Core Curriculum

Billings offers a rich core curriculum designed to engage students in rigorous, multi-faceted ways. Classes align with the developmental growth of our students and are taught with an awareness of each individual's strengths and learning styles.

Nationally recognized programs in science and the arts complement a core humanities curriculum, extensive outdoor program, and wide variety of extra-curricular activities. Strands of work on health issues, including gender study, are integrated across the three years at the school. While classes operate as a cohort, faculty work closely with individual students ensuring they receive the challenge and support they need to thrive.

Our academic program is built on:

• Understanding personal learning styles
• Project-based learning
• Fostering analytical and critical thinking skills
• Creating an environment of physical and emotional safety
• Working cooperatively with individual accountability
• Nurturing community and environmental responsibility
• Internalizing well-developed decision making
• Remaining open to the risks of learning
• Developing as self-confident learners characterized by academic and personal resilience

Teaching at Billings

Teachers at Billings bring a remarkable breadth of skills to their work with students. They develop curriculum, collaborate and co-plan, engage a wide modality of learning styles, and challenge students to connect content across disciplines and with wider ethical and global contexts. They read and apply research about the best practices for working with early adolescents. Teachers engage students at Billings in many ways – in the classroom, as advisors, as coaches, outdoor leaders, and as partners in inquiry. The result is a model of future mentorship that many students carry – and seek to replicate – for the rest of their academic lives.

The size and structure of Billings allows teachers to be exceptionally nimble and collaborative in their work. Understanding the need for middle schoolers to develop discipline specific skills AND to engage those skills through meaningful applied learning contexts, the school supports a hybrid schedule, balanced between core academic classes and blocked integrated learning opportunities.

What this means is that students take a focused math class, but they also participate in integrated STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) Labs and Applied Math Labs over their three years, so that the skills they are developing are joined with opportunities for hands-on inquiry into areas of Engineering, Economics and Civics. Similarly, core classes in Language Arts and History are linked to integrated studies of Humanities which present applications and case studies in areas such as Art History, Law, Ethics, Social Economics and Media Study.

Interdisciplinary Teaching

Interdisciplinary teaching, integrated curriculum, thematic instruction, and synergistic teaching are terms used interchangeably to connote one idea – teaching across subjects and skills brings meaning to knowledge.

Billings faculty practice three approaches to interdisciplinary teaching – sequencing, sharing, and integrating – to join together disciplines and give context to learning.

• In the sequencing model, topics and units are taught independently, but arranged and sequenced to provide a framework for related concepts. Teachers arrange topics so that similar units articulate. At Billings, for example, teachers coordinate units on the stock market in math and the Great Depression in history. 

• Units are planned to be synchronized. This approach has been shown to be particularly effective across age groups and learning levels.

• In the sharing model, two distinct disciplines are brought together into a single focus. In this approach, teachers of the two disciplines plan their teaching around common topics, concepts and skills. For example, Billings math teachers introduce the metric system, which the science teacher uses in experiments on density. At the same time, the Spanish instructor introduces vocabulary for the metric system.

• Billings teachers also rely on the integrated model of interdisciplinary teaching, in which units are arranged around overlapping concepts and emergent patterns. In the 7th grade, for example, three major themes are presented during the school year – community, identity, and global connectedness – which blend the disciplines by finding overlapping skills, concepts, and attitudes. Content becomes more meaningful when curriculum is collaboratively designed around important issues and when a common theme is studied in more than one content area.
  
  

Core Courses of Study

Curriculum Spotlights

6th Grade	7th Grade	8th Grade
In ArtsCore, students build a solid foundation in creative & expressive skills through classes in movement, drama, music and visual visual arts.	In Earth Sciences, students administer a reseach grant with Seattle's Discovery Park to document vegetation and restore native species.	In Integrated Human Sciences, students collect and track air particulate data over time analyze and share with other schools in Japan and India.