Academic Program

Our Academic Program

The Middle School’s academic program focuses on providing students with a highly-integrated, experientially-based, internationally-focused curriculum as we seek to fulfill our mission of developing mind, body, and spirit. The alignment of our program with the standards and guidelines of the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme guides our continual program development and focuses our attention on blending the rich and strong academic tradition of the Day School with the best educational practices from around the world. These practices involve using an inquiry approach in our classes as we engage students in asking and answering important questions, developing connected understandings across and within disciplines through interdisciplinary investigations and thematic organizers, and engaging students in thoughtful consideration and communication of ideas through individual reflections, class discussions, and various forms of assessment.

Our Faculty Makes the Difference!

Our middle school teachers recognize the challenge before them when students walk into their classrooms. Middle schoolers are at a time of tremendous transition. They enter the middle school as elementary school students and they exit as high schoolers. Throughout their time in the middle school, students are continually faced with emotional, physical, social, and academic challenges as they seek to understand who they are and how they fit into the world. It is frequently difficult to know what outward behaviors are caused by which challenges. In order to attain the goals we have laid out for our students, teachers must continually seek to navigate a series of delicate balances: between dealing with symptoms and addressing the underlying problem; between setting high expectations and making sure they are achievable; between providing support and promoting independence; between enjoying the unpredictability of the age group and encouraging greater degrees of focus and maturity; between loving with compassion and mercy and loving with discipline and accountability; between providing concrete learning experiences and developing abstract thinking. Our middle school faculty has the rare blend of high levels of academic expertise, deep care and concern for each child, keen understandings of middle school kids, and a heartfelt commitment to making the school the best it can be. It is this blend of talents that makes the difference at SDS.