Pros
Colleagues are very friendly and kind. You will never have gossipy, toxic coworkers. School wide unity on discipline helps a lot with classroom management. Administration helps with discipline a lot. Curriculum is good. Specials teachers see their kids every other day.
Cons
Great Hearts has no idea how to develop Specials teachers. As a charter school, they don't have Directors of Fine Arts or Directors of Athletics in the way that public schools do. So basically they have absolutely NO ONE qualified in the leadership team to help you flourish in your field if you are a specials teacher. You receive absolutely ZERO feedback on lesson planning or classroom instruction. The art teacher at my school said the headmaster only ONCE stepped into her classroom all year. The Spanish teacher complained about receiving absolutely NO help relevant to actually enhancing the curriculum and make it fit the needs of each grade. Both Sonrisas and Vale need a lot of work to actually constitute good materials. Don't even get me started on the music curriculum. Theory Time is the absolute worst thing that you can give to elementary students because talking about note values of music is not connected to music that they actually make so they are limited to a logical understanding of notes; it's not meaningful at all! I heard parents at my school say their children were crying and didn't want to go to school because they hated Music. Of all things they could hate! If you teach PE, Art, Music, or Spanish, and you want to get better at your craft, do yourself a favor and do NOT work for Great Hearts. Go somewhere else where you can actually grow as a professional, earn BETTER PAY, and be surrounded by people who are striving to become better TEACHERS. You don't become a better art or music or Spanish or PE teacher for elementary by sitting around reading and discussing literature. You become a better teacher by studying the pedagogy of your field and observing master teachers. Too often I have sat through stupid meetings that literally had NOTHING to do with my classes. Administration will forget about you and do not tangibly support you besides the talk at the beginning of the year about how important fine arts are. They only come to you when they want to use you. Did I mention that my school did not pay the art and music teachers for the extracurricular clubs we had? And they all left soon after that.
