Middle Level Education and Me

Why do you or did you want to be a middle school teacher? What characteristics do you think a middle school teacher needs to have?

I really never thought about middle school until I transferred to Elmhurst College. I remember my Introduction to Teaching professor telling my class that many students come in thinking they want to teach high school, but that once they experience middle school during their clinical hours they are converted.

I remained skeptical.

But, of course, my all-knowing professor required that we spend at least one hour in a middle school class for our project. I contacted a local middle school and signed up for one hour with an eighth grade English teacher…and one hour only. I had to get to my high school observation hours, after all! Plus eighth grade was practically freshman year and therefore very high school-like.

Little did I know, however, that my cooperating teacher for the experience also taught sixth grade English in the morning when I would be there. I chalked it up to an easy observation hour when she told me.

Guess what? I loved it. The sixth graders were not only cute as buttons, but they asked great questions and were curious and engaged. This was partly due to the fact that my cooperating teacher was a great teacher, but I also think part of it was because young adolescents are great people.

Also, this teacher had an amazing classroom library with all of my favorite books that I recommended to customers at my part-time job at Wonderland Children’s Books and Toys (*Shameless Plug for My Favorite Bookstore*: Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/#!/WonderlandBooks Twitter:  http://twitter.com/#!/WonderlandBooks ). Thanks to this fabulous bookstore, I love children’s literature. And guess where you get to teach children’s literature?

Middle school!

The next semester, we had to complete a project on middle schools in my Educational Psychology class. At Elmhurst, you can glean an endorsement in middle level education by taking Educational Psychology (which everyone has to do), Content Area Reading (also required) and Principles, Procedures, and Philosophy of the Middle School (optional, but well worth it).

For this project I went to my future cooperating school for student teaching (thought I did not know that it would be at the time). It was such a friendly school and the teacher I observed (my future cooperating teaching, naturally) let me sit in on the team meeting for the day. No one had ever invited me to sit in on a school meeting of any kind.

As we walked in to the teacher’s lounge, my cooperating teacher introduced me to all of the other team members as well as one of the current student teachers who was from Elmhurst. They planned a field trip and talked about school issues. It was fascinating to listen to, and I found myself more engaged in a clinical experience than I ever had before.

The next semester I added a minor in middle level education and I began taking those classes last Spring.

My first class was Curriculum Integration. Curriculum Integration is a radical educational model and system that works very well for middle schools. Instead of explaining it all right here, I will give you the definition of C.I. from one of my books at the end of the blog in case you are interested. I will probably talk about C.I. a lot because I really believe in it, so you will certainly hear about it again.

In the Fall I took two seminars to help me develop a middle school portfolio and gave me the opportunity to work in my cooperating school as well as my old middle school!

I also took Adolescent Development. This was such a great class. It really helped me understand my students and gave me ideas about how to work well with them. In fact, it even got me thinking about becoming a middle school counselor or school psychologist. We’ll see where that takes me…

Over my January Term (Elmhurst does those, you see…), I was able to spend part of everyday in a local middle school participating and observing their methods and philosophies. I was even given the opportunity to teach three classes all by myself. I taught two periods of gifted English class for eighth graders and one section of sixth grade social studies. I am hoping to be endorsed in social studies for the middle school, so this was a really great experience that I enjoyed.

And now, I am student teaching in a middle school and hunting for a middle school teaching position. It seems a little surreal to see how much my entrance into middle level education has deepened and strengthened.

Inevitably, I think a lot about what makes a good middle school teacher. Lately, I feel that being developmentally responsive is one of the most important things a middle level educator can do. By understanding that my students need more sleep but are not given the opportunity to get enough sleep; or, that they need opportunities to socialize…that they need their parents to be involved in their life even though they act like they don’t want them to be…that they are curious and have important questions regarding their futures and the world around them… All of these things are topics that can come up in my classes, and I should weave these threads into my lesson plans.

But, in order to get a good list of effective middle level educator characteristics, I asked my students from January to give me some advice:

v  Listen to students when they are talking and let them finish when they have something to say.

v  Give students second chances on turning things in when it’s most reasonable.

v  Work with students who ask for help.

v  Have a few times when students are allowed to talk or they will talk when you tell them to be quiet the whole period. Allow group time and trust…students.

v  Be funny!

v  Get involved with the students.

v  No assigned seats.

v  Let them have homework in class.

v  Always give the help your students need whenever they want it.

v  Be patient with the eighth graders, because they are the loudest and the stubborn ones.

v  Do not be a mean teacher or strict because kids like us do not like those type of teachers.

v  Be nice.

v  You don’t want to stress the kids out…it leads to not doing homework.

v  You want to give time to read.

v  You don’t want to act like a kid…it doesn’t work. It’s just creepy.

v  Don’t explain every little thing; people get bored and they usually already know what it is already.

v  Be understanding, caring, respectful, honest, creative…

v  There are times when some students won’t like you for some reason. But if you treat everybody with respect they will respect you too.

v  Treat all of your students equally and never look down on someone.

v  Do something different everyday and your students will love to come to your class.

v  Be funny but stay on task at the same time.

v  Don’t push kids to things. Sometimes it just makes it worse.

v  Be close with your students.

v  Students do crazy things. Try not to get mad at them. Count to ten and calm down.

All of the exceptional middle school teachers I have observed are able to approach these aspects of teaching in a way that keeps students engaged, but also lets the students know that they care cared about.

Although I think middle school students really need to hear they are cared about, caring about students isn’t a middle school teacher thing only. There are all kinds of teachers that care about their students, and that is probably why they are successful.

It’s the first step, anyway…

Curriculum Integration

The classroom must be democratic:

“…the curriculum ought to be democratically conceived through collaborative planning with involvement of early adolescents…”(James Beane 1993, 19 cited in Brown & Knowles, What Every Middle School Teacher Should Know, “Student-Designed Curriculum” 130).

This is necessary, according to Beane, because “…people have a fundamental right to human dignity and…people have a responsibility to care about the common good and the dignity and welfare of others” (8—9, cited in Brown & Knowles, What Every Middle School Teacher Should Know, “Student-Designed Curriculum” 131).

A school that has an integrated curriculum ought to “…respond to young adolescent concerns about the world, to those issues that they feel are important” (Brown & Knowles, 131). It is “developed collaboratively by teachers and students and arises from the questions and concerns of the students rather than the demands of subject areas or standardized achievement tests” (Brown & Knowles 131).

For example, if I taught an integrated curriculum, I would not be an English teacher. Rather, I would facilitate learning that focuses on the questions generated by my students.

Question and C.I. Definition from:

Brown, Dave F. and Trudy Knowles. What Every Middle School Teacher Should Know, 2^nd Ed. Portsmouth,

NH: National Middle School Association, 2007. Print.