Each week, students engage in a deep study of something they are passionate about. These teacher-, student-, and community-member designed courses of study are rigorous, inquiry-based, and experiential. Passions works to create the culture and conditions that will allow students and teachers to reach a state of flow while engaged in something they are intrinsically motivated to do.

Periodically (at least twice a year), students will have an opportunity to choose a passion and engage in a multiage class with peers who share their interest. These courses of study are directly and intentionally linked to developing the Habits of Heart, Mind and Voice. Teachers use the same curricular and assessment process in designing, implementing, and evaluating the Passions curriculum.Passions is based largely on the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow. Flow is a state that is reached when one is so engaged in an activity that all sense of time, and possibly place, is temporarily lost. For example, an artist may be “in flow” while painting and an avid gardener while gardening.

The P3 Curriculum Framework is the vehicle to creating a school culture where the conditions exist to develop the Habits of the Heart, Mind, and Voice. P3 was born directly out of The Project School’s core beliefs and is grounded in years of lived and practical classroom experience, as well as extensive research.

The work of Project Zero at Harvard University, and in particular the Teaching for Understanding Project and Framework (TFU), served as a starting point for the P3 framework. Teaching for Understanding: Linking Research and Practice, edited by Martha Stone Wiske (with contributions from world-renowned theorists Howard Gardner, David Perkins and numerous practicing educators), outlines the body of research that supports inquiry-based instruction that fosters thinking and understanding.