Academics

Ambitious Thinkers, Courageous Explorers, Creative Collaborators, Joyful Humans

Students’ educational journey is a spirited exploration rooted in discovery, community, inquiry, and an aspiration to know themselves and their world.  We endeavor to nurture students' natural curiosity through interdisciplinary studies, integrating the arts and outdoor education across the curriculum. We meet each child where they are in their development and provide the tools and learning provocations for them to reach their highest potential. Using a balance between direct teaching and a structured inquiry approach, we pose questions and build skills and knowledge while providing students voice and choice in their learning. Students are able to make connections between their learning, various disciplines, and the real world. They are active in their learning community, participating in collaborative problem-solving, and productive struggle that creates tenacious life-long learners. Intentional social-emotional learning complements the vigorous academic and co-curricular program ensuring that children thrive socially and emotionally as they build their academic skills. Students’ time is divided between our indoor and outdoor spaces and the vibrant city around us. Our learner-centered indoor spaces are warm, uncluttered environments that allow children, their thinking, and their work to be the focal points. Our inviting outdoor spaces encourage students to participate in deep work and play. Everything we do is grounded in knowledge of developmentally appropriate practices.

We approach the middle school years as a time to nurture agile minds and hearts through discovery, learning, and play. Early adolescents have unique intellectual, social, and emotional needs as they navigate the critically important years between elementary and high school. Designed with a deep understanding of these needs, Thaden’s Middle School curriculum ignites students’ curiosity and passion for discovery while building the skills and habits they will need to thrive in our Upper School program.

Giving equal emphasis to the sciences and humanities, the Middle School curriculum is designed to ensure that students build a strong and balanced foundation across all major disciplines. While our curriculum respects the boundaries of the core academic disciplines so that students understand how scientists, artists, mathematicians, historians, and others create knowledge and understand the world, the course of study within a given discipline often intersects with other disciplines in ways that help students discover larger patterns and explore broad topics and questions from multiple angles.

In Upper School, Thaden gives equal emphasis to the sciences and the humanities, enabling our students to address complex questions with a variety of disciplinary lenses and skills. Our teachers also use a wide range of teaching methods – from seminar-style discussions, group collaboration, and community-engaged projects – that enhance students’ versatility as problem solvers who can work independently and collaboratively. 

Our commitment to interdisciplinary problem solving also finds rich expression in our three signature programs — Meals, Reels, and Wheels — where students combine multiple fields of study and engage with community partners in ways that foster a strong sense of civic responsibility. Intensives and other forms of independent study as well as Community-Based Learning (CBL) courses provide further opportunities for students to form and investigate their own questions from many angles.   

Our academic program develops not only the cognitive abilities and skills that students need to make the most of a college education but also the social and emotional capacities essential to self-reliance, academic and professional success, and personal fulfillment.