Educators today are facing one of their greatest instructional challenges. How do we create meaningful and appropriate content that meets the needs of our middle school students when we are apart? How do we try to...

While on a socially distanced walk with my husband today, we heard a cacophony of caw-caws. My husband turned to me to ask, “What do you call a group of crows? A gaggle? A flock?” Without hesitation, I...

It's not our imagination, kids really are different. Today's youth face four constructs that adults either did not experience at all or did not experience in the same way as youth today. Athletics As a parent of...

By the time Catie, 14, stormed out of her last class of the day, she felt disconnected from her emotions. She had no idea how deeply she'd been impacted by a minor fight with her mother on the way to school. In...

Reading about the teenage brain is one thing, crawling inside the mind of an adolescent is quite another. As a veteran of adolescence and a current scholar of teenage education, I can now look back at my own...

"Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play." —Heraclitus (554 – 483 BC) As middle school educators, we see a growing population of adolescents who struggle with...

One of the highest forms of respect around the world is to prove to someone that we really know them, and that we see them as worth knowing. We can connect with the grumpiest of individuals when we prove such things,...

It was the summer of 1998. I lived in a two room apartment with my now husband. The shower was in the kitchen. We drove clunker cars, scrounged change for take-out, and let me tell you, we were living our best life....

Emily, one of my former students, was in seventh-grade when a close friend leaned over to share a secret. "I'm bisexual," Alison* told her. "I like guys and girls" (from Emily's blog at...

In our article titled "Transforming Middle School Practice Through Instructional Technology," we shared how our district has approached systematic growth by intertwining twin focuses on middle level education and...