Fall 2025: An Opening Letter to Our Middle School Parents
A September Letter from Abby Kirchner, Assistant Head of School, to Middle School Parents and Guardians.
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Happy September.
We have, by cultural tradition, now marked the end of summer and can embrace all things fall.
We are off to the races here in The Stone Independent Middle School! In some ways it does feel like we’re already mid-Mod with how quickly students have settled in. Your children are already knee-deep in math, science, humanities, art and music studies. With only five-and-a-half weeks in each academic term (Mod), the energy during the school year is always fresh and buzzing. Your child’s schedule will update each time we start a new Mod.
In the Upper School at Stone, we log similar instructional hours in just three Mods to what a more standardized school covers in a full year. In Middle School, we draw things out a bit more, so that teachers have the opportunity to take intellectual “side trips” and to dive more deeply into skills practice.
For example, our Middle School students’ humanities curriculum spans all six Mods. This allowance of time provides the opportunities to analyze literature, gain proficiency in academic writing, and think historically in order to build the strong foundation they’ll need for Upper School humanities courses. Our Middle School science curriculum also spans the full school year, helping students build strong scientific thinking and experimentation skills in life sciences, engineering, and physics. We do not believe that visual and performing arts should be sidelined either, and instead of being “specials”, we include art, music, and theatre arts in the core Middle School curriculum because we believe that learning how to see, learning how to speak publicly, and learning how to listen are vital pieces to a holistic education in adolescence and play a vital role in intellectual identity development.
As Upper School students start the post-secondary planning process at full speed in junior year through the “Where Am I Going?” class and the 11th grade family college meetings, inevitably one of my students says “Oh! So Stone is kind of like a liberal arts college, but for younger students?” to which I answer “That’s a good way to think about our educational philosophy.” The research and design your children are doing, aligned with the reading and writing, the interdisciplinary thinking, the experimentation, the connections they’re making — it is all rooted in our faculty’s deep understanding that having strong communication skills, broad knowledge across disciplines, and increasingly strong design thinking helps students build the adaptability, problem-solving skills, and strong content foundation they will need for diverse career paths and a rich personal life.
We are committed to growing well-rounded, engaged citizens who can analyze complex issues and make meaningful contributions to society and various professional fields. Adults who don’t need to be told what to do and aren’t waiting for a set of instructions — and that all starts Mod 1 in Middle School. We believe strongly in a liberal arts education for all, but not everyone wants nor needs that post-high school. We trust that we’re giving them as much of that experience as we can now, when their brains are ripe for making a variety of connections, much-needed for the un-siloed world they’ll eventually meet when they graduate.
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The Food Truck Challenge
Since we believe in confronting real-world challenges at the starting line, we gave Middle School students the “Food Truck Challenge” during orientation this year. Though ultimately it seems students decided that renting a Food Truck is expensive, complicated, and perhaps more than is needed for the event they are planning, they jumped right into big ideas and unbounded design.
Some intentional features of this collaborative project:
Each team was required to “flash pitch” — our way of immersing them in the “doing” of the Aristotelian Triangle.
We asked them to iterate their pitches without giving them a huge amount of direction. They evolved splendidly, using an entrepreneurial mindset and design thinking without even knowing it. Of course, there is much more direct instruction and practice of those three hallmark Stone frameworks to come (The Aristotelian Triangle, Entrepreneurial Mindset, and Design Thinking), but those sometimes-abstract concepts make a lot more sense when a student can put a name to something that they’ve already drafted.
Students will not be graded on the food truck/food service challenge, but they will be assessed and given feedback, simply to help them learn and to help them attach more value to feedback than to points. A student at Stone confronts a lot of feedback during their six years with us, and so we like to get started with that process early too. The ability to hear and implement feedback is a shining characteristic of our alums, one which I hear over and over again sets them apart in college courses and employment situations.
In the process of the “Food Truck Challenge”, they are also experiencing group dynamics, designing budgets, planning production, considering marketing, and delegating tasks.
After the challenge is over we will debrief and they will have an abundance of opportunities to iterate these skills over the remainder of their academic year — in all of their Middle School classes, through their work in the science fair, and, for 8th grade students, during their culminating project, EdVenture.
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Middle School Assessment vs. Grades
In order to ease the transition from Middle to Upper School, we ask students to consider the overlapping relationships between skills development, qualitative feedback, habits of mind, and graded assessment. We allow each Middle School student to view an updating gradebook all year, however, this is just to help students start to see connections between study skills, relationship to deadlines, and relationship to work.
In Mods 1, 2, and 3, a “shadow grade” is included in the report card comments for both 7th and 8th grade students. In Mods 4, 5, and 6,
8th grade students will receive an official grade on the report card. This official grade will be coupled with a natural and gradual increase in academic challenge, personal responsibility, and project management that prepares students for Upper School. It’s worth noting that official transcripts do not begin until 9th grade; a student’s Middle School record is never sent to colleges or post-secondary programs.
We hope that through this “practice grading” they learn to take more responsibility for their own academic journeys, a skill that we know takes a lot of practice over the six years before college!
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The Studio at Stone
Last week we launched The Studio, and I’m delighted to tell you that 53 students opted in to this “passion project” program, 17 of which were Middle School students!
An excerpt from a letter to the community regarding The Studio:
”Each year, we delight in watching you create and imagine. You are a community of designers, builders, visual and performing artists, comedians, researchers, writers, experimenters, volunteers, innovators, and entrepreneurial thinkers. This year, we want to give you more time to do, create, think, and wonder, and so we’ve made a few changes to the schedule. Monday –Thursday, we’ll be giving you more study hall time so that you have more time during school hours to engage with your studies. We are also offering time on Fridays this year to join “The Studio.” The idea for “The Studio” comes from Google, which years ago started offering employees the option to spend up to 20% of their work time (“20 Percent Time”) on projects of their own choosing, even if completely unrelated to their work responsibilities. So, for 45 minutes every other week, we’d like to give you a chance to intentionally explore...whatever you want.”
The creative curiosity in our Middle School crew is inspiring. Though many of the skills they practice and the content they encounter is meant to prepare our Middle School students for Upper School, we believe in the sacredness of this time of development in and of itself.
We believe Middle School is an incredibly special, and celebratory, time in a child’s life.
Thank you for entrusting us in this educational partnership.
Warmly,
Abby
Abby Kirchner
Assistant Head of School
Director of College Counseling
kirchnera@stoneindependent.org