— Pete Moravetz, Middle School Division Head
Ask anyone- middle school is a wild, weird, and wacky time for adolescents and parents! It’s also an incredibly rich, active, and fun time of life– a time of personal, social, and academic growth; a time to build the foundation of who one wants to become as a teen and an adult. At Watershed, we build a middle school program to embrace the contradictions and wackiness while also helping kids prepare for their next steps. We help kids learn how to make the most of the opportunity for immense academic and emotional growth that marks this time of life.
LEADING WITH CHARACTER
Character underpins all that we do in the middle school at Watershed. Watershed’s advisory program provides the foundation for this. Students are matched with an educator mentor with whom they work throughout their time in middle school. This structure is the student’s home base, and the advisor serves to support and coach students through the challenges that early adolescence brings. It is also a place for play, joy, service, and celebration.
Character development is also a critical component of middle school academics. Watershed’s emphasis on real-world, project based learning requires students to take ownership for their learning and to engage with community partners outside of the walls of the school. Our middle schoolers practice self-reflection on their learning process and progress. They learn how to work in groups. And they learn how to interact effectively and productively with the experts and community partners who work with our classes on course content and common good projects.
Building character is not something to which we merely pay lip service; we measure growth in curiosity, courage, creativity, ownership, and emotional intelligence using rubrics and reflections on learning. These character strengths make up our Portrait of a Graduate. We believe these are the traits that will best support young people in addressing the great challenges of the world.
A CULTURE OF BELONGING
Young people in middle school crave a sense of belonging, even when they’re not always sure how to achieve it. In class, during field work, in advisory, at lunch and while at play, we encourage our middle schoolers to know others and be known, to develop the confidence and sense of self needed to assert who they are, and to celebrate and be celebrated for personal integrity.
Our emphasis on asking essential questions about real-world problems and exploring answers to those questions through research, work in the field with experts and community partners who are devoting their lives to these same real-world problems helps our students explore their place in and their contributions to the world. This is an important step toward developing a sense of belonging, hope, and purpose.
LEARNING TO LEAD
We firmly believe that middle school voices matter. At Watershed, middle school students have opportunities to work side by side with administrators, educators, and upper school students in a number of areas. Middle school students serve on the Academic Program Committee, Middle School Citizenship Committee, Social Committee, Head’s Council, and the Community Committee to help form the culture of the school that they envision.
At Watershed, middle schoolers are not just along for the ride; they are active participants in creating the academic and social/emotional program that will best serve them, they actively learn about themselves and their peers, and they learn how to contribute outside the walls of the school through common good projects, field work, and work with community partners. We know that middle schoolers have a worthy contribution to make to the society around them even at this early stage of development, and we foster this opportunity both for the joy it brings to our students, and also the interconnectedness that our world requires.
