Offering diverse texts as well as justice-focused critiques of traditional literature On the first day of school in Chicago, I encountered a room full of Iraqi, Nepalese, and West African refugee students. Timid, cautious, and nervous, they sat in Room 34 with visible trepidation. Someone with an equal level of trepidation? Me. I was a
Read More… from Be Radical: Reimagining the 8th Grade Literary Canon
4 Scientific Ways to Create a Great School One of the foundational concepts in the critical middle grades is cross-content learning. We create interdisciplinary plans and bridge curricula for a few reasons. First, we know that young adolescents learn more when they can see that something has relevance in another class. Therefore, we may ask our
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Exploring vocabulary terms in social studies with primary sources. The C3 Framework by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) has changed the dynamics of social studies instruction. The emphasis of standards in this document is for teachers to build students’ content-area literacy skills through inquiry-based activities (NCSS, 2013). For social studies, this means
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Integrating disciplines to encourage exploration and discovery. AMLE’s This We Believe calls for teachers to be engaged in active, purposeful learning in which students have the opportunity to engage in meaningful questions, formulate conjectures and hypotheses, and explore patterns and relationships. This depends, in part, on the instructor choosing a curriculum that is challenging, exploratory, integrative,
Read More… from Mathematics and Science in Middle Level Classrooms
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A framework for co-developing projects with teachers and students. Ask a middle school teacher to explain why student-centered projects are a logical choice for young adolescents and you are bound to hear about the numerous ways in which these projects provide students with opportunities to actively participate and voice ideas and in so doing, increase
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Move the desks out of the way, pull up a piece of rug, and invent something using the engineering process and leftover parts. Just like anything else, the Internet provides a plethora of ideas to define and design “makerspaces.” Other names include fablabs, hackerspaces, and design labs. In our school, our students devise problems when
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