Good community relations and high quality learning are hallmarks of school success. But with the increased competition from charter schools and private schools, public schools can no longer rely on their...

Middle grades educators would have to live on another planet not to be aware of initiatives involving the Common Core State Standards, teacher accountability, and PreK–12 state achievement tests. How do we sort...

One of the hallmarks of middle level education is the process of understanding students and responding to their needs. In recent years, researchers have stressed the role of assessment in this process. As expectations...

The last United States Census reported that young adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in the care of someone other than their parents. Couple this with adolescents' growing need for independence, and...

In the middle of the night, I encountered an armed intruder in my home, and while the whole ordeal only lasted 45 seconds until local police arrived and apprehended the suspect, aspects of it are indelibly impressed...

How will you make the world better? This question challenges every member of the Preston Middle School community and serves as the foundation for everything we do. Preston Middle School is a school of science,...

Research has shown that, particularly in high-poverty environments, students' middle grades experiences are critical in launching them toward achievement and attainment or placing them on a path of frustration,...

We live in a world where you can’t understand science without technology, which couches most of if its research and development in engineering, which you can’t create without an understanding of the...

Carl Sagan once said, "We can do science, and with it we can improve our lives." Yes, science is an action—something we can do—and it is apparent that we in education have forgotten that fact. As a...

In her Click Here column, Brenda Dyck does a beautiful job of helping us incorporate and navigate technology, but I want to add my voice to hers in support of a particularly powerful tool: Twitter. To be honest,...