MiddleWeb | Middle Grades Resources

Shooting for the Sun

Read this collection of messages about student success by one of the nation's leading voices for middle grades reform.

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The First Days of Middle School

Classroom management tips, advice from veteran teachers, and much more.

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Showcasing "Schools to Watch," selected by the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform.

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In her new book, Notebook Connections, Aimee Buckner shows you how students can use reader's notebook to generate and elaborate on responses to text—beyond simply retelling the story—with 14 teacher-guided lessons that help students choose notebook strategies, and a variety of flexible assessment tools. Click here to order!

SOME OF OUR
FAVORITE RESOURCES

STUDENT-LED CONFERENCES
Thanks to MS librarian Sarah Thompson for prompting us to update our collection of resources on the student-led parent/teacher conference. We've checked all the links, tracked down URL changes, removed hopeless causes and, best of all, added new materials, including an excellent, detailed PowerPoint made available by the Arkansas Department of Education.

STUDENTS CAN DO HARD THINGS
"What can our students possibly learn if we only gave them easy tasks?" asks middle grades teacher Anthony Cody in this recent Teacher Magazine essay. "On the other hand, how can we motivate our students to accept a challenge if they doubt their own ability?" Students who lack motivation are often not convinced that the effort they invest in themselves is going to be rewarded, says Cody, a science content coach in the Oakland CA schools. "They simply have not been academically successful in the past, so why bother?" He offers several useful strategies that can increase students' willingness to embrace and master difficult assignments.

TEACHING SECRETS: TAMING CLASSROOM CHAOS
How does the semi-organized teacher hold the mighty dragon of classroom chaos at bay? In this Teacher Magazine essay, middle school teacher Cossondra George shares 10 “stolen” secrets that help her and her kids keep down the clutter and stay focused on learning.

PARENTS FROM MARS, TEACHERS FROM VENUS
This Teacher Magazine essay by sixth grade teacher Bill Ferriter begins with a tongue-in-cheek proposal to "make a mint" by explaining the complex relationship between parents and teachers. "I've never met a teacher who hasn't been mystified by the actions of a parent at least once a year, and I'm pretty sure that parents can say the same about teachers. Let's face it: We're two of the most complicated groups of people to understand -- and for $29.95, I'm willing to be your guide!" Bulging cheek aside, both parents and teachers will find some excellent pointers here, plus thoughtful comments from readers.

TEACHER-TO-TEACHER LESSON RESOURCES
Goodness, it doesn't get much better than this. Vetted teaching ideas and lesson plans from across the curriculum, nicely organized for easy searching. Follow this link to the presentation archive for the 2007 summer Teacher To Teacher workshops, sponsored at various sites around the nation by the U.S. Department of Education. This page lists all the presentations (K-12) in alpha-order, and by clicking in the left margin, you can examine presentation-clusters by subject area and theme. Click on a specific entry and you'll be taken to a page with a brief synoposis and two PDF downloads (presentation slides and handouts). Open the presentation PDF to find an email address for the teacher-author, if you'd like to query for more information.

USING TWITTER FOR PROFESSIONAL GROWTH
Are you starting to notice the Twitter craze? "Twitter has become THE most important digital tool in my learning," sixth grade teacher and Web 2.0 advocate Bill Ferriter told us recently. "The messages there are short, so I can scan them quickly rather than get lost in hours of reading." The key, he says, is to "follow" other Twitterers who share your professional interests, like to suggest resources, and jump in with ideas when you pose a teaching question to your Twitter network. "Building a network -- like building a reputation anywhere -- takes time," Bill says. One good place to start is Twitter for Teachers (link above). OTHER TWITTER RESOURCES: 9 Reasons Why Teachers Should Tweet; Collaborate Using Twitter; 21 Classroom Uses of Twitter.

GENERAL (and ESL) RESOURCE: THE AMAZING LARRY FERLAZZO
Larry Ferlazzo is a CA secondary teacher but takes a K-12 approach to his daily posts on the latest web-based teaching ideas he's come across. Many of the resources he identifies have 'all-student' applications. Larry's an English/LA teacher, but he's a cross-curricular kind of guy, offering ESL and non-ESL resources of interest to teachers in many different content areas. Explore. Subscribe to his blog feed!

MIDDLEWEB CLASSIC: LOOKING AT STUDENT WORK
We first heard about the professional development strategy of "Looking at Student Work" more than a decade ago. Unlike many other PD fads, LASW is a strategy that's stood the test of time and is practiced in many successful schools. Essentially, LASW refers to a process that helps educators improve teaching and learning by reflecting together on teacher lessons and student work products. One of the best resources on this subject continues to be the LASW.org website, first constructed by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform in the late 1990s and regularly updated since. It's a great place to learn more about the strategy—which, now as then, requires teachers who are willing to embrace the idea that "we learn more together than we do alone."

RICK WORMELI — DEALING WITH HOMEWORK
Read this chapter on effective middle school homework policies from Rick Wormeli's best-selling Day One and Beyond, in which he answers questions like: Is homework important? How much? How often? For what purposes? This is a small PDF file. (Thanks to Stenhouse Publishers for making this chapter available free to our readers.)

A WONDERFUL TOOL TO CONNECT WITH PARENTS
"This is the most valuable thing I've ever done with my students," one middle school teacher wrote about the "Million Words" assignment. "I've built an instant bond with parents," said another. Here's how it works: The teacher sends a note home with students asking parents to "tell us about your child in a million words or less." Just about every teacher on the MiddleWeb Listserv who tried this idea was amazed by the breadth and depth of the response and the valuable insights they gained into their students' lives. Read this archived conversation and see this Education World story which describes the activity and includes some cautions

SUCCESS IN THE MIDDLE
A major publication from the National Middle School Association sets forth an ambitious agenda "to raise academic achievement and support for 10- to 15-year-olds as they move through the exciting but challenging transitions of early adolescence." The report, Success in the Middle: A Policymaker's Guide to Achieving Quality Middle Level Education, details the steps necessary to implement a coordinated and strategic plan and calls for "financial and policy support from all levels of government" to help educators strengthen middle grades education.

MIDDLE SCHOOL COUNSELING – "LISTENING FOR DIFFERENCES"
As a middle school counselor, Marcia Rogat has learned that it's important to "listen for differences" and to teach students to be good listeners, too. Drawing inspiration from the writings of Margaret Wheatley, Rogat works with groups of kids in the aftermath of "scrapes and scuffles" to "gently introduce the possibility that every person in the room has a rightful place in our community." (Middle Ground, April 2006)

FROM ZERO TO SIXTY
A middle schooler does not turn in his project. You record a zero in the gradebook. When it comes time to determine the student's end-of-grading-period mark, you have to make a decision: Do you keep the zero or turn it into a 50, 60, or 70 to make the grading scale fair? Teacher/author Rick Wormeli explores this common grading dilemma in this article from NMSA's Middle Ground (February 2006). Wormeli's position: "We are not giving students something for doing nothing. We're adjusting the grade intervals so that any averaging we do is mathematically justified."

DESCRIBE THE MIDDLE PERFECT SCHOOL
Here's another classic article—this one at the Education World website—in which a middle grades teacher invites her students to "describe the perfect middle school." Among their answers: More technology, smaller teacher-student ratios, more electives, and a later starting time. Teacher Sue Chanda says the exercise "helped strengthen the teacher-student bond" in her classes. One student wrote: ""I can only dream of the perfect school, because there will probably never be a perfect school. Of course, it's not impossible and hopefully someone will read this and change some schools to get closer to perfect."

TEACHING THE TWEENS
Middle-grades students are ready for new challenges, if we give them the social support they need, says Donna Marie San Antonio in the lead article of Educational Leadership's special issue on "Teaching the Tweens" (April 2006). Those responsible for teaching middle-grades students take comfort in knowing that the contradictory behavior of middle schoolers is developmentally necessary and that some struggle is normal, she writes. "Still, we wonder how to balance academic and social support to encourage and guide children during these years."

CURRICULUM MAPPING
Subscriber Karen Morrissey, a middle school humanities teacher in Connecticut, shares a great site for schools and teams interested in mapping out their curriculum with an eye on alignment and improvement. It's one of several excellent webpages offered to fellow educators by The Greece NY school system. As the site notes, "curriculum maps are valuable planning tools for teachers, helping them to begin with the end in mind and chart a course for the year." You'll find a wonderful collection of templates, tools, and resources that can help you get serious about that curriculum mapping project you've been circling warily.

WRITER'S MODELS FOR MIDDLE SCHOOL
Is your school focused on writing across the curriculum? Are you a teacher with writing instruction as part of your teaching duties? You'll LOVE this Writer's Model website sponsored by textbook publisher Holt, Rinehart and Winston. You'll find grade-appropriate writing samples for more than 20 kinds of writing, including book reports, research papers, autobiography, cause and effect, personal narrative, and persuasive essay. Each Writer's Model is a full-length model paper, with interactive notes to help students make their writing stronger. Thre's also a detailed, printable Writer's Guide for each model. If you can't load a model due to the Flash player, try clicking on the "View Printable" button. It should open a copy as a PDF file. Designed so students can use independently.

ONLINE HISTORY INVESTIGATIONS
"With increasing demands on teachers to cover an ever-expanding content base, teachers simply lack the time to devote to sustained investigations in the classroom," say the authors of this article from Learning and Leading with Technology (May 2006). They've designed the Historical Scene Investigation "to address these pragmatic classroom concerns and to help bridge the gap between the potential of Web-based historical documents and the theoretical frameworks that guide historical thinking." The instructional model is not only highly engaging but scaffolds the analysis process for students. As the article notes, nine activities centering primarily on U.S. history have been developed to date (including "When Elvis Met Nixon"), with accompanying teacher materials. These activities are available at the HSI website at no cost.

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