them with the space, the tools, the coaching, and the skills to allow them to go as far as their passion, imagination, resourcefulness, and motivation will take them. In the Innovation Studio, the human-centered design process is used to explore and develop habits of work, mind, and heart. Students will work with their hands to build projects. They will use their minds to identify the problem they are trying to solve and come to understand who those problems directly affect and why. Students will use their hearts as they step into the shoes of others with empathy to explore viewpoints that are different from their own. The sciences, the arts, business, ethnography, and design come together as students learn and apply newly gained knowledge to relevant and meaningful projects that positively impact their community.

At NEIA, we want innovators to understand mathematics in abstraction and application as they develop conceptual fluency and employ real-world problem-solving strategies. We want Innovators to question and investigate mathematics while communicating their ideas through mathematical discourse and writing.

The goal of the mathematics program is to develop innovators’ quantitative reasoning skills — understanding how math is used in the real world and applying it to make the best possible decisions.

The NEIA math curriculum develops these practices through an integrated approach:

• Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them
• Reason abstractly and quantitatively
• Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others
• Model with mathematics
• Test their models through their Innovation Studio projects
• Use appropriate tools strategically
• Attend to precision
• Look for and make use of structure
• Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning

The mathematics program provides an Innovator-centered, hands-on environment to explore, invent, discuss, and debate the meaning of math. Subjects are introduced not as a collection of isolated concepts but as an ever-evolving body of interconnected knowledge. Building a sequence of experiences in a gradually enlarging spiral, teachers use problem-solving approaches to meet Innovators where they are and to develop their thinking and understanding. Innovators progress through the math sequence by “stage not age.”

At NEIA, we want Innovators to achieve communicative competence in the language and culture of study for real-world applications. The goal of the language program is to develop Innovators’ reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills so they can comfortably communicate their ideas in the target language, with an emphasis on spoken language and familiarity with the cultures of its speakers.  This year we will be featuring Spanish and Mandarin.

Our language curriculum is offered in partnership with Dartmouth College’s Rassias Center for World Languages and Cultures. The Rassias MethodⓇ employs a five-point philosophy that aims to break through “crusts” and communicate language and culture heart-to-heart:

• Know Thyself: We ask our teachers and innovators to think about who they are before they step into the classroom; to explore their values, beliefs, strengths, inhibitions, and prejudices; or, more simply, their own humanity.
• Connect: We work to assure that the material is relevant to the learners’ needs, that they can identify with it, that they are involved in the learning process and that they feel a change in themselves.
• Special Delivery: We use carefully-designed classroom techniques to bring the language to life, allowing learners to work on their communication skills. Together, we progress systematically from repetition that will create a foundation for pronunciation, to substitution, to sentence transformation, to spontaneous use of the language to express your own creative thoughts.
• Student as the Star of the Show: Our goal is for the innovators to feel empowered, to face errors that are a necessary part of learning, and to keep on communicating.
• Senses and Emotions: We aspire to engage all the senses in the learning process. Deep experiential learning occurs when one invests one’s emotions in the enterprise.

Wellbeing affirms that as whole beings we must integrate our physical, emotional, and cognitive selves to best thrive and function. Wellbeing unites the individual needs of students and community to foster healthy individuals and supportive interactions. Wellbeing is a way of being realized through the mindful decisions, feelings, and behaviors that represent our commitment to integrity and belonging. Wellbeing focuses on 4 core constructs that are integral to the development of fully dimensional youth; Mindwell, Bodywell, Livewell, and Learnwell.