Pedagogical Milestones

Love
for learning.

Students are taught self-assurance, subject-level mastery, critical and creative thinking, and other skills that will benefit them in high school, college, graduate school, medical school, law school, and beyond. Some of the key lifelong learning skills we develop in our students include the following:

Self-Assurance – SDA provides a nurturing environment that instills a strong sense of personal identity in young learners. SDA graduates are sure of their academic abilities, and have the confidence necessary to approach novel, complex, and ever challenging subjects with the belief that they can and will succeed.

Subject Mastery – SDA’s enriched, accelerated curriculum helps students develop a phased approach to learning that emphasizes progress as the incremental mastery of defined sets of knowledge, skills, concepts, and mindsets (competencies) for any given subject or topic.

Students learn the importance of demonstrating proficiency in these competencies and understand how multiple demonstrations of proficiency lead to subject-level mastery.

Critical and Creative Thinking – Advanced logic and critical thinking programs help SDA students understand not only what is going on but why it is so, or at least to be able to ask the right questions to get to the heart of any matter.

Students will learn how to examine, evaluate, disassemble, and reassemble information and ideas in order to develop a deep understanding of any subject. Students learn creative thinking to learn how to generate new ideas, novel solutions to confounding problems, and to make radical leaps in thinking.

Collaboration – Teamwork is an essential skill for the lifelong learner, and SDA offers numerous extracurricular activities that help students learn to collaborate and work in teams. SDA graduates have confidence in their own abilities, as well as confidence in the abilities of others and the recognition that teamwork is often necessary to learn and master new skills.

★ ★ ★

Think deeply.
Create wildly.

We teach a grade higher than most Arizona schools, but our curriculum is much more than that. We focus on instilling an ability to learn but also to think deeply and create wildly.

(480) 641-2640

(602) 274-1910