Mission Statement
At Seattle VocTech, we strive to help each student develop their unique abilities and interests. Our approach to teaching and learning is holistic. In addition to providing a standard core curriculum, we partner with students to help them follow their curiosities. By helping students integrate these interests into larger goals, we promote intellectual development that supports real-world goals. This two-pronged approach to learning cultivates each student as an individual with unique hopes and abilities. We begin with the assumption that each of our students is capable. We partner this assumption with a program characterized by structured flexibility. While hopes and dreams play an important part of our approach, we make them practical. We work with students to help them discover goals and refine them to make them reachable. Once students identify goals, we develop a systematic program for working toward those goals. Often this increases appreciation of core learning as part of what is needed to achieve goals. This approach enables us to help students pair standards and expectations with the pursuit of their own goals and interests. A key component of our teaching strategy is small class size. This enables teachers to identify individual learning needs and respond to them. As a result, we design coursework and learning pace to levels appropriate to each student. For students with a strong academic core, this means they are able to move through the standard curriculum quickly. For students with unique needs, we provide instruction to develop their capabilities. To help students refine their interests and develop capabilities to pursue those interests successfully, we build a passion project into each student's curriculum coursework. The passion project provides students with opportunities to develop a learning path unique to their interests. We do this by providing a structure to incorporate approved extracurricular activities into the structure of their learning. Our curriculum aims to help students understand that they are members of a larger community. |