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St. Mary's going 'mod' Sixth-grade students review a homework assignment Thursday at St. Mary's School. Mail Tribune / Denise Baratta Friday Oct 7, 2016 at 5:28 PM Oct 7, 2016 at 5:28 PM Teresa Thomas Mail Tribune @teresathomas_MT St. Mary’s officials plan to completely overhaul the school’s curriculum and calendar next year, giving students more class options and breaks and teachers smaller class loads. As of next fall, the school will no longer operate on a semester schedule. Instead, the school year will be divided into seven 26-day modules, with students taking different classes each “mod.” The new system has been dubbed “St. Mary’s 2.0.” As a private secondary school, St. Mary’s is not bound to Common Core State Standards, Smarter Balanced assessments and other state mandates, like the public schools, and has the liberty to pursue other models of education, said Head of Schools Frank Phillips. Over the last three years, Phillips has worked alongside Delaware-based consulting firm Independent School Management to look at schools around the country to see what they’re offering and how they’re organized. Two schools — The Cambridge School of Weston, which originated as a feeder school for Harvard University, and the Madeira School, a private girl’s school outside the District of Columbia — have had “phenomenal” success using the mod system, said Phillips. “It’s a complete 180 degrees away from Common Core,” he said. “Currently, St. Mary's has a great program," he said. "We do very well at preparing kids in a traditional way for success in college, but we believe that model is outdated and is not giving kids the skills they need for the 21st century. Kids were going through the paces, but they weren’t as engaged as we thought they could be, and it wasn’t as joyful of a learning experience as we thought it could be. We thought we could do better.” Under the module system, the school year is organized into seven “mods” made up of 26 academic days, with an optional 14-day mod in August. “Every day, students take just three 90-minute classes and then a 45-minute enrichment class (or elective) in which homework cannot be assigned,” Phillips explained. At the end of each mod, students get a four- to five-day break or holiday and then return to school for a new mod with new classes or “bins” and new teachers. This year, high school students have about 77 classes to choose from, but next year, they’ll have more than 200 classes to choose from, said the school’s spokeswoman Sarah Primerano in an email. Over the last few years, the school has held departmental meetings in which teachers have proposed classes. Their suggestions were then vetted by administration and presented to a student panel to gauge student interest in the topic. “We’ve taken the ones that played well with the student panel and have been developing them,” Phillips said. Humanities content, in particular, will radically change, he said. For example, freshman are currently required to take English 9, but next fall, they’ll get to choose from more than 20 English classes to meet that requirement, including "Short Shorts: Fiction Writing,” “Around the World in Poetry and Short Fiction," "Romantic Outlaws (Byron and Mr. and Mrs. Shelley)" and "Newspaper Editorials and Political Cartoons: The Art of Clearly and Compellingly Making a Point with Words or Lines.” “Students are getting the same emphasis on vocabulary acquisition, compositions skills and rhetoric, it’s just that it’s being delivered in these more intensive, focused, specialized courses,” Phillips said. “They won’t get a gigantic anthology and spend the year going through it chronologically.” As a credit consists of about 120 classroom hours, students need to take three mods to earn a credit and four mods for more difficult classes, such as Advanced Placement chemistry and biology. “The deeper dive has been shown to improve student retention in all areas,” Phillips said. “They can focus their schedule based on what they are interested in,” he said, adding that no two students will graduate with the same transcript under this system. Teachers will teach two bins each day, and with class sizes set at 18 students, their load will be 36 students per mod, providing them more time to spend with students and to give meaningful feedback, Phillips said. Under the mod system, the school year will be 182 instructional days, beginning the last week of August and ending the third week of June, except for seniors, who will graduate before the seventh mod. The school year is currently 180 days. “This is just a much more clever way to slice and dice a schedule, so not only will students all have unlimited choice, but teachers will have only 36 students per mod,” Phillips said. “(Students) can enjoy school more, have less stress and get better prepared for college,” he added. “And teachers love it because they get to design these wonderful courses and they don’t spend 30 years teaching the same thing while preparing kids to take the state test.” — Reach education reporter Teresa Thomas at 541-776-4497 or [email protected]. Follow her at www.twitter.com/teresathomas_mt.