Catalyst Pre-Professional Program
(C3P)
Online
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” Benjamin Franklin
Our ONLINE Mission
Seeking opportunities to learn in a diverse globally accessible classroom
Catalyst Pre-Professional Program strives to provide rigorous, focused instruction and apprenticeships for learners in grades 9-12, through which graduates will have the study skills and commercially applicable competencies to financially and academically support themselves in college, career, or both. Students use their professional goals as a lens for their learning in all subjects allowing them to learn through their interests for better retention and applicability. We offer students training in critical thinking, independent work skills, and reflective analysis to embolden creative productive thinkers to become catalysts for their independent goals secure in their financial viability.
Our online classes are offered at a synchronized time chosen by the crew members.
Classes meet an hour five times a week or ninety minutes three times a week.
Classes may be synchronized with an in-person class as well.
Classes use Google Meet and Classroom.
ONLINE COurse Offerings THIS YEAR
Students gain skills and perspective through interdisciplinary learning
Social Studies
Social studies is the backbone of our curriculum focusing on learning history and social studies as living components of our contemporary lives. We focus on learning to analyze social sources, find evidence for connections across sources, and especially finding commonalities across time and place to help us to learn more about our shared experience and how our diligent work can help to improve our world.
A look at our American government through current events and principles of economics using the lens of a entrepreneur as students create their own businesses.
A look at the social and physical forces that impact cultures across the world and how globalization is affecting culture today.
Reading and Writing
Catalyst Pre-Professional Program unique approach to reading and writing helps students become expressive and effective communicators in many twenty-first century mediums while relying on integration of sources and supportive research as well as explicit analysis of differing grammatical structures.
Reading and writing classes at C3P are a student-driven collaboration with each student choosing their own texts to meet expectations with input and assistance from their teacher.
Learners work collaboratively and independently on texts related to their other classes meeting independently with teachers to critique and improve their work.
All students read texts from American and global authors; classic and modern texts; informational texts from varying perspectives and narrative texts; poetry, dramas, and prose to practice utilizing their analytical reading skills and persuasive skills through organization of evidence culminating in projects that provide students an opportunity to utilize their new learning to effectively communicate entertaining and creative informative mediums, persuasive/argumentative, and narrative products with purpose.
This course utilizes novels and nonfiction texts to further student understanding of their fields while focusing on commercially useful writing skills.
This course utilizes novels and nonfiction texts to further student understanding of classic artistic works of writing and pop culture works while focusing on writing skills for creative use and also marketing.
Mathematics
C3P uses the Center for Occupational Research and Development Math curriculum and the lesson format recommended from the National Science Foundation to create a math program centered in real world application.
Underclassmen focus on demonstrating math in a way students could utilize in many professional and personal situations.
Students then choose the classes that are most useful for them. Students use their problem-solving skills to solve new problems while practicing skills to become more efficient in the use of formulas while understanding the purpose of the different steps.
All diploma seeking students take a math class each year. Students and their teachers choose each student’s path depending on preparedness and goals:
This class is for students who need a firmer foundation for the skills in our other math classes. However, this class is still taught using contextual and work-based examples in line with our larger purpose.
These two classes advance students’ mathematical understanding along interwoven strands of algebra, geometry, statistics and probability, and discrete mathematics. The year ends in a mathematical project that utilizes learning in student-chosen endeavors.
Each unit develops major ideas through investigations of applied problems. Lessons are organized in a four-phase cycle: Launch—a whole-class discussion of a
real-world situation establishing a context for the lesson; Explore—small-group investigations of more focused problems; Share and Summarize—a whole-class discussion enabling groups to summarize results of investigations and construct a shared understanding of important concepts, methods and approaches; and Apply—a task to be completed individually to assess levels of student understanding.
In addition to the classroom investigations, the program provides sets of MORE
tasks, which engage students in Modeling with, Organizing, Reflecting on, and Extending their mathematical understanding. These tasks are intended for individual work outside of class.
This course focuses on efficient methods for figuring out common uses for math implemented by every person such as calculating prices with taxes or discounts, choosing between interest options, figuring out measurement conversions for cooking, how to pick the right packaging based on volume for leftovers. Units cover all strands of math.