What Intermezzo Looks Like from the Inside

Twice each year, Woodlawn pauses the regular schedule. Here is what happens when 260 students and their teachers stop and ask a question together.

The announcement goes out the week before. Something like: "On Wednesday, we are pausing the regular schedule for Intermezzo. Clear your afternoon." Students who are new to Woodlawn do not always know what to expect. Students who have been here a few years know exactly what it means, and they start looking forward to it the moment the message arrives.

Intermezzo happens twice each year at Woodlawn, once in the fall and once in the spring. It is not a field trip. It is not an assembly. It is a deliberate pause in the academic calendar where the entire school, from Early Childhood through Upper School, pivots toward a shared theme, question, or challenge that cuts across the boundaries of any one class.

"The regular schedule is a series of rooms. Intermezzo opens a door between all of them."

This fall's Intermezzo was built around a single question: what does stewardship actually mean? Each division approached the question differently. The Early Explorers took a walk on the trails and identified what they wanted to take care of. The Lower School read a short text about the Woodlawn garden and then went outside to tend it. The Middle School ran a design sprint on campus sustainability. The Upper School broke into interdisciplinary working groups to develop a position and present it publicly by the end of the afternoon.

What the Structure Looks Like

Intermezzo is scheduled into the school calendar at the start of each year. Teachers know it is coming, and many plan backward from it. An Upper School science teacher might spend three weeks building toward a concept that Intermezzo gives students the space to explore without the pressure of a test or grade attached.

The format changes. Sometimes it is a whole-school gathering in the Red Barn. Sometimes it is small groups working independently on the campus. Sometimes it is a speaker, a workshop, or a project that continues in some form after the event ends. What stays constant is the permission to go deep on something that matters, together, without the clock running out at the end of a class period.

What Students Say

We asked a handful of students to describe Intermezzo in a sentence. The answers varied, but one pattern emerged: students consistently described it as a day when school feels less like a series of subjects and more like a single conversation.

"It is the one time when what I am doing in English and what I am doing in Biology actually talk to each other," said one Upper School junior. A 7th Grader put it differently: "We get to do something real." A Lower School student, when asked what happened at Intermezzo, said: "We made something."

Published by Woodlawn School · September 2025 · All Divisions · 5 min read

Inquiry. Integration. Immersion. Impact. Intermezzo is one of the places where the Arc becomes visible across the whole school at once.

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