Green Schools / Green School Bali / Middle School

Middle School

Enrich and Empower

Our Middle School is a three-year living curriculum. It guides learners through the move from childhood into adolescence, and on into High School.

Green School Bali is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), recognised by schools and universities worldwide, and our Literacies and Mathematics curricula are mapped to the Common Core standards. The academic ground is firm. The Middle School is about what learners do with it.

The Middle School at Green School Bali grows young people who put their learning to work for their community and the living world. Each student is met where they are ready to grow. Learners here do not sit still in classrooms. They take on real problems and see projects through, work that changes the ecosystems around them, from the microlocal to the planetary. This is more than project work. Learning here is put to work to help create the conditions conducive to life.

Every learner is different, and the Middle School gives them room to show their learning in ways that fit them. One student works through storytelling, another through regenerative design, performance, or hands-on ecological restoration. They play to their strengths and stretch their capacities, and what they make goes out into the living world rather than into a folder. The programme bends to what matters to each learner while holding to the work of nurturing regenerative futures.

Learning is not boxed into subjects or walls. The campus and the living world around it are classroom and provocation at once, drawing students into closer relationship with the place they are in and the people they share it with. Families come to us because they watch their children thrive, stretched and supported at the same time, often working across year groups or across Learning Neighbourhoods. Our reach is set by our imagination and our context, so that young people can change the communities they belong to, and further out from there.

Underneath the projects sits a strong proficiency curriculum in Literacies, Mathematics, and Science, with a wide range of course choices that include Electives and Jalan Jalan trips. In Regenerative Design, learners respond to local problems by studying how the living world has already solved them. Indonesian language and culture run through the whole programme. The projects cut across subjects because the world does too.

“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 Campus

The Green Literacies in Middle School

The Green Literacies are our curriculum, the framework that shapes what our learners learn and how. Like an artist’s palette, they offer a spectrum of choice from which our educators craft themes, units, and explorations. Rather than teaching subjects in isolation, we blend knowledge domains as we design each learning experience, so that ideas connect across disciplines and understanding grows richer and stays with learners. The framework carries from Early Childhood through to High School, giving every learner breadth, depth, and consistency.

Biomimicry for Regenerative Design (BiRD)

Green School Bali’s mission is to grow a community of learners with the confidence and ability to bring regenerative organisations and communities to life, connected by shared core beliefs in the power of regenerative, impactful learning experiences.
In 2026, Green School Bali inaugurated the world’s first K–12 Biomimicry for Regenerative Design (BiRD) Lab. In Middle School, it gives students’ growing curiosity somewhere real to go. This is 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 nurtures regenerative futures through the cultivation of bio-empathy, reciprocity, and long-term thinking.

BiRD helps learners and educators of all ages uncover new ways of thinking, designing, and bringing to life the products, processes, and places 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: We notice what the living world shows and hides.
Seeking: We ask big questions to understand and respond.
Shaping: We create with the living world to help life flourish.
Storytelling: We share what happens so connection can grow.

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.

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.

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.