Teaching Middle Years

Rethinking curriculum, pedagogy and assessment

Katherine Main, Katherine Main, Nan Bahr, Donna Pendergast

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000247749
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Elementary Education

Teaching Middle Years has established itself as the most respected Australian text to focus on the adolescent years of schooling. Recognition of the educational importance of this age group continues to grow as research reveals the benefits of programs designed especially for young people's needs.This third edition provides a systematic overview of the philosophy, principles and key issues in middle schooling, together with a new depth of focus on the emotional problems and behavioural challenges in working with students. The editors explore in detail two key areas in middle years pedagogy - differentiation and engagement - and there are new chapters on achieving effective transition, the importance of physical activity in adolescence, and how to develop cooperative and collaborative learning.Featuring contributions from leading experts in the field, and fully revised and updated to reflect the latest research, Teaching Middle Years will assist both pre-service and in-service teachers to bring out the very best in their students.Praise for the first edition: 'Teaching Middle Years gives the reader many ideas and examples based on sound research. It's an excellent coverage of the current thinking in this critical area of education.'- from Teacher: The National Education Magazine 'Offers educators a combination of theoretical constructions based on Australian and international research and practical suggestions for teaching middle years students based on the proven good practices of many effective middle years teachers.' - from the Australian Journal of Middle Schooling 'This book should be required reading for every middle school leader who strives to better understand and facilitate middle level learning and achievement.' - from Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries

Part One
The middle years

Chapter One
Middle years education

DONNA PENDERGAST

Learning intentions

In this chapter we will:

• introduce the field of middle years education
• consider factors that shape middle years education
• engage in a three-step strategy to develop a school-based philosophy for middle years education.

Introducing middle years education

Why focus on middle years education?

Over the last three decades, around the world there has been a great deal of interest in effective teaching and learning for young adolescents with the impetus to provide the best learning opportunities for engagement and, in turn, student achievement. It is through the thoughtful adoption of intentional approaches to learning and teaching that take account of, and respond to, young adolescent learners in formal and informal contexts that effective middle years education can be achieved. Middle years education applies to young people aged from around eleven to fifteen years and typically in Years 5–9 in schools. The exact age range and year levels vary in different states and territories around Australia and internationally, hence there will be some variation in this book. The need for addressing the middle years separately has emerged from an increased understanding of the changes that occur in the lives of young people during this period and of the effects these changes have on student learning.

The magnitude of physical, psychosocial, emotional and cognitive changes that occur during early adolescence is second only to that of the changes experienced in the first two years of life. In addition, we can expect the most differentiation, because for each individual the journey through adolescence is unique, with changes occurring at different times and at different rates. This means classrooms are widely differentiated, not only in the usual senses of socio-economic status, ethnicity, gender, location and other generally accepted variables, but also in terms of the widest range of maturation across the developmental domains. The middle years are also typically characterised by a transition in school from a student-centred model to an increasingly subject-centred model, with accompanying structural, organisational, cultural and other aspects of the school experience coinciding with this time of change.

The quality of teaching students experience is now accepted to be the most significant factor we can focus on to improve student achievement. This challenges us to consider what quality teaching means in the context of young adolescent learners, especially because there is a predictable, measurable decline in student achievement in the middle years. Indeed, much of the research around student academic performance indicates that during the early years of secondary school, students make the least progress, the gap between the low- and high-performing students increases, and students are less engaged with education. This has been called the ‘middle school plunge’ (West & Schwerdt, 2012) and the ‘dip’ (Education Queensland, 2001), and estimates put the effect as representing a loss of between 3.5 and 7 months of learning achievement. The impact on academic achievement is most significant in students who lack literacy and numeracy capacity, especially reading and spelling. It might reasonably be assumed that this pattern is connected to the nature of the changes that occur during early adolescence, along with the challenges associated with transition between primary and secondary school. Pulling these elements together, the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER, 2012) has captured the key challenges for education in the middle years as:

• the need to manage a heterogeneous student population without sacrificing inclusiveness
• a decline in student academic performance
• a high incidence of disengagement, disruptive behaviour, boredom and disconnection from schooling
• a knowledge gap between what is taught and the kind of content that would engage early adolescents and match their cognitive skills
• transition, which often entails major change.

Hence, the purpose of a focused approach to middle years education is to intentionally, and with a full understanding of the context, employ a range of evidence-based practices to provide the best learning opportunities to engage and improve student achievement.

Middle years education in Australia

In Australia, the middle years are increasingly the focus of education reform initiatives, and there is a growing corpus of literature and emergent theoretical perspectives regarding, and hence a growing intellectual investment and commitment to, the field. Many schools and school systems now publicly identify and name themselves or a sub-school within their organisation as middle schools, junior secondary schools or other comparable terms. For some this might be virtually a change in name only. For many others the change involves a significant re-imagining and re-culturing in order to implement teaching and learning approaches that meet the needs of young adolescent learners.

A highly influential platform for middle years education reform in Australia has been the 2008 Melbourne declaration on educational goals for young Australians, which identifies ‘enhancing middle years’ development’ as one of eight areas for action. In the declaration, the importance of the action is explained thus: ‘The middle years are an important period of learning, in which knowledge of fundamental disciplines is developed, yet this is also a time when students are at the greatest risk of disengagement from learning. Student motivation and engagement in these years is critical, and can be influenced by tailoring approaches to teaching, with learning activities and learning environments that specifically consider the needs of middle years students’ (Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs, 2008, p. 10).

The need for tailored approaches to teaching and learning activities for young adolescents has now been generally accepted in Australia as well as in many other parts of the world. In Australia, the Middle Years of Schooling Association (MYSA, 2008), now named Adolescent Success, formulated and advocates for the adoption of a set of Signifying Practices that are regarded as enabling quality learning for engagement and success for middle years learners:

1. Clear philosophy relevant to the context.
2. …
   • higher order thinking strategies
   • integrated and disciplinary curricula that are negotiated, relevant and challenging
     Provocation 1.1 Understanding middle years students
     You are a new middle years teacher. The sketch in Figure 1.1 shows a group of four friends who are studying Year 8 together and are within six months of age. As their new classroom teacher you have made a few assumptions about the students based on their appearance. The image is a simple depiction of the variation of physical development that exists even in a group as small as this. As you get to know the students you realise that appearance is no indicator for cognitive maturation or for other readiness aspects of learning. You also realise that these four are at very different points of psychosocial maturity.

     

     Figure 1.1 Four friends
     

     

     As a middle years educator, what are your first steps to understanding the students in your class—and not just these four, but the entire 30?
   • heterogeneous and flexible student groupings
   • cooperative learning and collaborative teaching
   • authentic and reflective assessment with high expectations
   • democratic governance and shared leadership
   • parental and community involvement in student learning.

A cursory glance at these practices confirms that the approaches are built on principles that are desirable for all learners, not just those in the middle years. It is necessary to drill down into each of these to gain an understanding of what this means in the middle years context. Hence, many of these practices are chapter topics in this book, to enable deep engagement and understanding.

The need for an approach to teaching and learning that intentionally privileges these Signifying Practices is well supported through rigorous research that reveals that the quality of teaching diminishes in the middle years and that specific strategies are better suited to middle years students’ age and developmental needs and to the wide range that is typical during the adolescent years. The absence of many of these practices and other high-quality pedagogy indicators remains a challenge in many middle years educational settings. Perhaps this is why there is an abundance of evidence that points to greater incidence of underachievement, disengagement, truancy, mental ill health and problem behaviours along with declining levels of resilience and motivation for those in the middle years (M.-T. Wang & Fredricks, 2014), despite the increased awareness of the effectiveness of employing appropriate approaches to teaching and learning for these students.

Factors that shape middle years education

Middle years curriculum, pedagogy and assessment

In Australia, schools generally operate on a two-tiered system (primary and secondary), providing a very different context for middle school reform. An important aspect of the underlying philosophy of reform in the middle years of schooling in the Australian context revolves around the provision of a seamless transition from primary schooling (which is traditionally student centred) to secondary schooling (which is traditionally subject or discipline centred) leading to more effective student learning, positive experiences in adolescence and a desire and capacity for lifelong learning. These issues go beyond the traditional shift from the smaller primary school site to the larger secondary school. Difficulties are exacerbated by the different structures, the new relationships with teachers, th...