Connected Hearts, Expanding Minds:

Hillbrook Middle School

The middle school experience

Our Middle School program is designed to encourage our students to grow as curious, confident learners with a "just-right challenge" approach, creating a pathway to high school for each student built upon strong academic skills and social-emotional learning.

Our programming offers a whole-child, real-world learning approach; through our work with the Scott Center for Social Entrepreneurship, we incorporate rigorous academics seamlessly with DEI+JA alongisde a strong sense of personal identity and belonging. Our Reach Beyond Block allows students to explore what matters to them and what they can do it about with the tools, agency, and encouragement to create the change they want to see in the world.

Journey

Hillbrook's Middle School program is a bridge into high school and beyond - with engagement and identity at the center of the learning experience, students find a voice and sense of belonging. Our curriculum is challenging, hands-on, and flexible, keeping minds and bodies active and engaged while broadening students' understanding of the world, their communities, and themselves.

Vision

At Hillbrook, we recognize that students need to be equipped with skills in communications, critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity to adapt to challenges and build resilience. With a curriculum that balances academic rigor with social-emotional learning, Hillbrook students are equipped with the skills they'll need for a future we cannot yet imagine.

Community

Hillbrook’s mission and vision serve as the foundation of our Middle School program. From 5th through 8th grade, from classroom to capstone project, all students learn and live out our Core Values - be kind, be curious, take risks, be your best - as they strive to reach their highest potential in school and in life as engaged learners and empathetic, self-aware community members.

Signature Programs

PASSION-DRIVEN ACADEMICS

The Hillbrook Middle School experience is all about balance: challenging and rigorous academics interwoven with extracurricular learning and opportunities for student-led exploration. Encouraged by an active learning environment, students dive deeper into their interests and passions in their elective periods and lunch clubs, and an interdisciplinary curriculum builds bridges between subjects, classes, and ways of thinking: science and social studies, English and math, history and electives.

The Middle School experience doesn't stop with the school day - teachers hold after-school office hours four days per week to provide extra help; students are welcome to sign up for after-school Athletics starting in 5th grade, and the Hub is open for projects and exploration. Our Performing and Visual Arts program invites students to discover their artistic talents.

Social-Emotional Learning in Middle School

At Hillbrook, students and faculty are a team, working together to co-create an educational experience that encourages our entire community to be the best that they can be. Academic rigor extends beyond the classroom - the challenges of social impact play a key role in students' intellectual and emotional development.

Across our Middle School, the SEL Competencies we teach remain the same, though their complexity and nuance progress with children’s age and stage. The Hillbrook Social-Emotional Core Competencies are:

Perspective-Taking
Self-Awareness
Self-Regulation
Social Awareness
Conflict Management
Effective Communication with peers and adults
Stress Management
Responsible Decision-Making
Relationship Building
Respect for Self & Others

Lunch Clubs and Enrichment Classes

Lunch Clubs allow our students to dig deeper into areas of passion while cultivating community and connections across grade levels. Lunch Clubs are offered in both the Fall and Spring semesters and are constantly changing based on student interests and suggestions.

Lunch Clubs have included:

Social Justice Club
Robotics
Rock Band
Sports Club
H.E.R.O. (Helping Everyone Reaching Out)
Show Choir
Dungeons & Dragons Club
SoCaH (Students of Color at Hillbrook)
Hub Club

Enrichment Classes take place after school, and offer a great opportunity for students to expand their learning and explore their interests. Enrichment classes have included chess, fencing, filmmaking, AI Adventures, and our homework center.

THE HUB

If you can dream it, you can make it in the Hub! The Hub is where engineering and the arts come together, allowing creativity and curiosity to flourish. Intertwined with middle school integrated studies, the Hub invites students - through electives and in their own free time - to design, imagine, and create incredible projects and works of art, with access to tools and experts they need solve any problem and imagine any future.

With woodcutters, a laser printer, sewing machines, silkscreens, a drill press, hot glue, pottery wheels, and an endless collection of craft supplies (paint, fabric, scrap wood, string), the Hub is the ultimate makerspace, with everything students need to make their ideas come to life.

Student Council (STUCO)

Reach Beyond Week

A journey like no other: building upon Reach Beyond Block studies and mindsets, our annual Reach Beyond Week provides middle school students a tangible experience of hands-on, real-world learning with potential to impact people or the planet. By dedicating a full week to Reach Beyond experiences, students achieve an ever-greater understanding of how we each make a difference in the world. Experiences range from local to international, offering a variety of ways to engage in the communities, experiences, environments, cultures, events, and complex issues that extend beyond our campus.

Previous Reach Beyond Week Experiences Have Included:

The Circus is Back in Town - Cirque San José
Yosemite Adventure
Service, Culture & Peer Exchange in the Southwest: A Journey to Cochiti Pueblo
Urbanization, Culture & Justice in the Rust Belt (Chicago and Detroit)
Social Impact in the Sacred Valley (Peru)
Food, Farms, and Fashion (Southern California)
Leadership in the Field: A Journey to Teton Science Schools (Wyoming)
Bicycling Adventure & Advocacy

View our curriculum guide

View our curriculum Connections

A Day in the Life

The Middle School Schedule

5th-8th Grade Students: 8:00 AM - 3:00 PM

Our Middle School schedule incorporates time for skill-building and collaborative learning, alongside endless opportunities for student choice and engagement. English, Science, Math, History, World Language, Physical Education, and Visual and Performing Arts meet with equal frequency, as students establish fluency in and discover connections between each of these disciplines. Integrated learning blocks offer students extended time for inquiry, labs, debates, creating and building, and more (and good conversations can get the attention they deserve!).

Students use lunch times to pursue club and leadership opportunities, get help from teachers, and spend time with friends. Through specially designed programs - our weekly Reach Beyond Block, annual Reach Beyond Week, and the 8th grade capstone Social Impact Project - our students have regular opportunities to partner with, explore, and problem-solve with the community beyond campus.

After school, our students can attend enrichment classes or play team sports, including basketball, cross-country, volleyball, flag football, and more, as well as various Enrichment opportunities.

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