MacLaren Library

Thomas MacLaren, our school’s namesake, hailed from Scotland. In honor of his heritage, we named our school houses “clans.” In Scotland, clans are tightly-knit kinship groups of people with a shared heritage. Here at MacLaren, all students are sorted into clans starting in sixth grade, and they remain in the same clan until graduation. Because clans are composed of students from every different grade, they provide a way to build community across the school.

The Great Conversation is a monthly post featuring contributions from MacLaren's faculty. This month, Mr. Gonzalez shares memories of his great-grandmother's hospitality and the impact of genuine hospitality in a classroom.

Faculty seminars constitute the heart of MacLaren’s faculty development. They stretch the faculty, engage them, and inspire them to be lifelong learners. They foster conversation, push faculty outside their field of expertise, and provide an opportunity to experience one part of the rich curriculum that MacLaren students work hard at every day. Faculty seminars make the community of learners a reality.

The Great Conversation is a monthly post featuring contributions from MacLaren's faculty. This month, Mr. Humber shares thoughts about the need to study the lives of ordinary people in order to truly understand history.

All students in MacLaren’s Upper School learn to play stringed instruments together in the school’s orchestra program. Starting as beginners in year one, they progress over seven years to performing masterworks by some of the finest composers the world has given us. One of the unique aspects of this program is that it is part of the school’s single-track curriculum, so truly all students experience making music together as part of their education. We believe that music should not be an elective course for many reasons: It is a core piece of our humanity, it helps us to emotionally regulate and navigate life’s challenges, it teaches us how to learn, it creates community, it gives us an outlet for expression, it inspires our imagination, and it helps us to understand things with our hearts.

At MacLaren, a hallmark of our K-12 curriculum is an emphasis on reading original texts. By original texts, we mean original works of literature, not summaries, abridged versions, or versions that have been altered in order to be easier to read. We also mean primary source documents from history. Reading original texts is indeed the central focus of our Humane Letters courses, but students in every grade are introduced to original texts. From kindergarten to senior year, our students are exposed to rich works of literature and history.

The Great Conversation is a monthly post featuring contributions from MacLaren's faculty. This month, Mrs. Rector shares thoughts about Roosevelt Montas's book "Rescuing Socrates" and his arguments supporting a liberal arts education.

You will often hear the term “a culture of error”* used in MacLaren’s classrooms. Creating a culture of error might seem surprising and even counterintuitive given the emphasis we also place on excellence and growth. But these ideas are closely related. At MacLaren, we attempt to create a culture in which students feel that it is safe to struggle and see the growth and improved understanding that result.

MacLaren’s K-12 curriculum is sequenced and single-track. This means that all students in the school take the same classes and are not tracked by ability. This also means that students do not take elective classes other than modern language courses in tenth through twelfth grade. There are many reasons for this approach. One is that it ensures basic ordered knowledge; a sequenced curriculum allows students to grow in sequenced skills in all classes, from math to orchestra, allowing them to grow in mastery of a few things instead of dabbling in many.

Each fall, a new wave of MacLaren’s youngest students arrive on campus, wide-eyed and excited for the adventures ahead. There is perhaps no other academic year in which students make such a big leap in physical, social-emotional, and language skills than in Kindergarten. There are many ways parents and guardians can help prepare their children for a smooth transition into this important year.

The Great Conversation is a monthly post featuring contributions from MacLaren's faculty. This month, Mr. LaBadie shares thoughts about the complicated translations of The Odyssey.

Lower School students at MacLaren receive six years of daily music training using the internationally-recognized Kodály method. Named for a Hungarian composer and teacher, Zoltán Kodály, the method is designed to help students fall in love with music, using the human voice as the primary instrument.

As students brought in their Project Week Projects, one teacher overheard some juniors talking about their eleventh-grade research project on Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War. One group had built a map of Greece which was so large that it required two sawhorses to hold it. They had researched the intricacies of a particular battle, and the physical map allowed them to demonstrate the troop movements. As this group was sharing with their fellow classmates, they said, “We went way over the required hours we needed for the research, but we didn’t know or care because we had so much fun doing the project.” That statement is the heart of Project Week. It is learning for its own sake.

Reading our mission statement, one might observe that it says nothing whatsoever about getting into a great college, having a successful career, or getting high test scores. Of course we are happy for our students to have those experiences, but we believe that humans ultimately desire more—are meant for more—than these exterior goods.

The Great Conversation is a monthly post featuring contributions from MacLaren's faculty. This month, Mr. Alvarado shares thoughts about the beauty of Mother Goose.

MacLaren invites its students of all ages to explore a rich curriculum with a sense of wonder and inquiry. Throughout the year, Curriculum Days provide an opportunity for students to temporarily shift from the normal rhythm of classroom life to enjoy in greater detail a particular aspect of their studies.

At MacLaren, everyone is an artist. Throughout the school day, students learn to see beauty all around – in their surroundings, in other people, and in the artwork that lines the school halls. While growing an appreciation for beauty, students receive focused instruction to create their own works of art.

Thomas MacLaren School is pleased to announce that the MacLaren Board of Directors has voted unanimously to name Bridget Rector as Thomas MacLaren School’s next Executive Director. Last year, Mary Faith Hall, one of the three founders of MacLaren and the school’s leader since its founding, announced that she would retire at the end of the 2024-25 school year. By finding and naming her successor now, the Board is affording Mrs. Hall a year and a half in which to mentor and train Mrs. Rector to take on this role.