Cooperative learning is working together to learn from and with each other.
The MA Competencies
Students at MA develop the intellectual and creative toolkit to live life to its fullest.
How do we do it?
To assist our students in developing and strengthening these competencies, our program—academic and co-curricular—focuses on the following:
Creativity thrives when an educational environment fosters varied approaches to tasks and minimizes, at all costs, student intellectual self-censorship.
Critical thinking is a mode of engaging with any content in an analytical and reflective way, where the thinker seeks to understand through an expansive examination of the subject’s or problem’s existing characteristics and larger contextual relationships.
Experiential learning is focused on the process of learning—rather than the end product—through experience, reflection, and application.
Intellectual challenge encourages students to cultivate their curiosity; to take risks with their thinking and to learn from failure and perseverance; to open up new perspectives and possibilities; to focus on how to find an answer more than what the presumed right answer may be.
Interdisciplinary education breaks free of traditional pedagogical molds while utilizing the expertise provided by disciplinary-specific teaching.
Transdisciplinary learning begins with questions and issues, and, while leaning on traditional disciplinary understanding, moves beyond the scope of disciplinary skill and content to generate novel responses to complex real-world issues.
Wholistic education is a holistic approach providing opportunities for cognitive, social, emotional, physical, creative, and ethical development in a variety of venues and experiences.
We are not simply preparing a student for a particular stage in life, but our education is for life. From that point of view, we imagine that we are educating students to be collaborators, to be leaders, and to be people who care about making the world a better place.
Travis Brownley, Head of School
Students get personal
MA seniors have the chance to reflect on their time at MA in a senior speech shared with the entire student body. Every speech ends with specific appreciation for the teachers and students that have shaped that senior’s experience. And a few tears often are shed as students consider what their time at MA has meant in their journey to becoming compassionate citizens of our world.