Program Philosophy
The conceptual purpose and design of the Governor's School's curriculum is to enrich and expand the educational and artistic horizons of gifted and talented high school students. When students attend the Governor's School, a delicate web of relationships between student, instructor, and artist is spun that unites the Governor's School experience and participants with home schools and teachers or artists. The Virginia Governor's School four-week summer residential program is, in fact, quite different from students' regular programs. The differences in curricula, learning activities, and relationships have considerable impact on the student population. This environment enhances the development of a "community of learners."
In addition to a course structure that emphasizes interdisciplinary thinking, students work in small project groups to discuss, study, and pursue a culminating interdisciplinary project or activity. This group project enables students and instructors to capitalize on the high level of self-motivation characteristic of most gifted and talented students. This activity provides invaluable experience in working collaboratively and cooperatively to resolve problematic situations, thus equipping students for future collaborative work and learning environments. Students share these projects with other groups so that all students discover what their fellow students have learned during their four weeks at Governor's School.
When a student must take responsibility for his or her own learning, his or her attitude toward personal capabilities is irrevocably altered. When students, often for the first time, find their individual voices validated and valued, those individual voices will not easily be repressed. When students experience relationships with instructors and artists who encourage them to voice themselves as equals, they cannot help but alter their concepts of the roles inherent in such relationships. The Virginia Governor's School curriculum emphasizes democratic rather than autocratic curricular development, active leadership, proactive involvement from students and instructors in the decision making process, shared goals, and intentional building of trust. Students who participate are truly changed by the experience.
All Governor's School classes and activities stimulate the intellectual curiosity and creative energies of talented and gifted students. Faculty and staff are recruited who can utilize teaching strategies and techniques quite different from those used in typical secondary or college classrooms. The program expects its instructors to approach teaching and learning as collaborative and cooperative. Approaches that use directed discovery, inquiry, small and large group interaction, simulations, technical exercises and other techniques are employed. Not only are the minds of the students stretched, but also those of the Governor's School faculty and staff.