Middle School

We believe that children’s spirit of inquiry, as well as their investment in and ownership of their work, are sustained when adults treat the children's interests and questions with seriousness and respect.

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Middle School Overview

Walk into our Middle School classrooms. You will not see heads bowed silently over textbooks, or students who listen passively as a teacher speaks. Instead, you will find small workshops in which students are active, engaged, and purposeful. You will find students designing, developing, and executing their own projects in Exploratory, our innovative independent study program. You will see students presenting original research to peers.

As much as possible, the work that middle school students do is connected to the real world; they address real problems, use real-world resources, and find multiple answers to their never-ending stream of real questions.



Learning in the Middle School is collaborative, investigative, and deeply intellectual. While content is essential – you can’t have genuine understanding without it – students also learn to develop the tools of inquiry and the habits of mind that will make them life-long learners and problem-solvers. Students are encouraged and expected to approach their work with passion, intelligence, and creativity; we believe in depth over breadth. Our goal is not simply to transmit material, but rather to teach students how to think and communicate like historians, writers, mathematicians, scientists, and artists.