The MYP focuses on helping each student develop within eight key subject areas. Each child is encouraged to become a well-rounded person by learning about themselves and their communities in each of these areas.
MYP students complete at least one collaboratively planned interdisciplinary unit each year. Here are some examples of the MYP in action at Channing Hall:
- Real-World Problems & Solutions: Students in seventh- and eighth-grade work alone or as a team to identify a problem in their community and develop a solution. The students conduct research over several months, and then present their findings to the school and the community.
- Creating Utopia: Students learn about natural disasters and how societies cope with them in their science class; they read The Giver by Lois Lowry or The Scorpion by Nancy Farmer, and discuss dystopian societies in their language/literature class; and learn about different forms of government in their history class. Then they have two weeks to create their own utopian society that emerges in the wake of a natural disaster. They create a city, government, history, belief systems and more, then present their society to the class. As a group, they all discuss the benefits and drawbacks of each utopian creation.
- Community/Personal Project: Students choose a topic that interests them and study the way their topic influences, and is influenced by, the community. Projects have included doing family history research, developing a T-shirt printing company, and even writing a novel.