How Peck's Secondary School Process Widens Horizons

Along with the academic agency, leadership, and character development happening in the eighth-grade year comes a milestone unique to students in K-8 schools: learning how to be a stakeholder in one’s own educational journey.

The opportunity for choice and agency in this kind of decision is a rare gift, and one that typically comes during a junior or senior high school year.

But at the tender age of 14? How powerful is it at this age to literally put into practice the idea that you can strive to go anywhere, and be anything?

Throughout their journey at Peck, students have learned how to develop their own perspectives and to share their ideas with adults. How to advocate for themselves. How to handle choice when selecting a school can be so visible to the rest of their community. How to assess themselves. How to show up and stand tall in a professional environment.

How to imagine for themselves, “what else can I do?”

“I think the process that we give them in classes, specifically starting in seventh grade where they learn to, for example, share their perspectives in Harkness discussions, instills in them a broader sense of what they can do in the world,” says Director of Secondary School Counseling Christine Williams.

“They discover they have a voice, and they aren’t looking for anybody to make choices for them.”

Though the secondary school process is pragmatic, involving hefty interview prep, testing practice, essay-writing guidance, and more, it also provides a significant uplift to the kind of soft skills needed for independence and future leadership. Students practice self-assessment, taking risks, and managing expectations and disappointments.

Of course, they’re not completely on their own, as family partnership is integral for success.

Williams works just as closely with families as a unit as she does with individual students. This structure provides eighth graders with a safe space to take risks and grow into this new, wider version of themselves; one who can both evaluate and answer one of life’s most important questions: Do I feel like I can belong here?

With such new questions, challenges, and opportunities taking hold during adolescence, it’s an enormous benefit for middle schoolers to be assured they can fall into a safety net if they stumble.

At Peck, our middle school kids know that they have an entire team of advocates behind them who know them, care about them, and will push them to both be and become their own best outcomes.

As the adage goes, “it takes a village,” and Peck’s K-8 model is no exception. With a cadre of experts in childhood and adolescence, our students can spread their wings and fly further than they ever thought before.

The Peck School is a K-8, co-ed, independent school in Morristown, NJ. www.peckschool.org

We set the standard for excellence in K-8 education, where academic preparation and character development intersect powerfully in the learning experience. By embedding consideration of others, service, and belonging in all that we do, we are designing an integrated approach to education that develops curious and disciplined learners who positively shape the world. Follow us for more:

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