Why Departmentalized?
Departmentalized teaching isn't rare in middle school. Most schools eventually hand off math, science, and history to subject-specific teachers by sixth or seventh grade. What's unusual is starting in Kindergarten.
The Model
From the first day of school, MTS students learn math from a mathematician, science from a scientist, and each subject from someone who specializes in it, not a single homeroom teacher covering multiple subjects. Humanities, math, science & engineering, Spanish and Mandarin, PE, and the visual and performing arts are each taught by a dedicated expert, even for our youngest students. What remains constant for every lower school student is starting and ending their day with their homeroom teacher.
Why It's Rare, and Why It Works Here
Departmentalizing a Kindergarten classroom takes more than a decision to do it. It takes a campus, a schedule, and a program built around it: classrooms designed for movement between subjects, a daily rhythm that gives young children structure without confusion, and years of experience learning how to support both teachers and students through the model. We've refined this over time. It's not something we do despite our students' age. It's something we've built specifically to work at every age.
Real Continuity, Not Just Depth
Many of our specialist teachers, in studio art, performing arts, music, world language, PE, and the library, work with the same students across multiple grades. They don't just teach a child once; they watch that child grow, year after year, and carry that knowledge forward with them. Students get to know these teachers deeply over time, and in subjects like science and math, a student may have the same teacher again in a later grade. It’s in this way that teachers become more like mentors - cheering our students through a growth mindset.
A Team Behind Every Student
Specialization doesn't mean isolation. MTS teachers meet regularly as grade-level teams, so every adult working with a student in a given year is tracking that child's progress together, not working from disconnected experiences. They also meet by subject area, across Lower and Middle School, so a Lower School math teacher and a Middle School math teacher are in ongoing conversations about how a skill should build from one stage to the next. It's a lot of tracking, and a lot of intention, but it's how we make sure no student, and no subject, falls through the cracks between experts.
An Everyday Class, Taught with the Attention It Deserves
When a teacher spends their entire day teaching one subject, something changes: their planning time, energy, and attention goes into getting better at teaching that one thing, rather than being split many ways across every subject a generalist has to cover. The result is a level of depth and expertise in every single class, not just a special unit or a guest lesson, but in humanities or math class day after day.