A Viable Curriculum

We create curriculum that is shared across each grade and department. This guarantees that important, agreed-upon content and literacy skills are actually taught to every student, regardless of the teacher they are assigned. 

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A Coherent and Content-Rich Curriculum

Our curriculum is based on a progression of skills in reading, writing and speaking, carefully designed to grow more complex from grades six to eight. Teachers of the same grade plan curriculum in their subject that complements and builds on curriculum being taught in other subjects throughout the grade. 

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Instructional Focus

Argumentative writing is our instructional focus because when paired with a polarizing question, such as, "Should Britain return the Rosetta Stone to Egypt?" it encourages students to analyze different viewpoints, choose a side, and support their thinking using evidence from multiple texts. 

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A Curriculum Rich In Authentic Literacy

"Literacy is 'the most important single goal of schooling in any nation' because it both requires and further enables the acquisition of knowledge." (Hirsch, 2010) 

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It is for this reason that reading, writing and speaking are the primary activities in every lesson we teach (click these links for diverse books for students and families).

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We concentrate our literacy efforts on:

1. Building students' knowledge through content-rich nonfiction,

2. Reading, writing, and speaking grounded in evidence from texts, and

3. Regular practice with complex text and its academic language

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Electives and School Day Clubs

We are excited about the fact that we are one of the few middle schools in the City that allows students to choose which classes they will take. In addition to their core classes, students can choose from debate team, band, spoken word, creative writing, Lego Robotics, science research, theater, psychology, and Hispaniola History, just to name a few. Click here for the full listings of all of our clubs.