Advanced Learning Opportunities at Nathan Hale

Honors Courses

In 9th and 10th grade core classes, an honors designation is available to students in:

• Math
• Science
• Language Arts
• Social Studies

Honors designation involves academic work that is rigorous and requires application of higher-lever “thinking skills” above and beyond standard content acquisition. Students who earn honors exhibit superior performance in all aspects with work that exemplifies the highest quality of performance.

Students engage in rigorous learning experiences. Rigor is defined as complex, provocative, and personally or emotionally challenging material. Students who earn honors demonstrate curiosity and intellectual interest beyond “merely getting a grade.”

Students pursuing an honors designation engage with the Habits of Mind at a deeper, more rigorous level therefore earning an “H” on the transcript and an increase in grade point.

Advanced Placement

In 11th and 12th grade, Advanced Placement classes are offered in the following areas:

• Computer Science
• Language Arts-Literature & Composition
• Statistics
• Environmental Science
• Spanish

Advanced Placement (AP) classes are approved by the College Board and prepare students to take the AP exams in the spring.

College in the High School Courses

College in the High School courses in US History, American Government, Financial Algebra, Calculus, English Composition and Japanese offer students the opportunity to receive college credit for courses taken at Nathan Hale.

Running Start

Students may enroll in Running Start classes in 11th and 12th grade. These classes are taken on campus at North Seattle College and other campuses.

All Students

All students engage with topics by developing Habits of Mind. All students are taught to question:

• Viewpoint: From whose viewpoint are we seeing, reading or hearing? From what angle or perspective?
• Evidence: How do we know what we know? What is the evidence and how reliable is it?
• Relevance: What does it matter? What does it all mean? So what?
• Connections: How are things, events or people connected to each other? What is the cause? What is the effect? How do they “fit” together?
• Supposition: What if…? Could things be otherwise? What are or were the alternatives?
• Academic rigor is defined as helping students develop the ability to understand content that is complex, ambiguous, provocative, and personally and emotionally challenging.
• Complex: Students grapple with content that has overlapping and interacting ideas.
• Provocative: Students engage with concepts that are dilemmas where the student engages in problem solving, inquiry, and taking positions.
• Ambiguous: Students examine poetry, primary documents and statistics that are packed with multiple meanings that must be examined and sorted into patterns of significance.
• Emotionally or Personally Challenging: Students look at content that challenges how they think the world works.