The Claudia MacMillan Academy®
The Claudia MacMillan Academy® sponsored and certified by The MacMillan Institute™ is a versatile educational model designed to provide public schools with an educational structure in which specially educated cadres of teachers and administrators are free to practice learning, teaching, and leading in the modes and philosophies that Dr. Donald Cowan calls the “spirit of liberal learning.”
The universal application of this attitude toward teaching, leading, and learning could provide a liberal education for every public school child.
The purpose of a MacMillan Academy is to foster an educational experience of the highest order for students and teachers so that they can act as community in the noblest human enterprise, that of building a life. This is a liberal education. This kind of education, which The MacMillan Academy provides through intensive campus Coaching, seeks to provide the foundations of wisdom by teaching students continually to frame and reconsider their own knowledge and skills within the larger context of the shared human situation in the ever-renewing, ever-deepening, ever-simplifying movement of the spirit that constitutes genuine learning.
Technically, a certified MacMillan Academy is a department or departments or an entire public school in which a majority of the classroom teachers and every supervising administrator holds or is working to secure the MacMillan Scholar™ certification or above.
*Only teachers and administrators who are engaged in or who have completed
certification training may teach or lead in a MacMillan Academy.
Philosophically,
a MacMillan Academy is an educational model based on Drs. Louise and Donald Cowan’s vision of liberal education grounded in the “poetic imagination.” Their conviction was that every child deserved a liberal education. Their abiding hope was that all children in America receive the foundation of a liberal education to help prepare them to experience both the benefits of liberty as well as to be able to help improve the democratic ideal.
In effect, a MacMillan Academy certified by The MacMillan Institute will be distinguished by the collegial intellectual community among their faculty and administration and by the quality of their “liberal” curriculum.
A certified MacMillan Academy will be monitored by a designated representative of The MacMillan Institute through annual, multi-day site visits as well as through a comprehensive self-study conceived and conducted by the Academy faculty and administration every five years.
A fully certified MacMillan Academy requires MacMillan Scholar™ certification for both teachers and supervising administrators.
To maintain certification, each educator involved must complete 14 hours professional development annually in MacMillan Institute classes and present an academic paper annually in The Alumni Conference.
MacMillan Academy candidates may license
The MacMillan Institute’s trademarked humanities curricula.
Districts or schools interested in having or being MacMillan Academy candidates should submit a written declaration of intent to Dr. Claudia MacMillan at cmacmillan@macmillaninstitute.org.