Academics

Focus on Gifted Learning

Bear Creek Academy's academics are designed to provide the best opportunity for academically gifted students. In order to achieve this goal, our teachers strive to teach and challenge our high potential students. We consistently use gifted education strategies that make a meaningful difference for high ability students. Bear Creek administrators and faculty are trained to recognize giftedness and to use acceleration, grouping, and curriculum compacting to serve our students and allow them to reach their true potential. All faculty and staff are here to advise, guide, and prepare students academically, emotionally, and spiritually.

College Preparatory Curriculum

Bear Creek Academy's college preparatory curriculum is designed for students who wish to attend a four year university or college after high school graduation. Emphasis is placed on high academic standards, and high academic achievement is expected. Classes are taught on an advanced level, fast-paced, and content rich. Once students reach the 10th grade, they can supplement their high school classes with college classes taken through University of Alabama's Early College.

Gifted Curriculum

It is close to impossible to develop the talent of a highly able student with insipid curriculum and instruction. Academically gifted students need content that is relevant to their lives. Their academic activities need to allow for opportunities to not only process important ideas at a high level, but to also grapple with meaningful problems and to pose defensible solutions to those problems.

Gifted Instruction

Gifted Instruction is paced in response to the student's individual needs. In some areas gifted students learn more quickly than others their age, and therefore need a more rapid instructional pace than their peers. In other areas gifted learners need a slower pace of instruction, so they can achieve a depth or breadth of understanding needed to satisfy their desire for knowledge.

This means that gifted students often learn topics at a higher degree of difficulty than other students their age. A higher degree of difficulty for gifted learners is typically showcased in the content, processes and products they produce. These academic artifacts should be more complex, more abstract, more open-ended, and more multifaceted than those produced by their peers.

Gifted students will often need less teacher-imposed structure, and should have to make greater leaps of insight and transfer than would be appropriate for many their age. Gifted learners may also be able to function with a greater degree of independence than their peers.

Gifted Instruction also requires an understanding of "supported risk." Gifted students often make good grades with relative ease in school and feel that they are expected to make "As," get right answers, and lead the way. This situation does not allow the gifted student to experience normal encounters with failure. Then, when a teacher presents a high-challenge task, the student feels threatened. Not only have they likely not learned to study hard, take risks and strive, but the student's image is threatened as well. A good teacher of gifted students understands this dynamic, and thus invites, cajoles and insists on risk-but in a way that supports success.

Honors Diploma

Students receive an Honors Diploma if they successfully complete all classes from the college preparatory curriculum and maintain at least a 3.0 overall GPA. Those students who have a GPA lower than 3.0, will not receive an Honors Diploma. It is not necessary however, to participate in the University of Alabama's Early College to receive an Honors Diploma.

Valedictorian and Salutatorian

Valedictorian and Salutatorian honors are awarded based on the highest and second highest GPA. Only students earning honors diplomas will have standing for these awards. GPA for this honor will be calculated on a scale that equalizes the value for college preparatory classes and classes taken through Early College.