CREATING SPACE FOR AUTHENTIC LEARNING
Higgins Middle School, Peabody Public Schools | Peabody, MA | Grades 6–8
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Higgins Middle School is the largest 6–8 school in Massachusetts. Every one of its roughly 1,270 students already had a block called Exploratory built into their weekly schedule — 90 minutes, twice a day, taught by 33 teachers. It was exactly the kind of space middle schoolers say they want, with room to pursue interests outside the core curriculum, connect learning to real life, and build a sense of purpose.
But students didn't experience it that way. When Higgins surveyed students using the Transcend Leaps survey, they heard a clear signal: kids wanted more agency and engagement in their learning, and the perception of Exploratory as "not a space for real learning" was widespread. The teachers who ran the block were seeing the same gap from the other side: working largely in isolation, with no shared structure for collaborating on what they taught or why.
We opportunity in that block — a chance to build authentic, community-connected learning experiences into a space every student and every teacher already touched, without waiting for new time, staffing, or courses. Working with Higgins leadership, WPS co-designed a shared vision for Exploratory: that students should feel empowered to make choices about their learning, and that the block should be a relevant, engaging part of their day rather than a “break” from learning. Starting in the first quarter of the year, a design team of teacher leaders began piloting interdisciplinary projects. By Q2, most Exploratory teachers were leading one. The criteria were consistent across every classroom: projects had to be interdisciplinary, hands-on, connected to a community partner, shaped by student choice, and presented to an authentic audience beyond the classroom.
What that looked like varied widely. Engineering students measured a local skate park, built to-scale drawings, and presented a redesign proposal to city planners, with a local skateboarder, engineer, and carpenter advising along the way. Art and ELA students visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, studied its empty frames, and designed original exhibits alongside short stories imagining the museum's real unsolved heist. Spanish, science, and art classes combined to build prisms and document the refracted light in a foreign language. CTE and Digital Tools students produced tutorial videos for the school's career pathway programs, work that left at least one student newly interested in a career in medicine.
None of this replaced the core curriculum — it ran alongside it, in a block that already existed, taught by the teachers already at Higgins. What was new was the structure underneath it: a weekly Exploratory teacher meeting (co-led by WPS and Higgins administration, with a plan to hand it fully to teachers by Q4), a biweekly design team, and opt-in one-on-one coaching. For teachers who had been working in isolation, it was the first shared system for building and improving their practice together.
What changed, by WPS's measures of impact:
1 / Empowered Learners
By Q4, 70% of Higgins students had completed at least one Exploratory project, and 119 students had completed three or more. The more projects students experienced, the more ownership they reported: students with three or more projects saw a 15-point increase in agreeing "I can choose how to do my work," and a 9-point net gain over peers with no projects on "adults at my school listen to suggestions from students."
2 / Engaged Communities
Students who participated in at least one project reported a stronger sense of belonging than peers who didn't and reported 9 points higher on "my school helps me to be happy and healthy," and nearly double the gain on "people at my school understand me as a person" for students with two or more projects. The shift reached teachers as well. Exploratory teachers described a level of collegiality that hadn't existed before: "I can't think of a person in the room when we have those Monday meetings that I haven't talked to," one said. Another put it more simply: "I feel like I'm just a different teacher this year, but it feels good. It feels really good."
3 / Boundless Futures
Students connected their learning to the world beyond Higgins in ways the data — and their own words — made clear. Students with three or more projects showed a 16-point increase in agreeing that "adults at my school help me see how what I am learning relates to my life," and a 10-point net gain over peers with no projects on finding school "interesting." One 8th grader, reflecting on a CTE video project, reflected: "I actually became very interested in the medical field, because before this, I did not want anything to do with that... I'm starting to, like, want to be a doctor when I'm older."
70%
9^
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"When you're a teacher and you're used to, 'I'm the leader, this is what we're doing, I have all the answers, because I made this up,' it is so scary to then say, 'here, what can you figure out?'" one Exploratory teacher reflected. "But I will tell you personally, when I did that for my students, the creativity that came out and the ownership of their work is more than I could have ever imagined."
Higgins isn't done. Its next phase turns to the instructional experience of the rest of the school day — the day-to-day classroom teaching that surrounds Exploratory — applying the same relevance-focused strategies the pilot proved could work. As one teacher put it, describing what it will take to keep the momentum going: "The program is only as good as the investment... just keep working on exploratory teachers staying invested."
What started as a survey finding — kids wanting more say in their own learning, and their teachers wanting less isolation — is now a working example of what authentic learning and collaboration can look like when they're built into each school day.