Teaching & Learning

At Fayerweather, every child is taken seriously — as a thinker, as an individual, as someone whose presence in the world already matters.

Taking children seriously means their full self is the starting point— their families, their histories, their racial and cultural identities, the questions they bring about a complex world. 

That conviction is the foundation of everything we do. It shapes how we organize our classrooms, how our teachers ask questions, what children spend their days doing, how each child is known across years, and how the curriculum unfolds across the years a child is with us.

What follows is what that looks like in practice — across our pedagogy, our curriculum, and the lived experience of our two divisions.

Explore teaching and learning at Fayerweather.

How a Fayerweather education unfolds from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade.

A deliberate progression in literacy, numeracy, science, history, the arts, world language, human development, and movement.

Ten signature practices — habits of teaching and learning that define how we work with children

Inquiry, real work, deep reading and writing, making, place-based learning, knowing every child, and the slow building of community over years. Each is a specific commitment, refined over decades.

Lower School: The elementary years at Fayerweather, from our earliest learners through fourth grade.

Where children begin, and where the foundation is built for everything that follows.

Middle School: The development years, from 5th grade to 8th grade

Where adolescents are taken seriously, stretched intellectually, and trusted with real responsibility.

How we teach about identity, race, family, and a complex world and how we work to live the values we teach.

This is foundational work we have been doing since our founding, and it shapes our classrooms, our community, and how each child comes to know themselves and others.

Student support and how we make sure every child has what they need.

Our learning specialists work alongside classroom teachers in every grade band, embedded in the daily life of the classroom.