Middle School: part one of many more to come
What if we spoke up to the intellects of our young people? What if we centered our educational approach on ways of thinking, and focused on the types of thinkers and doers we want to graduate, rather than on the lists of discrete knowledge they will accumulate? What if we embedded what we know about our students, their minds, and their brains in the foundation of our school, and built a program to elevate those capacities? The past eight years of work at Blue School have been grounded in these provocative questions, and for the past few months, I've been working with Laurie Kardos, our new Director of Middle School, and with our faculty and leadership staff to frame answers to these questions for the middle-school-aged learner. In this Huffington Post piece published this summer, I shared some of our initial thinking.
This fall, we invite our current parent community to a special "first look" on the evening of September 23rd. (Current parents, please RSVP by this Sunday.) We will also share this info later in the fall, in Open Houses for prospective parents, and we're looking forward to sharing the results of our work with all of you! Our purpose is to combine best practices and the knowledge that educators, scientists and other thought leaders have about the middle school years with our core mission, vision and values, animated as always by our unwavering optimism in humanity's creative potential and in the intellectual capacity of young people.
So, we invite you to learn more about the influencers who have shaped the program (Sir Ken Robinson, Dr. Daniel Siegel, Dr. David Rock, Ron Berger, Carol Dweck, Big History, The Cloud Institute, Project Zero, and the STEAM movement, among others). On the 23rd (for current parents) and on October 29th (for prospective parents), we will also cover the core elements of the program itself, and answer some of your questions. We can assure you that while we are proud of what we have established thus far, we know that our work will continue to evolve and strengthen throughout this year, and be truly elevated when the works meets your children, as is always the case at Blue School.