Educational Philosophy.
We believe that a quality education is only possible when an educational institution places people at the center of design. When building McAllen School, our design team started with a simple question: How might we improve the high school experience for all students, parents, and educators?
Answering that question led us down several roads of inquiry. We explored several educational theories produced by leading cognitive and educational psychologists including Piaget, Vygotsky, Dewey, and Gagné. Our team also refers heavily to design books like David Epstein’s Range, Tim Brown’s Change by Design, and Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. We study modern curriculum development and classroom instruction such as Douglas J. Fiore’s School-Community Relations, Susan Drake’s Creating Standards-Based Integrated Curriculum, Michael Sadowski’s Adolescence at School, Julie Dirksen’s Design for How People Learn, and Robert J. Marzano’s What Works in Schools.
Drawing from these resources and several others, we built an educational institution that is people-centered using collaborative learning to build cognitive skills through creative exploration of real-world problems.
People-Centered.
The McAllen School is not only focused on student experiences. Instead, we build our educational experiences with the needs of administrators, teachers, students, and parents in mind.
Designing a people-centered learning institution means we place ourselves in the shoes of as many stakeholders as possible every time we build a process or course. This design philosophy has resulted in fingertip access to the school for parents, streamlined and challenging courses for our students, productive professional development for our teachers, and enhanced decision-making processes for our administrators.
Collaborative. Cognitive. Creative.
Every course is designed to help students master employer-articulated 21st-century skills. Our students work in small teams using a variety of communication platforms to solve real-world problems. Students build cognitive skills through critical analysis of their thought processes. Finally, students must demonstrate an uncommon ability to find solutions to issues where solutions may not be easily found. View our curriculum here to learn how we prepare our students to be career-ready on the day they graduate.
Experiential Learning.
Everyone learns better when they get to experience a problem and teach the solution to others. Every class at McAllen School is designed to put students inside a problem, work as team to solve the problem, then teach their solution to others.