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Global Curriculum

The Avenues World Elements

The Avenues World Elements define the knowledge, skills and qualities that every Avenues student develops on their journey from early childhood through graduation. A unique combination of outcome and process, the table defines both what and how students learn at Avenues.

A powerful tool for teaching and learning

The table has two main components: elements (what our students learn) and learning experiences (the processes through which they learn). The 60 elements span the categories of thinking, character, well-being, understanding, purpose, interconnections, origins, nature, innovation and investigation. The 11 learning experiences—including language immersion, projects, and service—are staggered across different developmental stages, from toddler through graduation.

For example, the first Avenues World Element is empathy: the ability to recognize, understand and experience the feelings of others. Like the other elements, empathy spirals through our curriculum from the early grades to graduation. Our defined learning outcomes for empathy build on each other from kindergarten (e.g. identifying with characters in books), through 5th grade (e.g. recognizing that others’ perspectives may differ from yours), through 8th grade (e.g. defining bias and prejudice with concrete examples), and finally through 12th grade (e.g. resolving conflicts by analyzing the emotions and thought processes of those involved).

Empathy might be combined with other elements like planning, beliefs and ethics, and the learning experience of service, in a community engagement project requiring students to take direct moral action. It might also be combined with creativity, design and entrepreneurship, and the learning experience of projects, to challenge students to solve a problem in their community using design thinking.

Thoughtfully Designed for Avenues

Designed for the future

Cutting across traditional academic subject areas, the table is a powerful tool for the kind of interdisciplinary teaching and learning that will equip our students to understand and solve the world’s most pressing problems. Curricular elements can be combined to form a wide variety of programmatic “molecules”—courses, projects and approaches—focused on real-world problem solving and reverse engineered to ensure students attain the desired learning outcomes.

Designed for collaboration

Uniquely modular, the elements and learning experiences can be combined by teachers working across disciplines, or even collaborating on campuses in different countries.

Designed for the world

True to our World School DNA, our global curricular system is flexible enough to accommodate the unique local characteristics of our campuses on multiple continents. But while the table invites adaptation, its underlying structure remains consistent across the Avenues ecosystem, enabling students and faculty to seamlessly transfer from one campus to another.

pattern of dots that form the shape of a world map

Avenues is preparing students to become world-wise leaders uniquely equipped to understand and solve global-scale problems.