The Experience · 12 weeks
Twelve weeks. Twenty-four mornings. One unhurried becoming.
RISE is not a class added to a schedule. It is a designed environment — every morning built around what ten-to-thirteen-year-olds are actually becoming.
The cohort at rest — six to eight students, always.
KNOW
The cohort builds its agreements and launches the Becoming Portfolio. Students run experiments on their own attention and memory, and begin mapping how they learn.
GROW + CONNECT
Deep project work: the oral-history archive, the investigation, daily writing. Peer critique becomes a ritual — and a skill they carry out the door.
CONTRIBUTE
The cohort designs, pitches, and carries a service project in Montgomery — then completes the portfolio and presents it to families.
A RISE morning, hour by unhurried hour.
Open circle
Arrivals, check-ins, and the question of the day.
Core investigation
Science, history, or language arts — taught through real questions, not chapters.
True break
Movement, air, and unstructured time. Guarded fiercely.
Workshop
Writing, making, or building — skills students can hold in their hands.
Project studio
The cohort's own work: the market, the archive, the service design.
Close & send-off
One word, one take-away, one promise to themselves.
Real work, with real stakes.
A day at the market
The micro-market
Students design a small business — name, costs, pricing, a pitch — then run a real market morning: real customers, real change, real arithmetic that counts. Afterward they reconcile the books and ask what they'd do differently.
Listening as discipline
The oral-history archive
Students prepare interview questions, then record conversations with Montgomery elders and community figures. The recordings are archived, transcribed, and reflected on — an exercise in receiving someone else's story with care.
Their own question
The investigation
Each student shapes a science question they actually care about, designs a way to test it, fails, reruns it, and finally defends the results out loud. The failure is graded by no one; the persistence is noticed by everyone.
Leaving a place better
The service project
The final third of the twelve weeks belongs to work beyond the room: a project the cohort designs, pitches, and carries for real neighbors in Montgomery — planned the way real work is planned, with budgets, timelines, and names.
The small cohort
Six to eight students is not a cap. It is the design.
Every student is known — their project, their story, the thing that lights them up and the thing that shuts them down. In a group this small, there is nowhere to hide, and nothing to hide behind. That is precisely the point.
The Becoming Portfolio
A record of growth, kept by the student, not about them.
- 01A personal narrative, written and revised
- 02Artifacts from real projects
- 03Reflections on failed attempts
- 04A letter to their future self
- 05Evidence of growth, chosen by the student
- 06Shared with families at the close of the cohort
No grades · No rankings · No honor roll
We measure growth, not goodness.
A letter grade tells a twelve-year-old where they stood. A portfolio and a conference tell them how far they've traveled — and what to attempt next. Growth is documented, discussed, and celebrated in the Becoming Portfolio; goodness was never ours to grade.
Nothing about a child is a number. So nothing about RISE reports them as one.
Founding Cohort — Now Enrolling
Six to eight seats. One of them could be your student.
If something in these pages described your young person, we would be honored to meet them. Applications are read personally, every one.