How It
Works
Four years. One project. Ten units per year. Three lanes of self-direction that develop from Grade 9 through graduation. Here is the full structure.
โ Back to OverviewFour years. One project. Everything builds.
Each grade year advances the same project, the same project, continuing and deepening from Grade 9 through graduation. It grows. By Grade 12 the student is working at a level that reflects four years of compounding development in one domain, not four separate one-year experiences.
Each grade year has a defining event. Grade 9 has the Challenge Point, when something genuinely fails and the student learns to analyze the failure honestly. Grade 11 has the Refinement Point, when the project is working but the gap between adequate and excellent becomes visible. Grade 12 has the Graduation Presentation, when everything the student has built is presented to a domain expert who can evaluate it honestly.
Ten units. Every year. Bookended by the mental game.
Every grade year is organized into ten units. The unit names are the same across all four years, Know Your Project, Know Your Science, Know Your Design, and so on, but what the student does in each unit advances every year. A Grade 12 student doing Unit 1 is operating at a completely different level than a Grade 9 student doing the same unit.
Every unit opens with a Preparation section in the Mental Game Notebook, and closes with a Reflection section. These bookends are not optional. They connect who the student is becoming to the work they are doing, the inside-out structure of the whole curriculum, made concrete at the unit level.
Self-direction that actually develops, year by year.
The student is learning what serious self-directed work requires. The facilitator is actively present, weekly contact, initiating check-ins, walking through the structure until the student can hold it independently.
The student holds the pace and initiates contact when genuinely stuck. The facilitator monitors, challenges, and evaluates, but waits to be asked rather than prompting. The student is learning that the standards are real and the work is theirs.
The student is entirely responsible for structure, pace, and quality. The facilitator conducts formal milestone reviews and holds the standard, without managing the process. This is the closest thing to professional practice available to a high school student.
The document that grows across all four years.
The Blueprint is the living professional record of four years of serious self-directed work, built section by section, unit by unit, across all four grade years. At the end of every unit, the student updates the Blueprint sections touched by that unit's work. At the end of every grade year, the facilitator reviews all ten sections before signing the Credit Verification page.
The ten sections mirror the ten units. Section 1 holds the honest record of what the project is and what it has produced. Section 7 holds the dated log of every significant project action across the year. Section 10 is the completion, the graduation-day account in Grade 12, the Launch Plan for the year ahead in Grades 9 through 11.
At graduation, the Blueprint is a ten-section document built on four years of honest, specific, practitioner-level work. It is the most complete record a graduating student can produce of who they have become and what they have built. That is what a college, an employer, or an investor receives when a Brands and Blueprints graduate presents themselves.
The standard that the Blueprint is held to increases every year. Grade 9 is the descriptive practitioner standard, honest and documented. Grade 10 is the analytical standard, causal, specific, every number with a source. Grade 11 is the publication standard, the quality a serious domain publication would recognize. Grade 12 is the graduation standard, what a domain expert would receive as the honest four-year record of someone who has been doing serious work.
Nine subjects. All integrated into the project.
Every subject is applied to the student's project. There are no generic assignments. A student writing an essay is writing about their domain. A student doing mathematics is modeling their own data. A student studying science is engaging with the research most relevant to what they are building.
Spanish and Fine Arts are each two-year courses spanning two grade years. Spanish I completes in Grade 10 with a facilitator-administered oral assessment. Spanish II completes in Grade 12. Fine Arts follows the same structure, completing in Grades 10 and 12 with formal portfolio reviews. Every other subject runs all four years and earns 1.0 credit per year for the four-credit subjects, or 0.5 credit per year for the electives.
The facilitator does not need to be an expert in the domain. They need to hold the standard.
Tenney Training is available for facilitator support throughout the year. The curriculum provides facilitators with everything they need in the School and Parent Guide: scope and sequence with pacing, assessment rubrics for every deliverable, sample week schedules, standards alignment, and facilitator onboarding and training documentation. This is supported throughout.
A daily practice. Built on the equation.
The Mental Game Notebook runs alongside the Track Project Guide in every unit of every grade year. It is a structured daily practice, essential to the curriculum. It is the structured daily practice that connects who the student is to what they are building, T + B ร A = R, made concrete in the work of the unit.
Each unit opens with a Preparation section in the Mental Game Notebook. The Preparation section connects the student's identity, belief, and readiness to the specific work the unit is about to require. Each unit closes with a Reflection section, the honest accounting of what the unit produced, what it revealed, and what the student is carrying forward.
The daily practice prompts run throughout the unit, structured around the same equation the whole curriculum is built on. Over four years, the practice develops the capacity for honest self-assessment that is the most important skill the curriculum produces. It is not separate from the academic work. It is what makes the academic work mean something.
The Mental Game Notebook is available in a The Mental Game or Mindset Notebook and the Faith Edition. Both editions are structurally and academically identical. The Faith Edition weaves scripture naturally alongside the curriculum content, integrated naturally into the same Preparation and Reflection framework the standard edition uses.
Is this right for your student?
Starting in Grade 9, mid-stream entry, or a school considering adoption, here is the honest answer for each situation.
