4. Pedagogical Advantages
“Pedagogical Advantages”: Classroom Level
- CFA is teacher friendly and student centered
- CFA recognizes that all children love to learn! CFA leverages this interest to help empower students to succeed, especially low-skilled, or at-risk, or/and students of color
- CFA increases relevance and purpose in all disciplines
- CFA promotes deep, analytical thinking
- CFA provides curricular frameworks which offer Tier 1, 2, and 3 students to find academic challenge and success within their zones of proximal development even when heterogeneously grouped
- CFA respects teacher’s individualism and content selection by not mandating content
- CFA improves student academic achievement so that…
- CFA increases teacher agency – when students succeed, teachers succeed
- CFA offers civics connections as a tool to increase student interest and success in classes like math and science where students often struggle
- CFA uses civics to help highlight significant connections between current events and the primary topic being studied
- CFA encourages making claim based arguments using both text-based evidence and personal ethical and political beliefs
- CFA offers a plethora of text-sets which can serve as recursive, foundational texts as well as new texts when doing performance tasks
- CFA touts Classroom Based Assessments (CBAs) over specific content requirements for each grade, thereby highlighting teacher and student creativity and engagement (CBAs are revered as “best practice” in WA)
- CFA facilitates high leverage teaching practices (HLTPs)
- CFA facilitates success on the “New SAT” which emphasizes America’s founding documents and their authors
