A student-produced magazine celebrates middle level student voice. In October 2015, a team of seven editors—all eighth grade boys at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, Virginia—met during lunch to compare two digital publishing platforms. They judged entries for the Cover Art Contest and debated the potential of QR codes. By mid-November, a staff of 36
Even the most technical STEM jobs require verbal and written communication skills. John Engler, president of The Business Roundtable and former governor of Michigan, recently wrote an article for U.S. News and World Report entitled “STEM Education Is the Key to the U.S.’s Economic Future.” Engler pointed out the United States’ reliance on more qualified workers
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Incorporating writing into math helps students understand their thinking. In the minds of middle grades learners, math and writing typically don’t go together. With the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) things have changed! If you’d asked me not too long ago about the challenges of teaching pre-algebra to adolescents, I would have talked about procedural
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These simple strategies put students’ voice in their writing. Some students come to class ready to engage and offer their voice, but others wish to go unnoticed and remain silent observers to the educational scene. The following is an assortment of creative writing, image writing, and cross-curricular writing ideas that may encourage young adolescents to
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You’ve read it … that one passage in a student research paper that startles you. The sentence structure and vocabulary exceed middle school norms. You raise your eyebrows, shake your head, and take a deep breath. How many times did you say, “Don’t copy word for word.” As middle school educators, we’re used to saying things
Read More… from Preventing Plagiarism: Three Proactive Paraphrasing Lessons
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An old-fashioned radio broadcast encourages deeper reading. Connections between students, connections between texts and students, and connections between texts and the real world are vital to student learning. In classrooms, one way to make connections is by linking people, ideas, behaviors, and activities through projects. My first experience teaching in a classroom was when I
Read More… from Necessary Noise: The Importance of Collaborative Learning
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