A Strength-based Approach to Middle School

What do ethics, leadership, identity, wellness, social justice, and STEM have in common?

They make up the pillars of the Grade 6 Seminar. Now in its second year, the seminar is a series of mini-courses all six-graders take in addition to their traditional classes. Broken into three modules — STEM: Innovating for Our Future; Wellness, Identity, and Social Justice; and Ethics and Leadership — the seminar occurs at an age when students are naturally extending their world from the self to the group.

The intention is to give Grade 6 students a common language to begin exploring their new home away from home and introduce the core pillars of our co-curricular experience. Everything we know from neuroscience tells us that at this age, the brain benefits from being exposed to a wide range of topics, concepts, disciplines, skills, and competencies.

The seminar is strength-based, meaning the emphasis is on harnessing the interests and skills students already have, rather than trying to mold them into a certain type of leader or thinker.

In STEM: Innovating for Our Future, students unleash their creativity as they innovate, engineer, and code. Throughout the course, students gain content knowledge and skills in computer programming, problem-solving, human-centered design, and systems thinking and develop an appreciation for the impacts of computer science and engineering for the world.

Students in the Ethics and Leadership module look at the qualities and skills of the people who inspire them and then identify circumstances in which they themselves are already using those skills. Then they figure out how they can develop those skills and apply them in new ways.

“Our attention is on both action in leadership and empowering others,” says Holly Doyle, MS Latin and history teacher, Girls’ Leadership Institute Director, and Ethics and Leadership module instructor. “We talk about how a leader doesn’t always have to be the person in charge or have all the answers. Leaders can be vulnerable.”

Opportunities for self-discovery continue with the Wellness, Identity, and Social Justice module, led by Interim Middle School Director Neisha Payne. Here students learn the vocabulary and gain the historical understanding to feel comfortable talking about such topics as their own racial identity, their family background, and current issues related to race in our country.

“It’s very important for our students to understand who they are and what they stand for, and to have factual information with which to engage in conversations about race in the future,” says Ms. Payne.

This year, modules were added to Grades 7 and 8. “I love the fact that the seminar will be built upon and grow,” says Ms. Payne.

This story was published in the Winter 2022 edition of Kent Place magazine and has been edited for digital.