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...

In This We Believe, the Association for Middle Level Education stresses the importance of understanding the unique developmental needs of our middle level students in designing appropriate learning environments and...

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...

It didn't take long to realize Marissa was not going to be focused on the day's lesson. Shortly after arriving in class, she took her seat, placed her head in her hands, and started crying. She shared that her best...

I hated middle school. It seemed like a cruel joke almost 20 years ago that the only job I could find was teaching remedial English to sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. When I tell my students that I hated middle...