It’s a little after 11 a.m. on a Wednesday in October when Sam, an 8th grader at the Community Lab School, a small public charter school here, saunters into the office of Lucy Akers-Allen, the school’s activity coordinator, and casually greets her. It’s the day before a schoolwide fall festival, one of the biggest student events of the year, and Sam will be DJing at the event, as he does for all school functions. He’s stopping by to check on last-minute details, like where he’ll store equipment and what time he’ll set up.
Sam smiles and makes eye contact easily with Akers-Allen, thanking her before he walks out of the office during a 10-minute “brain break,” one of many throughout the day. Before leaving, Sam doesn’t ask the adult for a hall pass or proof of where he’s been. He doesn’t need to.
“There aren’t a ton of rules and policies here,” said Chad Ratliff, principal of the school that serves students in grades 6-12. The more rules a school has, he said, the more enforcement has to take place.
“When you suggest to a student that they’re going to lose their freedom, not, ‘you’re going to get punished,’ things shift pretty quickly,” he said. “It’s a house built on trust.”
It’s also a departure from how most middle schools operate. “Traditional middle schools are very authoritarian, controlling environments,” said Ratliff. “A bell rings, and you have three minutes to shuffle to the next thing.”
Such tightly-regulated school environments can stifle adolescents’ growth at a time when they crave independence and the ability to take risks. Boys in particular tend to look for that freedom—a trait that ramps up during adolescence and, when not channeled positively, can lead to potentially risky or disruptive behaviors.
But in a small school environment that prioritizes student-teacher trust and autonomy, adolescents are more apt to take positive risks, Ratliff said, like speaking up in class or taking on a leadership role, as Sam has.
The Charlottesville school is built around these and other principles that make up Universal Design for Learning, or UDL: connecting lessons to real-world application; allowing students some agency or choice in their school work; and offering opportunities to work collaboratively. Experts say these principles motivate boys, in particular, to learn.
Keeping boys engaged in learning is especially important during middle school, a period marked by surging hormones and new expectations. Many boys struggle with the transition, displaying more disruptive behaviors and struggling to stay focused and organized in class.
For boys in particular, the middle school experience is hard to do well. It can be pretty anonymous. ... When boys don't have an identity that gives them positive reinforcement, they will go negative if they have to.
At the Community Lab School, middle schoolers share classes that involve long-range, interdisciplinary, and often complex projects that ask students to respond to inquiries (such as, “what should government look like?”).
While teachers use some instructional time to speak to the class as a whole—for instance, providing background knowledge or sharing expectations—students spend large chunks of class time working through different phases of a given project: individually, with assigned classmates, or one-on-one with a teacher.
Throughout the school day, it’s not unusual to find a middle school boy deeply engrossed in conversation with a teacher, talking about the current status of his project, considering different directions it might take, or examining whether he needs to dig up more research before moving on to the next steps.
These interactions stand in stark contrast to those typically observed in a traditional middle school classroom, in which boys tend to ask few questions and prefer instead to maintain an outwardly detached appearance—behavior that social psychologist Michael C. Reichert refers to as “masking their vulnerability.”
Designing a school based on a research-practice partnership
The Community Lab School, which opened in 2020, is rooted in a research-practice partnership that puts students at the center of its every decision. Ratliff, a lecturer at the University of Virginia’s School of Education and Human Development, and Shereen El Mallah, a research assistant professor there, designed the school day with the needs of middle schoolers in mind.
Ratliff ticks off the evidence-based elements he considers essential to the success of Community Lab School: project-based learning, interdisciplinary work, collaboration across grade levels, and teacher leadership.
“You can do these things in isolation. But when they come together, that’s the secret sauce,” he said.
The school administrators made other deliberate, research-backed decisions as well. School begins at 9:30 a.m., so the students aren’t waking up earlier than their internal adolescent body clocks. Students get multiple “brain breaks” throughout the day, where they might be found sitting at picnic benches talking to classmates, shooting hoops outside, or planning a student-run event.
Teachers at the school eschew letter grades in favor of routine narrative assessments. They don’t assign homework; nor do they give traditional pen-and-paper tests. And in another twist from traditional middle schools, teachers develop the majority of curriculum.
For the long-range interdisciplinary projects, this involves drawing from their expertise in individual disciplines, their creativity, an understanding of what middle schoolers might find interesting, and an awareness of the state standards they need to teach. For teachers, it’s more work than following a scripted curriculum—but they say it’s well worth it.
“I voluntarily walked away from ‘drill and kill’ lock-step education to see what effect happiness, fun, and curiosity can have,” said Mae Craddock, the school’s middle school librarian who plays a key role in developing and teaching interdisciplinary projects.
Students seem to find it more appealing, too. El Mallah, who, as part of her research, interviews students about their experiences at Community Lab School, said male students routinely tell her that their favorite thing about class time is the interdisciplinary projects.
“Boys typically require more active and hands-on learning, and that’s baked into the projects,” she said.
Currently, students are working on a project built largely around developing critical thinking. They have to consider three main questions: How hard should it be to change the U.S. Constitution? Is change always good? How could we reinvent or reimagine the American electoral system?
The sophistication of these questions isn’t the only unique aspect of the project. So, too, is the time that students will dedicate to the estimated month-long project: On most days, “project time” takes up two separate class periods: 45 minutes and an hour and a half, respectively. The only discrete class these middle schoolers take is math, which is self-paced under the guidance of a teacher.
During project time, students may be working with teachers from one or more disciplines simultaneously—sometimes in the same classroom.
For this particular project, students will practice science standards by drawing conclusions using empirical evidence; they’ll learn about elections, branches of government, and the amendment process, which are social studies standards; and they’ll use expository writing and reading strategies to fulfill English/language arts standards.
Critical thinking pervades the entire project, which will be completed in mixed-grade classrooms. Teachers will evaluate projects on how thoroughly students demonstrated their knowledge of the project, which, in this instance, will involve a group effort of writing a new Constitution and presenting it orally.
“Regardless of when students are introduced to [grade-specific] standards, they’re hitting them more deeply and with greater context here, and in a way that’s relevant and with some interesting choice in how they pursue it,” said Ratliff, adding that topics of past interdisciplinary projects have ranged from fly fishing to the Cold War.
Kids with learning differences learn to thrive in this environment
Although the school is not designed specifically for students with learning differences, about 38 percent of the middle school students enrolled at Community Lab School have a learning disorder or disability (such as autism, dyslexia, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) or an emotional disorder, compared to an estimated 14 percent of students in the general population, said Ratliff.
Nationally, boys make up the majority of students diagnosed with a specific learning disability.
The unique structure of the middle school, which accepts students based on a randomized lottery and currently has a wait list in the hundreds, tends to attract families whose children failed to thrive in traditional settings, Ratliff said.
Such was the case with Michele Burke, whose son Tommy, a 7th grader, enrolled at the Community Lab School last year after attending a traditional public school. Like many students with learning challenges, Tommy figured out early on how to mask his academic troubles, recalls his mother, an education and outreach specialist at the University of Virginia’s School of Education and Human Development.
“He was that kid in kindergarten who said, ‘Can I just put T for my name? Because there’s no other kids that start with T in my class,’” she recalled.
Teachers tended to label him as unmotivated, even as early as kindergarten. It wasn’t until just before middle school that he received an extensive educational evaluation and a diagnosis: general learning difference. By that time, Tommy’s confidence had already been shot. He knew he’d failed the state standardized assessments, because he was asked to re-take them.
“I felt like he just spent all this time hiding in 5th grade because he didn’t want anyone to know that he had no idea what was going on, or that he couldn’t put on paper what he knew,” said Burke, who agreed to speak openly with Education Week about her son’s learning challenges.
It worried her, especially as Tommy approached middle school. “For boys in particular, the middle school experience is hard to do well. It can be pretty anonymous, and Tommy needed to be seen, and he needed somebody to push him to figure out where his gifts lie,” Burke said. “When boys don’t have an identity that gives them positive reinforcement, they will go negative if they have to.”
It’s a concern that doesn’t worry Burke much these days. Tommy’s scores have climbed, as has his confidence. His mother said he’s disappointed when school closes for holidays. The anxiety that used to follow him to school has dissipated. He frequently orally dictates what he’s learned, rather than being expected to write it down. In group projects, he often acts as the spokesperson; public speaking is a skill that comes naturally to Tommy.
“A lot of families, once their kids get here, realize that the special accommodations they needed [at their former schools] aren’t necessary because in this environment, the accommodations already exist,” Ratliff said.
Kids don’t need extra time on tests here, because they don’t take tests. Nor do they need to get additional breaks—the school builds in multiple “brain breaks” (aka recess) daily. The math teacher runs the class as “self-paced,” so students don’t need to worry about keeping up with students who can, for instance, solve complex math problems more quickly. Students who struggle to write in a timely fashion often have the option of presenting information orally, as in a group project.
Community Lab School middle schoolers’ scores on state assessments in English, math, and science averaged in the low 90s range last year, better than their counterparts in most Virginia public schools.
“We’re still in real school with real kids with real problems, real things that we’ve got to work through, just like any other school,” Ratliff said. “But it gives both the kids and the adults in the school such a different experience, and that’s good.”
This story is part of a special reporting project exploring why boys, overall, are doing worse in school than girls—and what can be done to reverse the trend.
Why school isn’t working for many boys: Teachers report in a new survey that boys are less motivated and focused than their female counterparts.
The data are clear: Girls, on average, find more success at school than boys. Explore key data points highlighting these disparities.
Reimagining what schools can look like: Find out how four schools get boys excited about learning.
Student-teacher relationships matter: The key to inspiring boys in the classroom is a strong student-teacher relationship, experts say. Here’s how to make it work.
Why boys don’t want to become teachers: Boys would benefit from more male role models in the classroom. Here’s what schools can do about it.
A downloadable tip sheet: Boys are relational learners, experts say. Here are eight key strategies on how to reach them.
