After this week's readings I was most captured by the article "Turning Points". "Middle grade schools- junior high, intermediate, and middle schools- are potentially society's most powerful force to recapture milltions of youth adrift, and help every young person thrive during early adolescence. Yet all too often these schools exacerbate the problems of young adolescents" (170). This quote was really surprising to me. I guess I never realized that middle schools were failing the way they were before reading this articles. I was lucky enough to attend a very good middle school so many of these issues never occurred to me. The article continues with recommendations to improve middle schools. I think they are all essential to a successful school, especially a middle school. One that I thought was really important was having faculty at middle school that are experts at teaching that grade. This seems like one of the most pressing issues. Maybe many teachers end up teaching middle school when they had been originally trained to focus on elementary or high school instead of that unique age group.
An interesting point in "The Emergent Middle School" was the fact that scientific research results often come 25 years later. By the time valid conclusions are available they are no longer true. This creates a big problem. I think middle school has changed a lot since I was there 10 years ago. Maybe if districts, teachers, and communities started focusing on the issues that are present in their schools now and experimented with possible changes more improvement could be made. Waiting 25 years to learn new strategies of what works and doesn't will not help fix the problems that have been created since then.
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I also found the idea that teachers need to be experts at teaching their particular grades in middle school to be important. I know some people who went to school expecting to be teachers in high school but ended up having to get a job in a middle school. This seems to be a problem as in middle school children are dealing with changes in their mental and physical lives. A teacher needs to be able to understand these issues in order to help their students to succeed in school. If a teacher is not trained to handle these extra areas of concern it can create great difficulties for both student and teacher.
ReplyDeleteI too agree that teachers need to be experts at teaching their particular grades, especially with such a unique age group as middle schoolers. As someone who is majoring in secondary education, I just assumed that I would be teaching high school, but I didn't realize that this includes grades 6-12. What is unfortunate is that there is more of a focus towards teaching high schoolers, at least from my experiences so far, and that some classes aimed at middle school might not be required in the near future. But now that I'm taking this class and realistically looking at the facts that it might not be so bad to end up teaching middle school, I will be thinking about all of the age ranges I could be teaching, how I will be teaching specifically to each of those age groups, and what I will be encountering.
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