AEDU 335 - Teaching in the Middle Grades

I'm ready!! Middle school is the place for me. I think!! This class really made me think about different things like the role of principals, creating a developmentally responsive place for these students, the complexities of a middle-level student, and the great big world with all of its stakeholders around. We started by learning about the history of middle schools and how they came to be to the different stakeholders involved and the different critical aspects we must always keep in mind as teachers. Week after week I thought to myself this isn't going to be easy, but it'll be fun. Things are always changing and I think we hold a great responsibility to be forever students. We must always be ready to learn and take on new hurdles in order to best serve our students. I doubt Kahoot was a thing a few years ago and now students love it. Just because something may seem difficult, time-consuming, or just not worth our time, we owe it to our students to check it out and p...

"Developmentally responsive middle-level schools" This repeated throughout the reading this week and I thought it to be more profound than simply saying middle-level schools. "Developmentally responsive", which means we, the teachers, the community, the staff, everyone is responding to the students' needs. A student-centered school is the essence of a safe, healthy, and successful school environment. When the time comes for middle school, it seems like a lot of things go out the window. Family involvement, constant encouragement and motivation, and the sense of community among all involved. I believe this to be due to the time these students are going through - puberty, friendships, new environments, and life revving up at full speed. AMLE discusses how family involvement diminishes as students enter middle school, however, an "active two-way communication [between home and school] leads to higher student achievement" (36). Why aren't we constant...

My key takeaway from this week's readings comes from the Edutopia article, "3 Ways to Plan for Diverse Learners: What Teachers Do". There is a graphic titled "The Learner's Relationship" and the online article's breakdown of the content from this graphic really broke down the complexity and aspects of differentiated learning. There are two key parts, "how teachers prepare" and "how students engage". Within the teacher's side, there are content, process, and product/learning artifacts. Then on the student side, there is readiness, interests, and learning profile. This really made it click for me and I viewed it as a checklist. So how I stepped up to it was okay I have this diverse learner, did I diversify the content? Did I diversify the process? How about the learning artifacts? These should all directly correlate to the student side and answer that part of the equation. The other online article included a step titled "Diff...