The Most Extraordinary 8th Grade on Earth
The Planet School is a one year private day school for 8th grade located in Bristol County, Massachusetts. Our students move between five different campuses that embody the pillars of our experiential curriculum—explore, design, build, serve—enabling an unrivaled level of personal and academic growth.
Chart your voyage into adolescence
The Planet School reimagines school as a joyful community on a rigorous journey of growth. This is only partially a metaphor: our students climb mountains, sail the open ocean, and walk across foreign countries.
Through encounters with nature and culture that test them physically, intellectually, and emotionally, students learn as much about themselves as they do the subjects that will carry them into high school. They emerge as teenagers with a planet-sized perspective and a maturity beyond their years.
One Year, Five Adventures
EUROPE
Walk the ancient Camino de Santiago through Portugal.
OCEAN
Sail a tall ship around Cape Cod studying the ocean.
FOREST
Construct an off-grid community from scratch.
DOWNTOWN
Launch a business and invest the profits.
MOUNTAINS
Roadtrip and backpack across America.
Explore
We practice physical exploration in our voyages as well as a mindset of curiosity—an eagerness to ask good questions and conduct thorough research.
Our Curriculum
Design
Our curriculum heavily employs design thinking principles, where students practice empathy, prototyping, and iteration to tackle real problems.
Build
The process of creation is constantly happening at The Planet School. This ranges from physical construction, to coding, to building systems of governance for student-led projects.
Serve
Whether on the ship or the trail, we utilize a model of service-based leadership where students are increasingly trusted with greater responsibility and stewardship of the school.
Learning Objectives
8th Grade Subject Mastery
Academic mastery is an essential part of preparing for high school and is the primary focus of conventional middle school. At the Planet School, our subjects are woven into the real-world projects of each campus, giving students a tangible reason to invest in studying and a place to put that knowledge to use. You need math to navigate a ship or design a structure. You need science to understand the water beneath you or to grow food for your community. You need history and literature to understand the country you are walking through. In this way, academics become an essential ingredient that students need in order to fulfill their responsibilities as citizens within the school community. By connecting academic subjects to meaningful experiences, we strip away curricular fluff and give students knowledge they are more likely to carry with them long after the test is over.
Social and Emotional Intelligence
For most kids, middle school is hard. At the Planet School, we make it easier through creating a supportive and caring community built on trust and the encouragement to each do our best work, which necessitates taking risks and making mistakes. We draw inspiration from the Nueva School’s Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculum, which we have seen first-hand in their middle school classrooms. Our ship motto of “ship, shipmate, self” follows students through each campus as they become stewards of not just themselves, but their surroundings and their peers.
Strong Character and Moral Fiber
Integrity, courage, humility, and perseverance are very hard to teach in a standard classroom, which is why our classrooms are unconventional. Character is built through experience—when something is difficult, when other people are counting on you, and when doing the right thing matters beyond a grade. At the Planet School, students are entrusted with real responsibilities and given meaningful opportunities to rise to them. They will stand watch when they are tired, carry their share of the group’s weight, admit mistakes, resolve conflicts, finish what they started, and make decisions whose consequences they can see. They will embed with faculty who lead by example and create a culture of virtue, spending a year practicing the habits of people others can trust and depend on.
Creative Capacity
Creative capacity is the ability to imagine something that does not yet exist and then figure out how to make it real. This full journey from inspiration to execution to review requires knowledge, resourcefulness, technical skill, communication, collaboration, and the persistence to keep going when the first attempt doesn’t work. In this way, creative capacity brings together all of the Planet School’s learning objectives: using what you know, working well with others, and having the courage and character to contribute something new. Students practice this throughout the year as they explore, design, build, test, revise, and solve real problems across our five campuses. At the same time, each student develops a Creative Culmination: something conceived and built from scratch that leaves one of the Planet School’s campuses better than they found it.
School is not working for many of us.
Disorienting “Busy Work”
Students feel disconnected from a sense of meaning in their lives and their work. The CDC found that 40% of teens had “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.” There is a sense that school is something you get through instead of a place where you work on important topics that matter.
Feeling Isolated
Half of teens do not feel a sense of belonging within their school communities and only 1 in 4 students felt that the adults at their school cared “a lot” about their well-being and success. Middle school in particular is where students begin to check out academically and bullying can intensify social isolation. We are stranding teens when they are forming their sense of identity instead of helping them craft a vision for themselves and the world they want to live in.
College Admissions Obsessed
School feels like a conveyer belt inside a one-size-fits-all education factory: get the right test scores, join the right clubs, get accepted into to the right college. The immense pressure causes burnout and the fear of failure can be overwhelming. Instead of completing intentional, character-defining rites of passage, students walk across a graduation stage and, suddenly, are expected to know how to be adults.
Now imagine what learning could be.
Authentic Purpose
Imagine preparing for high school with one of the most fulfilling years of your life. Students wake up every morning with a sense of purpose, enabling the shouldering of real responsibility. You will finish middle school with a portfolio of tangible work that you can put onto your resume or into a compelling college application.
Inspirational Community
Imagine learning alongside educators doing the most fulfilling work of their careers and bringing that inspiration to their student interactions everyday. Teamwork and leadership are intentionally cultivated as part of the curriculum during school, not just after school. Students feel supported when they make mistakes, because safe opportunities to fail are essential in the process of doing great work.
Opportunity-Awakening
Imagine middle school feeling like a runway designed for liftoff: graduates have the perspective and capacity to get started with the next chapter of your life. You have not just studied different subjects inside a classroom, you have participated in them. Whether public high school or private boarding school, you are ready to engage fully with the next phase of your education.
