ABSTRACT
We decided to change fifth, eighth, and twelfth grades in September, 2002. This decision was taken in the summer of 2002, so we had little time to prepare or to smooth the way with parents. This latter issue came back to bite us. Those grades were chosen because, in the words of the headmaster, those years were basically review years owing to their place at the end of the lower, middle, and upper schools. We had time (and money) to redesign eighth and twelfth, but we had no resources for fifth, so we decided that rather than using the SCC approach in fifth we would simply employ good methods that had been invented by other educational innovators, combining them in as coherent a way as possible.
