Middle School Skills

2020-2021

Citizenship

  • Advocate for self and on behalf of others 
  • Demonstrate active care for one another 

Learning

  • Take full ownership of learning process and work product
  • Chunk big tasks and assignments to better manage them 
  • Independently manage time and workload 
  • Effectively use technology 

Communicating

  • Discuss respectfully with others by clearly expressing ideas and building on others’
  • Actively listen with empathy and effort to understand
  • Recognize different audiences and adapt tone and mode 
  • Present claims, findings, and/or original ideas confidently 

Reading

  • Decode and read with understanding texts in English, and in Modern, Biblical, and Rabbinic Hebrew
  • Closely read to derive literal, inferential, and critical meaning
  • Draw conclusions from text, both in writing and in discussion, based on specific supporting evidence
  • Intentionally choose text to push thinking and understanding

Writing

  • Develop complex and reasoned arguments from evidence, including data and textual support
  • Express original ideas through narrative, creative, technical, expository and more writing
  • Thoughtfully plan for, reflect on, and revise written work

Inquiry/Research

  • Construct critical and compelling research questions about a topic that can deepen understanding of self and world
  • Find and evaluate high quality sources that provide evidence or claims relevant to a compelling question
  • Synthesize information from a variety of sources to develop an independent and evidence-based response to a question
  • Explain how an author uses reasons and evidence to support particular points in a text
  • Effectively take notes on a variety of sources

Experimentation

  • Recognize, explain, and draw conclusions about patterns in data
  • Extend thinking to apply concepts and skills to new problems
  • Reflect on processes and work product to identify successes and opportunities for improvement

Mathematics

  • Develop number sense and intuitions through repeated exposure and attention to mathematical relationships
  • Recognize, extend, and utilize patterns
  • Notice, describe, and utilize spatial relationships 
  • Create visual representations of concepts
  • Reason abstractly and quantitatively
  • Revisit and improve problem solving techniques
  • Attend to precision and develop automaticity