Green Schools / Green Schools Bali / Middle School

Middle School

Enrich and Empower

Our Middle School program provides a three year living curriculum designed to guide learners in the transition from childhood to adolescence and prepare them for High School.

The Middle School program at Green School Bali develops young people who transform their learning into action to contribute to the community and the planet. Here, each student is challenged exactly where they’re ready to grow, within an approach to learning that nurtures curiosity and innovation. Our learners don’t sit passively in classrooms; instead, they actively respond to real-world problems, designing and implementing projects that make a tangible impact on our local ecosystems, influencing the world at large. This is more than project-based-learning: this is learning put to action to care for the planet and create the conditions conducive to life.

We celebrate the uniqueness of every learner by allowing them the freedom and flexibility to express their learning authentically, in ways that resonate personally. Whether through storytelling, design through regenerative approaches, performance, or hands-on environmental restoration, students are encouraged to express their understanding in ways that leverage their strengths and challenge their skills, while contributing to a thriving planet. The Middle School program is flexible enough to allow learners to engage in what matters to them, while staying true to the school’s mission of nurturing regenerative futures.

In the Middle School, learning is never confined to traditional boundaries. Our campus and surrounding natural environment serve as both inspiration and classroom, fostering a deeper connection with the earth and community. Families join us because they see their children thriving, challenged yet supported, often working collaboratively across grades or even Learning Neighborhoods. This approach allows us to be limited only by our imaginations, to find inspiration in our context, so that young people can change their communities and the world.

On the ground, Middle Schoolers are supported by a strong proficiency curriculum (Literacies, Mathematics, and Science), and a wide array of personal course choices, including Electives and Jalan-Jalan (trips) classes. Learners engage in Regenerative Design to respond to local problems, inspired by how Nature has solved problems. Lastly, Indonesian language learning and cultural experiences remain embedded in the program, and our integrated project-based approach reflects the complexity and interconnection of the world around us.

“The Middle School is designed for young people to learn by taking action. We believe that learning is more powerful when it’s meaningful to both the individual and the community. Our living curriculum challenges learners to contribute to regenerative futures by responding to local and global issues through inquiry, advocacy, risk-taking, and collaboration.”
Dr. Benjamin Freud – Head of Upper School

The Green Literacies in Middle School

Biomimicry for Regenerative Design (BiRD)

Green School Bali’s mission is to grow a community of learners with the confidence and ability to build sustainable organisations and communities, connected by shared core beliefs built on the power of regenerative, impactful learning experiences.

In Spring 2026, Green School Bali will inaugurate the world’s first ever K-12 Biomimicry for Regenerative Design (BiRD) Lab. This will be a space for learners to engage in living systems thinking, find inspiration in Nature to design local solutions to global challenges, and inspire the world with artefacts and stories of learning. But BiRD is more than a lab, it is an approach to learning and doing that will nurture regenerative futures through the cultivation of bio-empathy, reciprocity, and long-term thinking.

BiRD is designed to help learners and educators of all ages uncover new ways of thinking, designing and bringing to life the products, processes, and places that are needed for a collective shift to regenerative futures.

The core of BiRD’s contribution to transformational design is a learning journey based on four lenses: Sensing, Seeking, Shaping, and Storytelling.

Sensing and Seeking help learners develop transcontextual ecosystems-based thinking. Shaping is where they use biomimicry to turn their ideas into regenerative designs, inspired by nature as model, mentor, and measure. The vital phase of Storytelling helps learners shape effective ways to communicate their ideas and designs to catalyse change.

Our Learning in Action

Learning is infinite. All schools and all learners must make choices. We have learned from our Green School experience that our REAL learning principles serve as lenses to guide our program and prioritise the critical issues of our time. Through these topics, our program encourages students to develop strong skill-sets to make a positive difference for self, community and nature. In practice, we use these REAL Principles to choose the content of our curriculum and the structure of our programmes. In Middle School, our specialisation programs reflect this focus:

Jalan-Jalan

For at least a full half day each week, learners do not follow a timetable and have the time to explore learning in another way. These courses focus on experiential learning in the areas of service, enterprise and outdoor education. Students are asked to step outside of their comfort zones and try something new, as well as given a chance to pursue their passions in these areas. Learners can propose courses as well. Courses are designed to foster leadership, adaptability, awareness, collaboration and creative thinking.

Green Studies Through Project-Based Learning

We know that students learn more from how they are taught than what they are taught. That is why we employ a project-based approach and let students experience their learning in a more hands-on way. Students in Middle School are empowered to start leading their own learning journeys and select their own projects. They can have the freedom to explore an issue and its solutions.

For example, a student could create a renewable energy source, make surfboards from bottle caps collected on the beaches of Bali, regenerate coral reefs by re-planting them, and campaign for local restaurants to stop using plastic straws and provide them with bamboo straws made by them at our on-campus Innovation Hub. Watch this video to learn more.

The culmination of all that is learnt in Middle School is shown to the learner themself and celebrated by our community through the Grade 8 Quest project and presentation highlighted below.

Social Emotional Wellbeing and Mindfulness

Each individual Middle School learner builds social and emotional skills through weekly classes focused on age-appropriate themes. The purpose of the program is to empower learners to become stewards of their own health and wellbeing. Relationships are integral to this process – relationships with themselves, their peers, their parents, their teachers, and with the world around them. Our mindfulness programme also plays an integral role in this self development process. Mindfulness teaches important strategies that help students focus their attention, improve self-regulation skills, build resilience, and develop a positive mindset whilst at school and in life. Mindfulness as a practice is a feature of each day across the whole of Green School.

To learn more about how we approach student wellbeing at Green School, click here.

Interdisciplinary Learning

Green School advocates for interdisciplinary learning because it creates meaningful learning and broadens the notions of knowledge by applying ideas or topics in a variety of contexts. This type of learning removes artificial boundaries between school subject areas. We believe that focused instruction on learning subjects (e.g., literacy, mathematics, and science) is important but incomplete without direct experience and application. The Middle School program used the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as a foundation for developing the topics of integrated learning experiences.

Culturally Connected Arts Elective Program

Green School’s Creative Arts Curriculum is richly influenced by our geographical location — the cultural and artistic features that abound in everyday life, celebrations, and festivals in Bali. Students regularly explore several forms of creative arts which fosters student confidence and inspires aesthetic interests, self-awareness, perseverance, and collaboration. The artistic traditions and beauty of Bali is hard to surpass, and we embrace those opportunities to learn locally from these rich traditions and from the artistic skills of our very diverse global community of learners.

Quest

Quest is a Grade 8 Capstone Project that challenges students to identify one of their passions and turn it into a project that has an aspect of environmental or societal sustainability to it. The project culminates in a TED Talk style presentation that helps prepare our students for success in their High School Greenstone presentations and beyond.