The classroom structure offers a rigorous, responsive curriculum guided by a core teaching team and a range of specialist teachers, multi-aged grouping of 12-15 year-olds, large blocks of learning time, and peer and cross-age teaching. The adults in the program actively nurture the adolescent intellectual, social, and physical need to become independent functioning members of adult society. Parent-teacher-student relationships are fostered as partnerships. Conferences between the teachers, the adolescent, and parents are one way in which these partnerships are developed and cultivated.

The middle school educational syllabus is an integrated two-year curriculum. Over the two-year cycle, students investigate the broad tapestry of human achievement with specific study on the constructs of human societies, scientific discoveries, geographic explorations, and relations of humans to the environment. They explore the relationship between humans and the natural world and the responsibility for sustaining the health of the planet.

Across the curriculum, work that meets the adolescent need for social interaction is coupled with activities that foster independence. Some of these elemental studies include a micro-economy (running a business to participate in the adult economy), responsibility for the built and natural environments, expanded definition of physical education to include health, outdoor experiences, participation in sports, learning based in the care and respect of one’s self, and activities of practical life. Science and math are the foundation for discovery and invention, so competence and conceptual understanding of these subjects is necessary to express oneself in society and adult work.

The adolescent course of study is based in the classic liberal arts. State standards and district expectations are included in the interdisciplinary themes, study skills and strategies, personal learning plans, mastery, coaching and exploratory activities, individual, small-group, and whole-group learning experiences.

The Montessori adolescent program is designed to be a real life experience of building community. Activities in academics and in the classroom environment call upon the adolescent’s need to see academics have a purpose. They work toward, and actively participate in group endeavors that benefit both the whole school community and the people in it (elementary and primary, adults and neighbors). The end result is that the adolescents become deeply invested in what they do; whether it is academic projects, day to day tasks and events in their school community, or the opportunities for outreach that take them from the classroom. Through these avenues, they learn to direct their developing skills toward a wider society where they feel they are valued and can make a worthwhile contribution. These experiences foster care for themselves as people, care for others, and care for the environment.