STEAM

Teacher wearing goggles creating a yellow and green flame with a science experiment

At Chartwell, you will often hear faculty referring to strengths and stretches as qualities within our students. For example, students must stretch themselves and apply patience, tenacity, and hard work as they learn skills and strategies applied in subjects such as structured literacy and mathematics. While our faculty practice unique multidisciplinary and sensory methods teaching these subjects, they remain typically difficult areas for our students.

Our STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math) programs exist to celebrate and grow the strengths, creative interests, and potential of our students. These classes, units, and cross-curricular activities are designed to leverage many of the inherent abilities within our students. Consider these characteristics shared among students with learning challenges at Chartwell, as shared within our Chartwell Teaching Institute:

Enhanced spatial awareness, the ability to manipulate 3D shapes in one’s mind
Lateral processing, offering unique strategies to rapid problem solving
“Thinking in pictures” rather than words, identifying and remembering complex images
Ability to see how things connect to form complex systems, and to identify similarities among multiple things (pattern recognition)
Strong tendency towards entrepreneurship and creative advocacy or agency

Our faculty within the STEAM department prioritizes these aspects of our Chartwell learners while designing powerful and stimulating experiences for students.

Our philosophy of creating engaging, purposeful, multi-sensory and hands-on learning is applied across all divisions.

Lower School

Lower school students learn foundational skills, tools, and strategies in Music, Arts, Technology, and Science (MATS) rotations, which change quarterly. Faculty work closely with homeroom teachers to plan interdisciplinary lessons and units to complement what students are working on in their homerooms. Some highlights within the lower school STEAM curriculum are:

The Lightbulb Project: a year-long project where student cohorts tackle real-world problems through activities in teamwork, communications, and entrepreneurship - culminating in a community marketplace where their solutions are presented to the larger community.

STEAM Discovery Days: Coordinated by our faculty in strength-based programs such as Science and Arts, our discovery days bring local scientists, artists, inventors, and organizations together to facilitate short activities and interactive presentations. These experiences, purposefully tied to their work in the classroom, help students take deeper dives into the content they are studying and offer fresh perspectives and stronger connections to their learning.

Field Experiences: students regularly venture off campus to see firsthand how their classwork is applicable outside the classroom, bridging the gap between theory and practice and strengthening our connections and service in the community.

Middle School

Our middle school STEAM curriculum builds upon the foundational skills learned in Lower School MATS (Math, Art, Technology, Science) rotations. In addition to the NGSS standard curriculum that focuses on three disciplines; earth science, space science, and engineering, middle school students are offered additional courses in technology and robotics which supplement their traditional science classes.

Middle school STEAM classes celebrate students’ learning styles, strengths, and stretches through lab experiments, hands-on projects, off-campus field experiences, and community partnerships with the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Lowe Lab at Stanford University.

High School

As students enter the high school program, they can choose between a growing number of courses offered to satisfy the A-G requirements for California, as well as college and university requirements. Our offerings are diverse and tailored to students’ interests each year. In years past, courses have included: chemistry, computer science, digital art, drones, engineering, fine art, marine biology, photography, and physics. Courses are based on student interest each year and the options are always expanding.

A key part of the high school STEAM curriculum is partnership and internship opportunities. All high school students complete a comprehensive, collaborative project or senior internship at the end of each school year that allows them to further explore what they have learned in the classroom, expanding their knowledge and often discovering a new passion.

Learn more about our high school programming and Project-Based Learning approach here.

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Enrichment Opportunities

To supplement our students’ passions in STEAM, we offer many extracurricular programs and experiences for our community:

Field experiences
Community partnerships with the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Stanford University Lowe Lab, and more
Competitive and recreational FIRST robotics teams
Interest-based afterschool club offerings
STEAM electives at the middle and high school level

Dedicated Learning Spaces

Our campus offers unique learning spaces that support our STEAM program, including:

60 acres of diverse ecosystems including coast live oak, coastal scrub, mixed annual and perennial grassland, wild animals like deer and turkey, and numerous trails
On-campus garden, orchard, chicken coop, and pollinator garden
Makerspace and Digital Lab, which include tools such as AR/VR devices, 3D printers, soldering and fabrication tools, woodshop tools, and more.
Art classroom and ceramics studio

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