The golden rule of middle school: Build relationships with your students. This claim is supported by the Association for Middle Level Education (NMSA, 2010), as they describe a successful middle school as "an...

Ok, so before you start freaking out and telling me how important curriculum is in a school, let me preface this whole article by saying that yes, curriculum is a very important part of a school's program. The purpose...

Nearly six million middle school students today are reading below grade level—a shocking number. The National Center for Education Statistics' 2017 report, The Nation's Report Card: Mathematics and Reading...

IMHO, LOL, OIC, OMG. If you've recently graded middle school or high school writing, chances are you've read terms like these; or my favorite, "wtf - idk" which also happened to be an answer on a student's quiz. As a...

We've all had those days when technology doesn't cooperate, leaving that innovative lesson plan we've worked so hard on to fall apart. I crafted a differentiated lesson using a popular web-based educational technology...

"Laughter is the shortest distance between two people." – Victor Borge In my first year of teaching, I taught kindergarten. There are moments from that year that parallel later moments teaching middle...

One of my favorite days of the year is when I give students their first independent reading assignment. I believe the best way to keep the love of reading alive is for students to read what they love and share their...

The eighth-grade girl approached Tom Adams in the cafeteria. "Dylan just asked out Samantha as a joke," she said. "Now he's laughing about it with his friends, and Samantha is sitting at our table crying." Adams, the...

Much of the writing we assign our students is public writing—writing to communicate with others. Writing-to-learn is personal writing, writing that helps students increase comprehension of texts—fiction...

iGen, a term used by generational researcher Jean M. Twenge (2017), is used to describe children born between 1995 and 2012. In her book, Twenge analyzed large data sets to understand the struggles and hopes of this...