All About MiddleWeb
Welcome to MiddleWeb!
MiddleWeb is all about the middle grades with a sharp focus on teaching and learning in grades 4-8.
Read Larry Ferlazzo’s interview with MiddleWeb founder John Norton
Since 1996, we’ve been providing resources for teachers, school leaders, parents and others interested in the success of young adolescents. In 2012, we’ve completely redesigned our website around four streams of original content:
• Resource Roundups: We’ve always specialized in finding and sharing resources you can use. Here at our new site, we feature regular “resource roundups” — our tag for short, link-laden essays built around a theme. Browse here or search for keywords.
• Guest Posts: Just what you might expect…first-person articles. We bring you the voices of middle grades education stars and many lesser known teachers and school leaders up on the front lines who have stories to tell and good practice to share. If you’d like to write for us, check out our writer guidelines.
• Book Reviews: Back in MiddleWeb’s early days, we featured reviews of professional books of interest to educators working in the middle. We’re reviving that tradition and we’ve made arrangements with many education publishers to share review copies with us. If you’re interested in becoming a MiddleWeb reviewer, let us know. We’ll share a list of what’s available and some basic guidelines for review writing. You pick what you’d like to read, write the review, keep the book. We publish your reviews, make you famous.
• Interviews: We’re talking with interesting people who have expertise around middle grades education — or just do great things for middle grades kids and schools. Peruse our Five Q Interviews for ideas, insights, and plain good chat.
Middleweb SmartBrief
As part of the new MiddleWeb experience, we’ve formed a partnership with the SmartBrief Education news team to produce the twice-weekly MiddleWeb SmartBrief e-newsletter. You may be familiar with the nation’s premier professional newsletter organization, which also publishes ASCD SmartBrief, Accomplished Teacher SmartBrief, SmartBrief on Ed Tech and other education reports.
MiddleWeb SmartBrief specializes in Grades 4-8 news and resources. We work with SmartBrief editors to shape the content and also contribute our own news and resources to every issue. Subscriptions are free, your address is kept confidential, and you can unsubscribe anytime with a single click.
Get Involved with MiddleWeb
From our earliest days we’ve viewed MiddleWeb as as community, and we’d love for you to get involved. Here are several ways you can do that.
1. Pen a guest post. Share some of what you know, what you believe, what you hope for. Learn more.
2. Write book reviews. Middle grades educators want to grow professionally but they’re very busy people. Help them invest their professional reading time wisely by reviewing and summarizing worthwhile (and not-so-worthwhile) books in the field. Learn more.
3. Share photos. We’re eager to expand our collection of photographs portraying student learning and middle grades life. Send us some and we’ll highlight them. Be sure to include captions! Learn more.
4. Recruit student voices. We believe it’s important for the world to hear from students themselves. We rely on educators to help us gather student opinions and stories about their own learning. Each month we’ll select several student articles for our Guest Articles stream. Learn more.
5. Interview yourself. Ask yourself five questions. Answer them. If we like what you have to say and how you say it (we love to laugh, for example), we’ll use your self-interview in our Interviews stream. Learn more.
6. Comment on our content. All of our posts are open to comment. We welcome everyone who’s not a spam robot (or human equivalent) to tell us what you think!
7. Tell on somebody. We love to hear your ideas. Here’s one from Anne Jolly, long-time friend of MiddleWeb and interviewee: Ask a teacher to catch another teacher in the act of doing something “good.” Excellent idea! Learn more.