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