Academics
Strong Foundations. Real Application. Growing Innovators.
EBIA’s academic program is designed to help students master essential knowledge and skills and then use them. Across subjects, students read, write, discuss, calculate, investigate, build, create, revise, and explain their thinking.
English Language Arts: Fishtank Ela
Students strengthen reading comprehension, vocabulary, writing, research, discussion, argumentation, and communication through substantial grade-level texts and meaningful questions.
Fishtank’s middle school courses are organized around big ideas. Sixth grade examines coming of age and identity through texts such as The Giver and The Outsiders. Seventh grade explores belonging and social change through works such as A Raisin in the Sun and Uprising. Eighth grade examines power, justice, resistance, and human behavior through texts such as All American Boys, Night, Animal Farm, and Persepolis.
Students do something with what they read. Fishtank projects can include researching and presenting a contemporary woman artist or building a museum-style display about a social movement. Students may also conduct climate research, write climate fiction, participate in Socratic Seminar, and produce argument, informational, narrative, and research writing grounded in evidence.
Mathematics: Strong Foundations. Advanced Opportunities.
EBIA uses Illustrative Mathematics, a problem-based curriculum that asks students to reason, model, compare strategies, justify thinking, and communicate mathematically.
Across grades 6-8, students build from ratios, rates, percentages, equations, geometry, and data into proportional relationships, probability, linear relationships, functions, systems, exponents, the Pythagorean Theorem, and increasingly sophisticated modeling.
Application tasks ask students to use mathematics in meaningful contexts. Students may work with taxes, tips, markdowns, commissions, interest, and depreciation. They may plan restaurant recipes, costs, and floor space or use measurements and scale drawings to design a 5K course. Other tasks include tessellations and weather-data modeling with scatter plots and lines of best fit.
Qualified eighth-grade students can access Algebra. Placement considers multiple measures of readiness, including MAP and state assessment data, current math performance, and teacher input. The goal is to place students where they can be appropriately challenged and successful.
Science: Openscied + Stanford Scale
EBIA’s science program is built around phenomena, investigation, evidence, modeling, engineering, and sense-making. Students ask questions and make predictions. They collect data, build and revise models, test solutions, and explain conclusions.
OpenSciEd units invite students to investigate real phenomena. Students may explore how one-way mirrors work, how living things heal, what happens during chemical reactions, how collisions transfer force, how weather and water systems behave, and how Earth systems change.
Stanford SCALE adds integrated, project-based science experiences such as Colossal Collisions, Traveling Through Space, Save the Andes!, Nature via Nurture, Adapt or Die?, and A Warmer World.
Students use these curricula to investigate phenomena, build explanations, and apply science and engineering practices. For hands-on examples, visit our STEM page.
History + Social Science: Tci History Alive!
EBIA uses TCI’s California middle school History Alive! sequence: The Ancient World in sixth grade, The Medieval World and Beyond in seventh grade, and The United States Through Industrialism in eighth grade.
Students work with primary and secondary sources, context, perspective, evidence, discussion, and writing. They investigate topics such as Hammurabi’s Code, Egypt and Kush, the Silk Road, medieval Muslim innovations, and the social effects of industrialization.
The sixth-grade Historian’s Toolkit begins with a personal object. Students trace its story and use it to practice sourcing, context, evidence, perspective, and the kinds of questions historians use to make meaning from the past.
Art: Creating + Communicating
Art is part of EBIA’s STEAM identity. Students build technical skill while using art to communicate ideas. They study artists and movements, critique work, revise, and connect visual culture to identity, design, and community.
Students have created street-art-inspired work connected to Brandan “BMike” Odums. They explore how composition, lettering, color, symbolism, and scale communicate message and place. Other studio experiences can include drawing, painting, collage, sculpture, digital design, printmaking, photography, and mixed media, depending on the year’s sequence.
Physical Education
PE develops movement skills, fitness, teamwork, sportsmanship, and healthy habits through fitness, conditioning, team sports, movement skills, games, and cooperative challenges. The skills students build in PE can also support participation in EBIA’s extensive athletics program.
Capstone Projects
At key points during the year, academics come together through Capstone Projects. EBIA changes the master schedule so students can spend extended time solving a shared interdisciplinary challenge.
Capstone Projects periodically bring academic disciplines together in extended interdisciplinary work. The Project-Based Learning page explains how the schedule changes and shows what that experience looks like.
Explore Project-based Learning
Intervention + Enrichment: Twice Each Week
Students arrive with different strengths and different areas for growth. EBIA is responsive to that reality.
Twice each week, students participate in a dedicated Intervention + Enrichment Block during the regular school day. Teachers use IXL diagnostics, classroom performance, assessment data, student work, and observation. Together, these sources help identify the specific skills each student is ready to strengthen or extend.
Students may receive targeted small-group instruction in reading or mathematics. They may work on prerequisite skills, use teacher-selected IXL pathways, or receive reteaching and additional practice. Students who are ready for greater challenge can use the same time for advanced problem-solving, research, STEAM extensions, creative work, and project enrichment.
Groups are flexible. As students grow and new data becomes available, their focus changes.
Student Ownership Of Learning
Student ownership is developed through advisory and quarterly student-led conferences. The full three-year advisory model lives on our Inclusion page.
How We Know Students Are Learning
EBIA uses multiple sources of evidence to understand student progress. These include daily work, projects, teacher-created assessments, IXL diagnostics, MAP Growth, CAASPP/SBAC, CAST where applicable, classroom performance, and teacher observation.
Assessment is used to identify the next instructional move, not simply to generate a score. Families receive progress information through the gradebook, ParentSquare, progress reports and report cards, student-led conferences, and direct teacher outreach.
Recognized Academic Work
EBIA has been recognized in U.S. News & World Report’s Best Middle Schools rankings and through Oakland’s Raise the Bar Awards. These recognitions reflect the academic growth and student development we value. Our goal is for students to build the knowledge, habits, confidence, and adaptability to become thoughtful leaders and innovators.