Developing communication and leadership skills through community engagement During the middle school years young adolescents not only become aware of the changes associated with physical and emotional maturity, but they also adjust to new learning standards and expectations. The goals of middle school include fostering the self-esteem, self-worth, and confidence necessary for young adults to
Helping students draw meaning and demonstrate skills in discussing thematic elements Teaching literacy skills through the story of Anne Frank has evolved for me—I’ve learned so much through my students and what they like in the music world! Their creativity and insights show academic progress, but even more importantly show me their middle school selves—feelings
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Putting standards in place for collaboration to prepare students for the workplace Collaboration. The buzzword that gets crowned as one of the most important student skills. It has emerged as one of the major components of 21st century learning. The idea of collaboration is far from new, and the importance of it has been well
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Offering diverse texts as well as justice-focused critiques of traditional literature On the first day of school in Chicago, I encountered a room full of Iraqi, Nepalese, and West African refugee students. Timid, cautious, and nervous, they sat in Room 34 with visible trepidation. Someone with an equal level of trepidation? Me. I was a
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4 Scientific Ways to Create a Great School One of the foundational concepts in the critical middle grades is cross-content learning. We create interdisciplinary plans and bridge curricula for a few reasons. First, we know that young adolescents learn more when they can see that something has relevance in another class. Therefore, we may ask our
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Exploring vocabulary terms in social studies with primary sources. The C3 Framework by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) has changed the dynamics of social studies instruction. The emphasis of standards in this document is for teachers to build students’ content-area literacy skills through inquiry-based activities (NCSS, 2013). For social studies, this means
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