Collaboration is one of the essential attributes of successful middle grades schools. The benefits of working together are apparent in the joint efforts of a small midwestern college and an urban middle school to...

State standardized test scores at Cedarbrook Middle School in the Cheltenham (Pennsylvania) School District had been stagnant for several years and the achievement gap within our school dismayed and disheartened all...

Remember the Fibonacci sequence? It's a series of numbers in which each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, and so on. One of the most fundamental concepts in...

With only a few days left with my students, I’m thinking how far they have come in their reading and writing skills this year. Their final writing assessment has actually been a pleasure to grade. But now, I...

Question? To assign homework or not to assign homework? To grade homework or not to grade homework? Educators, parents, students—they all have an opinion. So, what is the value of homework and should it be...

As I become energized for the new school year, I find myself evaluating middle level practices in our district and across our state. And, although I have read AMLE’s groundbreaking publication This We Believe...

A professional learning community (PLC) is more than a group of individuals meeting together to read a common book or discuss a relevant issue. According to Huffman and Hipp (2003), PLCs are a way of working; "a...

High stakes tests should assess what the public values from education, but they too often fall short of measuring the many and varied student learning outcomes that actually occur in classrooms. For example, in...

Today’s school leaders are challenged to ensure their schools are effective—providing a quality education for every student—but they must do that with fewer resources than in the past. They need an...

High Expectations In accord with the Association for Middle Level Education's (AMLE) This We Believe tenets (National Middle School Association, 2010), teachers of middle level grades should implement curriculum that...