Curriculum at Nova

Nova’s curriculum has been developed through collaboration between the Curriculum Committee, Academic Director, and the faculty of Nova. It represents the vanguard of modern scholarship within the classical model. Our curriculum is both age-appropriate and accelerated; we push all students to achieve higher levels of competence at all times.

In Kindergarten through 12th Grade, Nova Classical Academy holds three Curricular Tenets:

• Classical
  • Choosing the best sources
  • Choosing curricular pieces that fit the pedagogies and curricular goals of each stage
  • Emphasizing virtue instruction including Truth, Beauty, and Goodness
• Spiraling 
  • From grade to grade (like the concept of nouns or basic addition)
  • From stage to stage (like medieval history)
  • This “spiraling” allows for students to build from a broader to a deeper understanding of subject matter, work with more sophisticated primary texts, and develop a clearer conception of how ideas have unfolded over time.
• Connected
  • Changing one piece affects the whole, so faculty engages in ongoing conversation and professional development regarding the threads of the Curricular Tapestry at Nova Classical Academy.
  • Continuing to calibrate and refine the individual (grade to grade, stage to stage) pieces to stay true to the whole.

The texts chosen and modes of instruction work to support Nova Classical Academy’s commitment to virtue education. Our aim in instilling habits of intellectual inquiry is to perfect students’ abilities to think for themselves and to choose freely a life that embodies virtue. The interplay of rich texts and rigorous seminars affords students a chance to grapple with the most fundamental questions and to contemplate the answers provided by a variety of thinkers. The seminars are more than an arena for intellectual conversation: they are also moral exemplars of how we wish our students to treat others and their ideas. In this sense, seminars serve as regular exercises in the norms and practices of civil discourse. Seminars advance moral and intellectual excellence by bringing to life the cultural expectation that our students strive to be respectful, tactful and kind even in the heat of rigorous intellectual disagreement.