Christopher Donovan Center
Our Curriculum and Methods

We follow the curriculum frameworks mandated by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Our modified curriculum includes access and entry level benchmarks ensuring individualized program alignment.

We provide differentiated classrooms, where teachers are better able to respond to the various needs of individual students. This learning environment encourages critical and creative thinking, problem solving, experimentation and innovation.

A multisensory approach is utilized along with multiple materials to meet the unique needs of each student, including some materials not typically found in traditional schools. We also utilize technology within all academic areas in order to maximize each student’s achievement and level of independence.

When it comes to teaching our students, we consider their social and emotional development as well as their academic development of every student when constructing and implementing their individualized programs. In addition to academics, those individualized programs include pragmatic, sensory motor, behavior management and life skill components.

It is the mission of the Christopher Donovan Center to work collaboratively with families, schools, and communities to ensure that students learn the skills required to succeed in the world. We embrace collegiality and a sense of shared commitment, and we recognize that we can accomplish more collectively than separately. We believe that parents, in partnership with schools, are an integral part of a child’s learning. We also believe that community involvement should be actively solicited, encouraged and developed.

Our individualized academic plans follow best practices and are constructed utilizing a cognitive-constructionist view based on the work of Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. Piaget’s theory has two major parts: an “ages and stages component” that predicts what children can and cannot understand at different ages, and a “theory of development” that describes how children develop cognitive abilities. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development proposes that humans cannot be “given” information they immediately understand and use. Instead, they must “construct” their own knowledge, which they build through experience. Experiences enable people to create schemas – mental models in their heads. There are two key Piagetian principles for teaching and learning: (1) learning is an active process, and (2) learning should be whole, authentic and real.

Working with special needs students and patients sometimes leads to moments of heightened crisis. To deal with those times, we utilize the Crisis Prevention Institute, Inc. Nonviolent Crisis Intervention Model. We believe that understanding effective communication and human physiology during aggressive moments, coupled with the core philosophy of maintaining care, welfare, safety and security, provides a balance in behavior management as well as academics.