So it’s colored sheet season once again! Good or bad thing? For those of you who do not know, “colored sheet season” is the time of year when students race around campus gathering signatures on their colored sheets to sign up for their class selection for next year.

During Wednesday’s assembly many of the faculty members presented the change in curriculum for the 2014-2015 academic year.

Next year, however, teachers are making some big changes to the school curriculum. There are tons of electives being offered and ODA is implementing its first round of  “blended classes” into the school curriculum. Blended class are exploring new models for course delivery. Essentially, the “blended classes” will meet fewer times a week, having different meetings times sometimes saved for discussions, labs, meetings, projects, and individualized instruction, while still giving the students the same amount of work per week. In the 2014-2015 school year, a total of six blended classes will be offered to Upper School students.

Also experiencing a great change next year will the History department.

As a sophomore, the usual history class one would take is another year of World History. However, next year, instead of the old world history II, sophomores will take American history. Also available to them will be AP US History. This will be the first AP class at Out-of-Door to be offered to Sohpmore students. As for 11th and 12th graders, they will have the opportunity to take an AP history class or choose from the array of new history electives being offered.

Along with the added electives to the history department, students have widened variety of electives to choose from for English, Science, and Math.

One of the main reasons for the curriculum change is; 37% of college students will be required to take on online course (2012) and by 2019, ½ of all high school courses will be delivered online. (Disrupting School) so ODA is working to expand the college prep throughout our curriculum and find ways to design our classes in a way that not all of our classes will (eventually) all have to be online.

Junior, Sarah Karp, says “I think it’s really cool how they are offering so many new electives but that same time it makes it difficult to decide on which electives to take because there are so many choices!”

So as you start filling out your class registration sheets check out some of the new electives being offered. Happy signature hunting!