This episode features a conversation with Chris Balme, Founder of Argonaut, a new live online community that offers young adolescents opportunities for hands-on experiences to develop wisdom, kindness and real-world skill. Chris has founded a handful of successful organizations, all centered on the learning and development of young adolescents, including the Spark Program and Millennium School. His drive to build new and different opportunities for middle schoolers comes in part from his own unhappy experience in those years, and a frustration he has with the low expectations commonly ascribed to middle school.

Chris and Jason talk about Chris's strong feeling that the middle school experience needs to be more relevant for young adolescents and cater to what young adolescents are “here to do,” the advantages of creating a laboratory school in the middle grades with freedom to experiment and then share things of use to the field, his approach to translating the science of learning and development into specific educational practices, and what fuels his unsatiated entrepreneurial proclivities.

Additional Readings and Resources

• chrisbalme.com and Chris's blog
• Argonaut advisory program for middle school, built around the Essential Experiences curriculum
• Millennium School and Millennium Forum
• "Talking in Circles: An In-School, Relationship-Centered Approach," a case study on Millennium Forum in Social and Emotional Learning in Early Adolescence: Tapping Into the Power of Relationships and Mentoring, MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership, 2019: pp. 24-28.
• A. P. Giannini Middle School, San Francisco Unified School District
• Spark Program
• Chris's Reading List:
  • Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence, by Laurence Steinberg, 2015
  • Permission to Feel, by Marc Brackett, PhD, 2019
  • How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, by Lisa Feldman Barrett