Middle School Reimagined

Our approach to learning encourages curiosity and exploration, helping students approach learning as a process of discovery rather than hyper focusing on outcomes.

The design of our middle school is based on research in the science of learning and early adolescent brain development. In collaboration with Chris Balme and Millennium School, we reimagined middle school to set your child on a learning trajectory of cognitive resilience.

Adolescence presents a critical window of opportunity for learning as your child’s brain goes through its second growth spurt. With countless synapses forming to build their conceptual understanding of the world, their brains have extraordinary plasticity, so this is the time for students to approach learning as a process of discovery and not focus on outcomes and performance metrics like grades.

At Hudson Lab School, our small class sizes allow teachers to truly understand each student’s strengths, interests, and unique approach to learning. They design lessons that push students beyond surface-level thinking and actively engage students in meaningful explorations of complex ideas. 

Our real-world interdisciplinary projects offer students voice along their learning journey and choice to decide how they approach defined tasks, naturally driving their intrinsic motivation and fueling deeper engagement, creativity and long-term retention.

At a time when students are developing their identities and social consciousness, we structure learning and our community towards building self-confidence, empathy, purposeful communication, and a growth mindset.

We believe true intellectual development happens when academic rigor is combined with social-emotional learning. At Hudson Lab School, students are not only challenged academically but also supported emotionally, ensuring they grow holistically as critical thinkers and empathetic individuals.

  • As students form independent identities, they want to be taken seriously, not only as intellectuals but as whole people. They want to be recognized, understood, and valued for their unique perspectives, preferences, and habits.

    With a strong understanding of each student’s learning styles, our teachers know how best to challenge each student to think more critically and engage more deeply with complex ideas.

    Our favorable student-teacher ratio also allows teachers to build strong, trusting relationships with each student, allowing for a more holistic approach to education. We emphasize character development and social skills. With reflection and collaborative work built into the Design Thinking process, students are able to express their rapidly expanding sense of Self while fostering empathy and acceptance towards others. Not only do students feel seen and heard, they see and hear each other.

  • Students care about how others perceive them and want nothing more than social acceptance. Even as they try on different personas and personal styles, students in a small, project-based school recognize the importance of actively nurturing a culture of kindness, acceptance, and mutual respect.

    Students collaborate on group projects, and they also get to know each other on a deeper level during advisory. Teachers facilitate open and effective communication so that students come to recognize one another’s individual needs, strengths, and challenges. As a result, students foster authentic relationships and healthy identity formation at a stage when they develop autonomy from their parents and look to their peers as a significant source of social and emotional support.

  • Adolescents have a keen sense for irrelevance, so it’s important that learning is connected to the world around them and challenging in just the right amount. Our teachers expertly engage and motivate students by structuring projects around real-world problems that align with students’ interests, community concerns, or significant global events. Students are further motivated to produce great work because they present their projects and receive feedback from experts, whose insights and opinions they deeply respect and value.

    Teachers skillfully personalize challenges for students, encouraging students to stretch their abilities outside of their comfort zones. Middle school classes in our environment are anything but ordinary—they're perplexing, vibrant, unconventional, surprising, intense, and filled with boundless joy.

Learn What Your Middle Schooler Needs to Succeed

Utilize brain research and problem reframing in order to love your child’s middle school years.

Middle School Academics

We make learning personally relevant to students by guiding their exploration of the world around them. We integrate challenging academics with self-discovery and real-word application through student-centered projects to support students at a time in their life when they’re beginning to embrace the notion that they too have the power to build the world they want to live in.

  • We want our students to see the world, and their place in it, as an interconnected whole, so we teach students how to think in systems and to appreciate the interconnected and interdependent aspects of the systems that make up the world around us. Middle School students work in small teams on authentic, interdisciplinary projects to tackle complex, real-world issues that emphasize uncertainty, iterative thinking, and innovation.

    While lower school classes tackle one project each semester, middle schoolers take on three projects each quarter for a total of twelve projects each school year. These shorter learning cycles serve to sustain the motivation of adolescent brains throughout the year. Additionally, rather than present their work to parents and family members, middle schoolers often present their projects and receive feedback from experts, whose insights and opinions they deeply respect and value.

  • Math at HLS is taught in small, skill-based groups to give students time to explore and tackle problems in ways that make sense to them. We teach students to develop their problem-solving skills, we equip them with strategies to make sense of math problems, and we share our different approaches and solutions to problems with one another. We believe that doing math means:

    • Connecting the abstract and the concrete

    • Building powerful mathematical ideas through direct experience with unfamiliar problems

    • Generalizing, generating and testing theories

    • Communicating one’s thinking in discussion and in writing

    • Supporting ideas with proof

    • Analyzing and evaluating

    • Appreciating and incorporating the mathematical thinking of others

    • Approaching novel situations with curiosity and confidence

    • Applying a structured approach to unstructured information

    • Being flexible and persistent – looking for meaning, not just applying a rule

    • Finding and using connections between ideas and concepts

    By the end of middle school, our students have what Stanford professor Jo Boaler calls a “Math Mindset”: the confidence, persistence, cognitive flexibility, and creativity with numbers to recognize patterns and generate multiple solutions to complex problems.

  • Our STEM program challenges students to tackle current real-world challenges by honing their data-interpretation skills to analyze scientific problems and learning how to observe physical phenomena and form questions and theories supported by evidence. Our integrated, cross-curricular projects require students to use their scientific skills in addition to skills they’ve picked up in their math, humanities, art, Design Thinking, and engineering lessons. In addition, our projects require students collaborate, think creatively and critically, and communicate in ways towards making our world a better place to live. Our goal is for all students to feel excited about science by discovering concepts and being able to apply or reuse those discoveries in unexpected places.

  • Our humanities curriculum inspires a love of history, social science, culture, literature, poetry, and drama while cultivating independent thinkers and writers. Students come to appreciate the power of story and how narratives can shape human history through the interrelated experiences of reading and responding to literature, composing creative and expository pieces, and thinking critically. Students often explore humanities through a social justice lens by focusing on marginalized voices and identifying alternative narratives. They become skillful writers and oral communicators through debate and frequent presentations to panels of experts as part of their projects.

  • Learning only happens with presence of mind, and our advisory program creates a safe space for your child to address questions or challenges that come up as they experience significant changes physically, socially and emotionally.

    Because middle school students thrive in community, we believe it is essential for students to feel connected to and valued by their peers and adults. Our rich advisory program kicks off in middle school with a camping trip and serves as the backbone of the middle school community structure. It provides students the safe space to practice kindness and to care for others, it helps students build self-awareness and form meaningful friendships. It also affords students the joy and freedom to follow their passions and try new things.

  • Our middle school education is the confluence of classroom and real-world learning. We build bridges beyond the classroom by connecting students with experts for projects.

    In addition, students regularly venture off the school campus to get to know their local communities and understand the everyday applications of learning. These informative trips are distinct from the classroom curriculum and range from scientific studies to historical field trips, company tours, and more. Students practice planning and navigating these trips. They learn how to explore, research, and document the world around them with wisdom and compassion. They connect their academics to the real world with immersive first-hand experience, and they begin to envision how they might impact the world one day.

Our graduating eighth graders have been admitted into several highly competitive private and charter schools. They are performing well in demanding honors and AP courses and being recognized for their leadership skills and excellent quality of work.

“Hudson Lab School has helped me reach my full potential in each and every subject, and that is just one of the many reasons I love and appreciate HLS. Not only am I a part of this community, but a whole new family.”
— HLS 7th Grader