In the Association for Middle Level Education's This We Believe: Keys to Educating Young Adolescents (NMSA, 2010), there is an expressed commitment to helping young adolescents become successful, responsible, global...

John Dewey (1959), a great philosopher and educational theorist of the 1950s, had already warned us about the importance of an educational focus on the student rather than on the teacher. He argued that classroom...

In her 1994 book of poetry, Something Permanent, writer/poet Cynthia Rylant gets inspiration from the photographs of Walker Evans, a photojournalist who documented rural America during the Great Depression in the...

Dopamine is known as the "feel good" neurotransmitter, and we crave it because it lets us know that predicted rewards are coming. That first sip of coffee that signals caffeine will improve your mood and energy level,...

With all the talk about mindfulness and learning, are there simple mindful practices teachers can use to make students available for optimal learning? The answer seems to be promising as growing enthusiasm for...

My school district recently went 1:1, meaning each student receives their own district-issued Chromebook for use throughout the school year. As an Automation and Robotics teacher, I was interested to see how this...

Allowing students to see perspectives other than their own is a critical component of transformative learning. In my current teaching environment, I get to see the results of this as students encounter other cultures...

During middle school, students begin to strengthen their ideas and beliefs about themselves and the world around them. To become socially responsible citizens, students need the skills to explore controversial issues...

For the life of me, I cannot remember having a significant interaction in middle school with my peers who had disabilities. I'm not a particularly forgetful person; I have many memories from my small town middle...

Everybody has a story. These stories comprise the events in our lives that intersect in complicated and uniquely beautiful ways to shape our perceptions and general outlook of the world. They demonstrate our strengths...