The Mod Schedule

The Mod Schedule is an innovative schedule that breaks up the school year into 6 mods and an Immersive Week. Think of a mod as a segment of the academic year, or a term. During each mod, students will be scheduled into fewer classes than typical in a traditional semester schedule.

At Forest Ridge, the Upper School calendar will be divided into six mods, each lasting 28-30 academic days, or about 6 weeks. During each mod, students will take 3.5 classes. Full classes will meet every day for 90 minutes. Half classes will meet every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for 45 minutes.

The Upper School Mod Schedule is a direct outgrowth of Courage & Confidence: The Strategic Framework for Forest Ridge School. Over the past several years, our program has embraced a model that encourages active engagement and student choice in what they’re learning, the integration of knowledge and skill across disciplines, significant peer collaboration, and experiential learning. Moving to the Mod Schedule allows for better differentiation and innovation with a focus on girls’ health and wellness. The new schedule will create benefits for our entire community, including the following:

• Forest Ridge will offer a more diverse array of classes, including more opportunities for interdisciplinary studies and greater flexibility for students’ course selections, encouraging them to explore their interests and try new things.
• Students will take fewer classes per mod, allowing them more time and space to dig deeply into the work in front of them, allowing for more practice of skills and promoting better retention of course material.
• The schedule will allow our students to remain focused on their studies, have intentional space for community building, and foster their academic independence.
• The schedule provides time for more authentic experiential learning opportunities for our students.

As a result of the Mod Schedule, students and families can expect:

• A focus on academic excellence without sacrificing student balance
• A wide variety of interesting and unique courses offerings
• A focus on depth over breadth in learning
• The growth of critical and agile thinking skills and an increased ability to transfer knowledge from one situation to another.
• More experiential learning opportunities, including travel
• Dynamic interdisciplinary courses and experiences
• Graduates who are confident, competent, and courageous

One consideration the Forest Ridge School Leadership Team and faculty weighed heavily when choosing a new schedule for the Upper School was the amount of instructional time each class will be given over the course of an academic year. It is important to us that our new schedule will increase contact time in each class, while also protecting our community time outside of class. In our Mod Schedule, yearlong classes, for example, will have 12% more instructional time.

The Mod Schedule format brings several important enhancements to our academic program, including but not limited to:

• A schedule that reflects current research on how adolescent girls learn best by providing fewer, longer classes of 90 minutes in length that offer a better balance between the mastery of individual topics and interdisciplinary learning.
• A course of study that provides in-depth exploration of individual disciplines, with a greater emphasis on applying knowledge both to solving problems and to fostering creativity.
• An academic program that offers more opportunities for girls to pursue immersive experiences, including global exchange and course-specific learning opportunities.
• A varied curriculum that provides a larger array of course offerings, giving students more choice to pursue what excites them most.

When exploring a new schedule for our Upper School, one of our goals was to create a schedule that provided deep learning opportunities for our students. Independent School Management (ISM), a leading educational consulting firm, completed an extensive examination of research on class time and student retention. The findings of their research support the notion that when in-depth learning (depth over breadth) takes place, students experience less short-term memory loss and very little long-term memory loss and can retain information, even with short breaks in between learning opportunities. In fact, their research also supports the idea that breaks in between learning have a position impact on their overall retention of information.

In the Mod Schedule, students take fewer classes at a time than in a typical semester schedule. Therefore, a student will typically be managing homework for fewer courses during each mod. The shift to studying and learning more intensely in fewer areas at a time will reduce the overall homework burden on students.

As a Sacred Heart school, Forest Ridge is committed to providing enriching opportunities for our students to experience and practice the Goals and Criteria both inside and outside of the classroom. When building our new schedule, it was important not to lose the opportunity to offer our most important traditions. As such, while each mod averages 29-30 days, 28 days are designated for instructional time, ensuring that there are flex days in each mod for important supplemental and co-curricular programming. These flex days will be used in a variety of ways, but you can rest assured that not only will we continue to celebrate Sacred Heart traditions like Congé, but our service-learning and Cor Unum programming will be enhanced. 

Students need to complete 69-72 bins to meet graduation requirements. Please see specific requirements outlined in the 24-25 Upper School Curriculum Guide.

College admission officers look at end results: courses taken and grades on the transcript to assess a student’s performance, not at the school's schedule structure. Every transcript will be sent with Forest Ridge’s School Profile that gives an overview of the academic and co-curricular programs at Forest Ridge. Our college counselor updates the school profile annually to ensure that colleges have an accurate picture of the excellent program we offer our students and the high standards to which Forest Ridge holds itself.

The short answer is yes. While on the cutting edge, the mod schedules have been used by independent schools for many years with high degrees of success. We are joining eight other highly regarded independent schools in the United States and Canada, two of which are all-girls schools, who use a very similar modular schedule, including one of our sister schools, Duchesne Academy of the Sacred Heart in Houston, TX.

Forest Ridge uses an open grade book, and policies will remain consistent with principles of Grading for Equity. Students will continue to receive timely and relevant feedback on assessments through Canvas. Parents/Guardians will be updated on student progress using the Veracross comment system while still having access to a student’s grades on Canvas. Each mod will end with authentic end of mod summative assessments with opportunities for students to share their work and learning throughout the course of the academic year via intentionally placed showcases.

The Mod Schedule provides more balance for our students and makes school more manageable for those who are heavily involved in co-curricular activities. Focusing their attention on only three and a half classes per mod gives students more time after school to be involved in co-curricular activities without sacrificing the appropriate time needed to complete homework or academic responsibilities. In addition, students will have the flexibility to build a schedule that makes most sense to them during their busiest seasons, so they can prioritize what they feel is most important, without sacrificing their learning.

Our Upper School students and teachers are already accustomed to having classes in extended periods, with 80-minute classes for 2023-2024, making for a more fluid transition to the Mod Schedule. Since our Middle School program does not currently run a block schedule, we felt it was in the best interest to have more time for research and discernment to determine if/how longer learning blocks could benefit our Middle School students’ learning before implementing a schedule change.

If you have further questions, please reach out to the Director of Upper School, Stephany Fontanone.