What is the Circa Project?
Come read about our commitments, and see what sets Circa apart.
The Circa Project is committed to a single goal: to teach students the skills that they need to succeed in high school, college, and beyond.
Most high school classes—along with most college classes and videos you can find online—focus on learning material. These lessons certainly have their place—we would all be lost if we didn’t know facts and figures. But these lessons also omit a central aspect of education: namely, they overlook the skills that students need to engage with the world around them, to think critically, and to present their ideas effectively.
In many classes today, information comes first, skills second. The hope is that students will pick up skills along the way. If they are assigned a paper, then they will learn about writing and making arguments, or so conventional wisdom often claims.
We at the Circa Project, however, believe that these are skills that need, first and foremost, to be taught. Making a sophisticated argument is in fact very difficult—and it is equally hard to grab a reader’s attention or to extract meaning from a primary source.
Circa courses and programs, therefore, are structured around the skills that students will have learned at the end of the course. Our checklists show the new capabilities that students will walk away with after the end of the course—from exploring sources to making an argument to writing for an audience. These skills are foundational to the work that students will be expected to do in high school, including in taking AP exams and in applying for college. These skills are likewise foundational to succeeding in college. Indeed, college professors assume that students have these skills when they walk in the door (and we should know—we all teach college courses!). But equally importantly, these are skills that students can use in the real world: when consuming the news, when reading books, when making their own projects, and when presenting their ideas.
These skills are fundamental to success, so Circa is committed to teaching them.
There’s another reason for teaching students these skills—it is just far more interesting for the student. Instead of taking the word of a book or a teacher or the internet, students now have the ability to go out and answer questions themselves. What really was the cause of World War I, or what is this tension over the ‘hard border’ in Ireland—after taking our courses, students can now uncover primary sources and explore answers to these questions and others on their own. Students are right—sitting and memorizing facts is boring. What is not boring is discovering your own answers to the questions that most drive you. Who knows where the path to answering these questions might lead—they might be over in a day or they might lead to an interest that spans a lifetime. The only way to find out is to start researching.
This is where the Circa Project is crucial. We fill a gap in most students’ educations, having courses that are driven by the skills that students will learn, not the facts that they will accumulate. But we also give them the tools to follow the questions that drive them. Passion with an inability to act on it will quickly fizzle out. Students with the skills to answer their questions will only dive more deeply into the problems that move them.
So join us today. Build some skills to work toward your goals, whether they are for high school, college admissions, or AP exams. Find a passion project. And, most importantly, gain the ability to follow that passion yourself.
