Middle School (12-14 years old)
In Montessori education, we see the transition from childhood to adolescence as the birth of the social individual. Elementary-age children are focused on “me.” Middle schoolers are deeply concerned with “me in society.” They constantly want to know what their peers think about them. This interest in everything social comes with a strong appetite for discovering the surrounding adult world. Early teens are curious, imaginative and ready to be inspired. They want to work with their hands, do real things, collaborate with their friends and feel that their actions are consequential. They are also eager to ask big questions: What is true and what is false? What is right and what is wrong? What is the meaning of life?
Obviously, we, the teachers, cannot answer these questions, but we can definitely provide the students with many opportunities to investigate them. We do it with project-based, hands-on and real-world learning that takes place both in and outside school. For example, the students help maintain a community garden, and they hang posters about the upcoming shows of the local theater. Open-ended seminars provide an intellectual depth to the practical work-study. With student-led activities, our young teens build a nurturing community. They manage daily tasks such as a lunch blessing, cleaning chores (there is no hired professional cleaning service at Roadstead), and weekly community meetings (in which all decisions are made by consensus). All these activities are great means for developing strong executive skills, something to which we give much educational attention. Academically, our students develop executive skills by learning, for example, how to schedule their work daily on Google Calendar. They also learn how to assess their work objectively with weekly self-assessments and six-week cycle grades.