According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a quest is a long, purposeful search, journey, or attempt to find or achieve something difficult.

This kind of adventure is exactly what we envision when we design our students’ Quests: deep, transdisciplinary dives centered around an essential, open-ended question.

One current 8th grader, Rohan, describes a Quest as “a rich and investigative experience, which really brings out the best in a student.” In a Quest, students go beyond traditional subject boundaries, drawing on knowledge and skills from different disciplines to investigate a shared question.

Learning That Reaches Beyond the Classroom

At Millennium, Quests often lean toward STEM or Humanities. Students explore relevant content, connect what they are learning to a real-world issue or application, and bring their learning to life through a culminating project.

Sometimes, students’ work even influences the direction of the school. In 2023, students crafted an AI Code of Ethics. In 2019, they researched the impact of phones on learning and helped shape the school’s technology policy. In 2021, they codified our school government structure and Constitution.

Importantly, the audience for this work is not limited to the teacher, or Guide. Students may engage with experts and practitioners as they develop their ideas, receive feedback, challenge their assumptions, and discover how concepts work beyond school. Depending on the Quest, those people might be scientists, artists, attorneys, historians, engineers, or community members.

Students create culminating projects for people who have a reason to engage with them. They might present a proposed policy to school leaders, design an escape room or museum for visiting families, or participate in a hack-a-thon to uncover the culprit who hacked the school mainframe. 

In a Quest on environmental and personal resilience, students sent their infographics to professional scientific illustrators, who provided feedback to help students prepare their work for a final public competition. The audience is not simply there to applaud. Its questions, feedback, and responses give students a reason to think more deeply about their work.

Bringing Knowledge and Skills Together

At the heart of our Quests is transdisciplinary learning. Students work toward middle school standards, including those from Common Core and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), while bringing academic disciplines and whole-self skills together to investigate questions about the world and their place in it.

Take the Quest “How Do We Transcend Our Limits?” Students build bottle rockets and launch them in a nearby park. Their goal? To reach the greatest height without breaking their precious cargo: a fragile egg. Along the way, they explore design thinking, Newton’s laws, gravity, and pressure. They also practice academic skills such as Justify with Evidence and Explore Possibilities, as well as the whole-self skill Act for All.

Students are not simply memorizing principles of physics and applying them on paper. They are using those principles to design, test, and improve something that must actually work. In the process, they collaborate, iterate, explore, and learn from both failure and success. The challenge is not only to see how high their rockets can fly, but also to discover what they are capable of.

Teaching whole-self skills alongside academic ones is one of the things that sets Millennium apart. The broader approach has roots in research on interdisciplinary learning. In a study of interdisciplinary units in five International Baccalaureate middle-years schools, Annie Termaat found that teachers valued these units for helping students connect disciplinary knowledge and develop metacognitive skills that support future learning. The study offers one example of how learning across subject boundaries can help students build connections and reflect on their own learning. These are capacities students can draw on long after middle school.

Learning That Matters Beyond Middle School

Quests prepare young adolescents not just to know things, but to use what they know with curiosity, wisdom, and a sense of responsibility to others. During a Quest exploring the complexity of access to water, students tackled a local issue: whether Hetch Hetchy ought to be restored. In their culmination project, students took on the perspectives of different stakeholders and debated their ideas in front of representatives from Restore Hetch Hetchy and SF Public Works. Julene Freitas, an audience member from Restore Hetch Hetchy, reflected, “It was so amazing to see all the different discussions taking place and inspiring to see the youth in action.”

When we take young people’s ideas seriously, we invite them to take their own thinking seriously, too. They learn that knowledge is not just something to acquire, but something to question, apply, and use in service of others. They begin to see themselves not just as learners preparing for the world, but as people who can contribute to it now.

Research & Further Reading

Termaat, A. (2024). “Framing, classification, and conceptual linkages: What can interdisciplinary practice in small secondary schools contribute to the curriculum conversation?” The Curriculum Journal, 35(2), 145–167. https://doi.org/10.1002/curj.229