Enhancing Student Learning in Middle School

Martha Casas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415801775
• eBook ISBN: 9781136938948
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A comprehensive introduction to middle school teaching, this textbook focuses explicitly on instructional strategies that encourage adolescents to become active participants in their own learning within a world of accountability and standardized testing. The author, an experienced middle school teacher and teacher educator, takes a constructivist approach to teaching that considers the whole child, including the emotional, psychological, social, and cultural variables uniquely associated with adolescence. The text examines the full range of middle school topics, from the development and diversity of middle school learners, to the structures, curriculum, and management of the classroom itself.

Special features include:

• "Empowering Middle School Students to Take Ownership of their Learning," "Teaching Scenario," "Key Points," and "Creating an Anti-Oppressive Atmosphere in Your Classroom" textboxes help teachers gain a clearer understanding of content presented and encourage them to become reflective practitioners.
• Callouts throughout explicitly link chapter content to NMSA standards.
• Discussion of the unique challenges of actively engaging bilingual students, special needs students, and students exhibiting antisocial behavior.
• Accounts about middle school students illustrate the ways adolescents think about school and learning.
• A chapter that focuses on ways teachers can apply the general teaching strategies to specific subject areas.
• Sample Lesson Plans, Focus Questions, Chapter Summaries, Journal Entries, and Student Activities/Assignments are included throughout to encourage readers to actively participate with the text.

CHAPTER 1
Rationalizing the Middle School Concept

ABOUT THIS CHAPTER

Reading this chapter will expose you to the rationalizations behind grade- and middle-school-level configurations that are in operation across the country. As a first-year teacher, some of you will be teaching in a middle school or a junior high school, whereas others will teach in schools that follow a K–8 or K–12 configuration. It is important, therefore, that you become familiar with school configurations because each has its own particular strengths and weaknesses. Learning how to capitalize on the strengths associated with the configuration of your school as well as minimizing its weaknesses will help you to become a more effective teacher in the classroom. In addition, this chapter will introduce you to the key characteristics of a high-quality middle-level school.

FOCUS QUESTIONS

1. Which model do you find most effective at teaching young adolescents and why: K–8, 6–8, or 7-9?

2. In what ways can teaching young adolescents be challenging?

3. How has the report Turning Points: Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century (Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1989) affected the way we teach young adolescents?

4. What are the key characteristics of high-quality middle schools?

5. How has the field of psychology impacted the way we teach middle school students?

Standard 1

Knowledge 4: Middle level teacher candidates understand the implications of young adolescent development for school organization and components of successful middle level programs and schools.

INTRODUCTION

More than likely, you have heard that teaching middle school students can be fun and exciting as well as a little scary. You might have heard that young adolescents can be egocentric, hard to discipline in the classroom, and vulnerable to peer pressure. Although these descriptions are true, teaching this age group can be most rewarding. Middle school students are in the process of leaving their childhood behind and embarking on the road to becoming young adults. In general, they undergo a dramatic growth spurt in which children begin changing physically and emotionally from little boys and girls to awkward adolescents with new secondary sex characteristics and all the challenges associated with growing up. Also, middle school students experience growth in cognitive development as well. They experience a steady increase in logical thinking, an improvement in memory, and the ability to learn through dialogue with others. In spite of the trials that adolescence brings, middle school students are at a fun stage for teaching and learning in that they do not possess some of the characteristics or challenges associated with elementary and high school students. They are old enough to tie their shoes and take care of their own lunch money and school supplies, and possess a longer attention span, characteristics not usually found in younger students. In short, they are less dependent on the teacher.

Conversely, middle school students do not experience the challenges facing some high school students such as a need for balancing their time between school and work. As a result, middle school teachers do not have to worry that their 13-year-old students are spending too much time working at part-time jobs and less time completing their homework after school. Also, middle school teachers generally receive more parental support than high school teachers because, as the complexity of the subject matter increases, parents can often feel intimidated. Speaking to the calculus teacher, for example, can be intimidating to parents, especially if they did not take calculus when they were in school.

Currently, the term secondary education refers to both middle school and high school. As you prepare for becoming a middle school teacher, you might be wondering what a middle school is. Or you might want to know if a middle school is the same as a junior high school. This chapter will introduce you to the different configurations of middle school education because you may be teaching in 6–8, 7–9, K–8, or elemiddle configurations. Having an understanding of your school’s set-up and the philosophy that underpins its configuration before you enter your classroom will help you know what to expect and how to teach accordingly.

However, before you read about middle school configurations, you will need to know some of the history surrounding the American system of education to help you appreciate how important middle school is to adolescent development and how important your role as a middle school teacher will be. Middle school education is more than a series of grade levels between elementary and high school education, and as you read its history you will be appreciative of the work of earlier educators who struggled to give early adolescence its respective place in human development.

The History Surrounding Grade- and School-Level Configurations

Standard 2

Knowledge 2: Middle level teacher candidates are knowledgeable about historical and contemporary models of schooling for young adolescents and the advantages and disadvantages of these models.

Disposition 4: Middle level teacher candidates are committed to developmentally responsive and socially equitable teaching, learning, and schooling in a variety of organizational settings.

Today, the American education system consists of a sequence of grade levels ranging from kindergarten to college. This grade-level configuration originated in the eighteenth century when the nation assumed a national identity. Defining who we were as a nation was important and that included the need to define public schooling. In 1892, the National Education Association’s Committee of Ten was created to address the issue of every college prescribing its own entrance requirements. High schools were having difficulties meeting requirements that differed among colleges. Although the Committee focused on college requirements, its work and recommendations were undoubtedly influenced by a need to address the concerns of parents of adolescents who wanted their children to be well prepared for a secondary school education. Can you imagine how challenging it was for teachers to prepare secondary students according to the academic requirements of various colleges and universities?

In the pedagogical arena, there were discussions aimed at developing an intermediate school concept. In addition to having students be prepared for high school, proponents of intermediate schooling believed that establishing a series of grade levels between elementary and high school would keep students enrolled in school for a longer period of time. The compulsory education laws, in general, required that students remained in school until they were 14 years of age. Advocates of intermediate schooling argued that the 8–4 plan of school organization, in which students enrolled in elementary school for eight years and high school for another four, made it easier for young adolescents to end their education with graduation from elementary school. However, other supporters believed that, if students were given opportunities to take courses in accordance with their interests and abilities during the intermediate years, they might choose to remain in school longer instead of terminating their education after completing the eighth grade. The debate surrounding intermediate schooling focused primarily on two school configurations—the junior high school and the middle school concept.

Junior High

Although the concept of two-year and three-year junior high schools was an outgrowth of the Committee of Ten’s recommendation that academic work needed to begin earlier and that elementary schooling needed to be reduced from eight to six years, psychology also played a significant role in the establishment of the junior high (Webb, Metha, & Jordan, 2000). The notion of “middle schooling” was championed by the psychologist G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924), who wrote the first book on adolescent development, Adolescence, which was published in 1904. His work focused primarily on the period of human development that occurs between the ages of 13 and 18 years. According to Hall, education must take into account the student’s needs, nature, and development. He argued that the developmental differences between adolescence and childhood warranted a reorganization of the 8–4 system. Hall (1904) is noted for having highlighted the psychological significance of adolescence. His work had a profound impact on school organization, educational aims, subject matter, and instructional methods in secondary education. Other proponents of an intermediate level of education, such as the psychologist Edward Lee Thorndike (1874–1949), believed that students needed to be exposed to industrial and commercial training before entering high school. Thorndike argued that not all students possessed the same aptitude for academic learning and that therefore they should be taught skills that could enable them to earn a living in the future (Kliebard, 1991). He championed the need for a differentiated curriculum. As a result of these discussions in the pedagogical arenas, junior high schools were first established in 1909 in Columbus, Ohio, and in 1910 in Berkeley, California. Soon afterwards, other cities adopted the junior high concept. After 1930, the junior high school was commonplace in the United States (Pulliam & Van Patten, 1995). Clearly, psychology has played a key role in the development of intermediate education.

Although the original purpose behind the establishment of junior high schools was to afford 12- and 13-year-old students a smoother transition into high school by meeting their special needs, its purpose began to change. By the 1940s, the primary function of the intermediate grades was to prepare students for high school and to bridge the self-contained classroom setting of elementary school and the departmentalized setting of the senior high school. In short, the junior high school was modeled after the high school and teachers trained in secondary education were responsible for teaching the students. Soon the early intent of meeting the special developmental needs of young adolescents was forgotten. By the 1940s, the predominant pattern of grade configuration consisted of K–6, 7–9, and 10–12 institutions.

For decades, the traditional junior high school configuration of 7–9 was popular. In 1971, 45% of the 10,445 intermediate-level schools in the United States implemented a 7–9 junior high school configuration and 24% adopted a grades 7–8 structure; 16% of schools reflected a grades 6–8 configuration, with 7% of schools adopting a grades 5–8 intermediate-level school. Years later, the popularity of grade-level configuration changed. In 2004, the popularity of the junior high school had diminished significantly (National Center for Education Statistics, 2004–2005). Only 4% of the 14,107 intermediate-level schools in the United States had a grades 7–9 configuration and 16% had a grades 7–8 structure, but 61% of campuses had adopted the increasingly popular middle school structure of grades 6–8 and 10% had a grades 5–8 configuration (Elovitz, 2007). The gain in popularity of the middle school structure can be attributed to the hard work of educators who championed the middle school concept, namely William C. Alexander (1912–1996) and John H. Lounsbury (1924–), who are regarded as the “fathers” of the middle school concept. Both Alexander and Lounsbury believed that middle schools could provide young adolescents with a smaller and more intimate learning environment. Although Lounsbury has retired from serving as dean of the College of Education at Georgia College and State University, he is still actively involved in the National Middle School Association (Gloer, 2007).

Middle School

In the 1960s, there was a swift and almost widespread movement from junior high schools to middle schools. However, many of those schools simply adopted a different grade configuration devoid of any significant changes to their curricula, programs, and practices (Hlebowitsh, 2001). Although these schools took on a 6–8 structure, they were still functioning as junior high schools and did not address the needs of young adolescents in the curriculum. Instead, they imitated the high school by placing a strong emphasis on academic mastery. Then, in the mid-1980s, the requirement for addressing the special needs of young adolescents resurfaced in the social and pedagogical arenas. An increasing number of school districts were discarding the junior high school model and replacing it with the middle school concept as a means to stem poor student performance. Proponents of the new grade configuration argued that the middle school could look at curriculum options that reflected the needs and interests of the early adolescent, as well as exploratory learning and more mul...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• CHAPTER 1 Rationalizing the Middle School Concept
• CHAPTER 2 Theoretical Frameworks
• CHAPTER 3 Motivational Theories and Early Adolescence
• CHAPTER 4 Effective Classroom Management
• CHAPTER 5 What is Antisocial Behavior?
• CHAPTER 6 Designing and Enacting the Curriculum
• CHAPTER 7 Using Multicultural Education to Enhance Student Engagement in Learning
• CHAPTER 8 Assessing Student Learning
• CHAPTER 9 Instructional Strategies for Developing Higher-Level Thinking
• CHAPTER 10 Enhancing Student Engagement in the Content Areas
• CHAPTER 11 Parental and Community Involvement
• References
• About the Author
• Index