ACADEMICS
Focus on the Actual Learning Experience
Promise's teaching philosophy is a straightforward one, but made powerful and effective through the use of great content and the hard work and effort of its teachers and team members.
As alluded to above, here at Promise we believe the learning experience is influenced mainly by two factors: 1) the content, and 2) the teacher. In this internet-based day and age, students have access to a huge wealth of truly wonderful learning content.
Harking back to its origins and its founder's belief, Promise utilizes a combination of its own literary-based curriculum for ESL learners and other experience-proven materials to create the basis for a truly inspiring and engaging learning environment.
Our curriculum is literary-based as we believe that it is through great stories students learn how to learn. Even if its for ESL learners, stories (with great pictures) have the power to inspire and grow intellectual curiousity. This, in the hands of our teachers, allows for our online classroom to be a truly effective teaching model.
*Note about our classroom technology: Promise dabbled with having our own custom web-conferencing classroom program in the past, but have since learned that there are many great third-party programs out there to be used at a fraction of the cost. Currently, Cisco-based Webex serves as the platform of choice for our programs, and we also offer classes through Polycom equipment.
Virtual Class Programs
Reading Club Programs
Promise is proud to say that it was one of, if not the very first, America-based program (starting early 2005) to offer real-time online classes with American teachers to students in their local school classrooms. These programs were created to foster a strong working relationship with schools in order to improve their English language class offerings, especially those rural schools where students had little means to afford after-school private tutoring.
This class model is effective for our entire range of classes,
starting from Pre-K up to young Adult.
As the name implies, our Reading Club (RC) programs utilize literary works as their basis for learning. However, they do also entail a broad range of other curriculum and course-offerings that we offer here at Promise which are suitable to this class setting in which students login individually from their own computer, smartpad, or smartphone.
These classes are small in size, being either 1:1 or 1: X (where X <4). This allows Promise teachers to focus in on individual student needs. In addition, RC classes have much easier flexibility of scheduling, allowing us to tailor even further to students with busy schedules.
This class model is effective for students
from Middle school up to Young Adult.
*Younger learners are accepted, but must pass
a diagnostic test showing they have the maturity
level to be able to study in this online setting.
Click to see more details on our curriculum and course content!!
"The Proof is in the Pudding"
The following chart shows the actual scores of elementary school students from one of our partner schools in South Korea. Students were given a diagnostic test at the beginning of the year to test their level, and a separate test at the end of the year to measure progress.