International Handbook of Middle Level Education Theory, Research, and Policy 9780815358619, 9780815358626, 9781351122115

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
PART I: Introduction to the Volume
1. Capturing a Moment in Middle Level Education Theory, Research, and Policy
Purpose and Organization of the Volume
Overview of the Volume
Conclusion
Note
References
PART II: Visions and Frameworks for Quality and Equity in Middle Level Education
2. Hope is Work: A Critical Vision for Middle Grades Education
Historical Context of Visions
Journey of “The Good” in Education
Conceptual Framework
Data Collection
Analysis
“Good” as Academic Excellence
“Good” as Developmental Responsiveness
Findings and Discussion
Conclusion
References
Appendix A National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform Vision Statement (1998)
3. The International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme (MYP) in US Middle Level Schools
The IB Continuum
History of the MYP
MYP Curriculum and Framework
Adoption of the MYP
Outcomes of MYP
Perceptions of MYP
Conclusion
References
Appendix Alignment of This We Believe Characteristics and IB Standards (Dever & Raven, 2017)
4. Democratic Living and Learning as a Signature Pedagogy for Middle Level Teacher Preparation
Historical Recommendations for the Preparation of Middle Level Professional Educators
Roots of Signature Pedagogy Research
Signature Pedagogies Explained
Seeking aSignature Pedagogy for Middle Level Teacher Education
Democratic Living and Learning: ASignature Pedagogy
Professions and Professionals
Complexity of Preparing Teachers as Professionals
Conclusion
References
5. A Framework for Classroom Caring that Challenges the Eurocratic Norm in Middle Level Schools and Classrooms
Toni’s Introduction
Susi’s Introduction
Blending Our Work to Offer aFramework
Culturally Relevant, Responsive, and Sustaining Caring
The Framework
Conclusion
References
6. Exemplary Middle Level Education in Three Pacific Contexts: Hawai‘i, American Samoa, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands
Overview of Three Pacific Locales
Education in Three Pacific Locales
Exemplary Middle Level Education in Three Pacific Locales
Acknowledgement
References
PART III: Characteristics of Learners in Middle Level Education Communities
7. Understanding Young Adolescents through the Intersection of Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychology, and Educational Pedagogy
Cognitive Neuroscience
Psychology
Pedagogy
Recommendations for Researchers
Final Thoughts
References
8. Using a Cognitive Apprenticeship Approach to Prepare Middle Grades Students for the Cognitive Demands of the 21st Century
Metacognition
Cognition
Designing Instruction
Conclusion
References
9. The Effects of Contemporary Technology on Young Adolescents’ Socioemotional Behaviors and Learning
Young Adolescents’ Developmental Traits
Available Technology
Effects of Technology on Young Adolescents
Conclusion
References
10. Engaging and Supporting Boys Through the Middle Years: A Perspective from Australia
History of Boys in Schools
Disengagement of Boys in Schooling
Students’ Perspectives on School Engagement
Improving Support for Boys in the Middle Years
Addressing Boys’ Needs to Gain Social Power and Be “Macho”
Conclusion and Recommendations
References
11. The Need to Teach Responsive Dispositions in Middle Level Teacher Preparation
Young Adolescents and the World Today
Middle Level Education and Dispositions
Dispositions in Action
DIA and Young Adolescent Learners
DIA and Current Trends in Teaching
Dispositions in Action: Findings about Teaching and Learning
Conclusion
References
Appendix
Pedagogy of Dispositions Observation Form
Responsive interaction with students (empowering/connected)
Responsive interaction within assessment (challenging/critical)
Responsive interaction within instruction (facilitative/creative)
PART IV: Characteristics of Middle Level Education Learning Environments
12. Supporting Young Adolescent Motivation in School Through an Adolescent-Centered Community of Care
Young Adolescent Motivation at School
Adolescent-Centered Community of Care
Key Elements of an Adolescent-Centered Community of Care
Conclusion: Future Directions and Implications for Young Adolescent Motivation
References
13. Classroom Behavior Management in Middle Level Education: A Self- Regulatory Approach to Empower Teachers and Adolescent Learners
Recognizing Middle Level Education and Adolescent Development
Reviewing Teaching and Learning Philosophy for Middle Level Education
Linking Classroom Behavior Management and SRL
Articulating a Self-Regulatory Approach to Classroom Behavior Management
Conclusion
References
14. It’s a Human Right! Young Adolescents Need to Play in the Middle Grades
Toward aTheory and Operational Definition of Young Adolescent Play (YAP)
Young Adolescent Play (YAP) and Its Potential to Support Healthy Development
Young Adolescent Play (YAP) and Enhanced General Learning
Young Adolescent Play (YAP) and Discipline Specific Learning in the Middle Grades
Conclusion
References
15. Creativity and Non-Traditional Approaches for Middle-Level Music Education
Defining Creativity in Music Education
Implementing Creativity in the Music Classroom
Informal Music Learning
Non-Traditional Music Education and Its Challenges
ACall for Change and Increased Opportunity
Suggestions for the Future
References
16. Continuing Professional Development and Middle Years Teachers: What the Literature Tells Us
The Need for Professional Learning
General Principles: CPD and How It Impacts Student Learning
Method
Deepening Our Understanding: What the SQLR Tells Us
Conclusion
References
PART V: Microcontexts of Middle Level Education Praxis
17. Less Doing, More Being: A Conceptual Framework for Cultural Responsiveness in Middle Grades Education
Opportunities and Challenges Shaping Middle Level Education
Cultural Responsiveness in Middle Grades Education
Research Methodologies and Methods Capturing Successes with Marginalized Students1
Conclusion: Unasked Questions at the Middle Level
Note
References
18. Starting with the Students: An Assets-Based Model to Teaching Middle Grades Mathematics
An Overview of Recommendations for Academic Programming in Middle Grades Mathematics Education in the United States
An Assets-Based Model for Academic Programming in Middle Grades Mathematics Education
Our Assets-Based Model for Academic Programming in Middle Grades Mathematics Education
Conclusion
Notes
References
19. Place-Based Education in Middle Level Education: Bringing in and Contributing to the Local Context
Description of Place-Based Education
Extant Research on Place-Based Education in Middle Level Education
A Place-Based Education Framework for Middle Level Career Development
Conclusion
References
20. Making the Shift: Consciously Preparing Clinically-Minded Middle Grades Teacher Educators
Clinically-Intensive Teacher Preparation
Clinically-Intensive Teacher Educator Preparation
Perspectives on one Clinically-Intensive Middle Grades Teacher Educator Preparation Program
Preparing Clinically-Minded Middle Grades Teacher Educators
Final Thoughts
References
21. Middle Grades Ethnographies in Theory and Practice
Of Ethnography
Middle Grades Ethnographies
Conclusion: Possible Directions in Middle Grades Ethnography
Notes
References
PART VI: Macrocontexts of Middle Level Education Policy and Praxis
22. Reforming Middle Years’ Education in Australia: Challenges, Implications, and Opportunities
The Middle Years’ Movement in Australia
Current Challenges
The Role of Capacity Building in Reform
Building Capacity for Future Middle Years’ Reform
Conclusion and Recommendations for Future Research
References
23. Engaging Middle Yearsʼ Learners: An Australian Perspective, 1990–2018
Creating the Conditions for Engagement: The Australian Context, 1990–2018
(Re)conceptualizing the Problem of Engagement
(Dis)engagement in Australian Middle Level Schooling: Pedagogical Solutions
Conclusion
References
24. Humanities-Forward Developments in Norwegian Middle Grades English Education
The Norwegian Context
Background
Features of Humanities-Forward Reforms
Teacher Autonomy, Responsibility, and Professionalism in the Humanities Context
Conclusion
References
25. Middle Level Social Studies Education in Turkey: A Window to Citizenship Education
Social Studies: ACitizenship Education Program
Turkish Education System and Social Studies Education
Historical Development and Citizenship Education in Turkey
Social Studies Teacher Training System
Conclusion
References
26. Measuring What Matters: Rethinking Middle Grades Accountability Systems in the Era of the Every Student Succeeds Act
Standardized Testing and Accountability: Immediate History and Uncertain Future
Teaching and Learning in the Age of Accountability
The Opportunity: Every Student Succeeds Act
Measuring What Matters
Leading from the Middle: Envisioning an Accountability System under ESSA
Six Measures of School Quality and Accountability
Implications for Future Research in Middle Level School Accountability Systems
Conclusion
References
27. Hidden in the Middle: The State of Homelessness in Middle Level Education
Defining Homelessness
The McKinney-Vento Act
United States of Student Homelessness
Literature on Youth Homelessness
Why Focus on Student Homelessness in the Middle Grades?
Note
References
PART VII: Future Directions
28. Looking Back to Move Forward: An Historical Analysis of Educating the Young Adolescent in the United States
Looking Back: Evolution of Education for the Young Adolescent
Moving Forward: Key Principles for Re-Energizing Middle Grades Education
References
29. Maturation of Scholarship in Middle Level Education
AMaturing Field
AGrassroots Epistemology for Middle Level Education
ATranslational Research Approach
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF MIDDLE LEVEL EDUCATION THEORY, RESEARCH, AND POLICY

The International Handbook of Middle Level Education Theory, Research, and Policy is a landmark resource for researchers, graduate students, policy makers, and practitioners who work in middle level education and associated fields of study. The volume provides an overview of the current state of middle level education theory, research, and policy; offers analysis and critique of the extant literature in the field; and maps new directions for research and theory development in middle level education. The handbook meets a pressing need in the field for a resource that is comprehensive in its treatment of middle level research and international in scope. Chapter authors provide rationales for middle level education research and definitions of the field; discuss philosophical approaches and underpinnings for middle level education research; describe and critique frameworks for quality in middle level education; review research about young adolescent learners, middle level school programming, and educator preparation; and analyze public policies affecting middle level education at national, regional, and local levels. David C. Virtue is professor and head of the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Auburn University. His areas of scholarly interest include social studies instruction, comparative and international education, and middle level teacher education and certification policy.

INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF MIDDLE LEVEL EDUCATION THEORY, RESEARCH, AND POLICY

Edited by David C. Virtue

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of David C. Virtue to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-8153-5861-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-8153-5862-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-12211-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK

CONTENTS

List of Contributors Acknowledgments

ix xv

PART I

Introduction to the Volume

1

1 Capturing a Moment in Middle Level Education Theory, Research, and Policy David C. Virtue

3

PART II

Visions and Frameworks for Quality and Equity in Middle Level Education 2 Hope is Work: A Critical Vision for Middle Grades Education Susan Y. Leonard and P. Gayle Andrews

11 13

3 The International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme (MYP) in US Middle Level Schools Robin Dever

31

4 Democratic Living and Learning as a Signature Pedagogy for Middle Level Teacher Preparation Karynne L. M. Kleine, Joanne L. Previts, and Nancy B. Mizelle

41

5 A Framework for Classroom Caring that Challenges the Eurocratic Norm in Middle Level Schools and Classrooms Toni M. Williams and Susi Long

50

v

Contents

6 Exemplary Middle Level Education in Three Pacific Contexts: Hawai‘i, American Samoa, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands Paul D. Deering, Deborah K. Zuercher, Kezia M. Curry, and Sabrina Suluai-Mahuka

64

PART III

Characteristics of Learners in Middle Level Education Communities 7 Understanding Young Adolescents through the Intersection of Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychology, and Educational Pedagogy Erika Daniels

89

91

8 Using a Cognitive Apprenticeship Approach to Prepare Middle Grades Students for the Cognitive Demands of the 21st Century Victoria Cardullo

103

9 The Effects of Contemporary Technology on Young Adolescents’ Socioemotional Behaviors and Learning Priya M. Poehner and Dave F. Brown

116

10 Engaging and Supporting Boys Through the Middle Years: A Perspective from Australia Craig M. McFarlane

131

11 The Need to Teach Responsive Dispositions in Middle Level Teacher Preparation Holly Thornton

143

PART IV

Characteristics of Middle Level Education Learning Environments

159

12 Supporting Young Adolescent Motivation in School Through an Adolescent-Centered Community of Care Sarah M. Kiefer and Cheryl Ellerbrock

161

13 Classroom Behavior Management in Middle Level Education: A SelfRegulatory Approach to Empower Teachers and Adolescent Learners Karen L. Peel

179

14 It’s a Human Right! Young Adolescents Need to Play in the Middle Grades Bea Bailey 15 Creativity and Non-Traditional Approaches for Middle-Level Music Education Robert L. Lyda, Jane M. Kuehne, and Shane E. Colquhoun

vi

194

207

Contents

16 Continuing Professional Development and Middle Years Teachers: What the Literature Tells Us Katherine Main and Donna Pendergast

220

PART V

Microcontexts of Middle Level Education Praxis

237

17 Less Doing, More Being: A Conceptual Framework for Cultural Responsiveness in Middle Grades Education Kimberly J. Stormer, Cory T. Brown, and Pamela Correll

239

18 Starting with the Students: An Assets-Based Model to Teaching Middle Grades Mathematics Torrey Kulow and Micki M. Caskey

250

19 Place-Based Education in Middle Level Education: Bringing in and Contributing to the Local Context Matthew J. Irvin, Jennifer Harrist, Dodie Limberg, George J. Roy, and Gina Kunz

271

20 Making the Shift: Consciously Preparing Clinically-Minded Middle Grades Teacher Educators Melissa Baker, Katherine F. Thompson, Ashley S. Nylin, and Janna Dresden

281

21 Middle Grades Ethnographies in Theory and Practice Boni Wozolek and Walter S. Gershon

293

PART VI

Macrocontexts of Middle Level Education Policy and Praxis

303

22 Reforming Middle Years’ Education in Australia: Challenges, Implications, and Opportunities Rebecca Seward-Linger

305

23 Engaging Middle Yearsʼ Learners: An Australian Perspective, 1990–2018 Rachel Flenley, Julie McLeod, and Russell Cross

318

24 Humanities-Forward Developments in Norwegian Middle Grades English Education Jessica Allen Hanssen and Maja Henriette Jensvoll

331

25 Middle Level Social Studies Education in Turkey: A Window to Citizenship Education Zafer İbrahimoğlu

343

vii

Contents

26 Measuring What Matters: Rethinking Middle Grades Accountability Systems in the Era of the Every Student Succeeds Act Steven L. Turner 27 Hidden in the Middle: The State of Homelessness in Middle Level Education Matthew J. Moulton

357

367

PART VII

Future Directions

381

28 Looking Back to Move Forward: An Historical Analysis of Educating the Young Adolescent in the United States Shawn A. Faulkner, Chris M. Cook, and Penny B. Howell

383

29 Maturation of Scholarship in Middle Level Education David C. Virtue

397

Index

402

viii

CONTRIBUTORS

P. Gayle Andrews is professor and head of the Department of Educational Theory and Practice at the University of Georgia. She is a member of the Association for Middle Level Education’s Research Advisory Committee, former AMLE board member, and past-president of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform. Bea Bailey, Ed.D., is a professor of Middle Grades Social Studies Education in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Clemson University (SC). She is the middle grades representative on the executive board of the International Play Association IPA/USA and conducts research related to inquiry and play in middle grades. Melissa Baker, Ph.D., is a clinical assistant professor of Middle Level Education at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Cory T. Brown, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Early Childhood and Elementary Education at Murray State University (KY). His research focuses on social justice and culturally relevant pedagogy. His work has been published in Teachers College Record and the Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. Dave F. Brown, Ed.D., currently is an educational researcher who holds professor emeritus status in the College of Education and Social Work at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He is co-author with Trudy Knowles of all three editions of the book, What Every Middle School Teacher Should Know. Victoria Cardullo, Ed.D., is an associate professor of literacy in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Auburn University (AL). She is the current chair for the American Reading Association and serves an invited reviewer for the Association of Literacy Educators and Researchers. Micki M. Caskey, is a professor at Portland State University (OR), and specializes in middle grades and doctoral education. She is co-editor of The Handbook of Research in Middle Level Education and The Handbook of Resources in Middle Level Education, former editor of Research in Middle Level Education Online, and author of 80 publications. ix

Contributors

Shane E. Colquhoun is a Ph.D. candidate in Music Education at Auburn University (AL) and serves as the band director at Loachapoka High School (AL) where he also teaches middle school general music. His research interests include non-traditional music courses and ensembles, rural music education, and popular music producers. Chris M. Cook, Ph.D., is professor of Middle Grades Education at Appalachian State University (NC). He also serves as the co-director of the North Carolina Schools to Watch program. Pamela Correll, Ed.D., is an assistant professor of Literacy Education at Missouri State University. Her research focuses on culturally responsive instruction, pre-service teacher preparation, and instruction for English learners. Her work has been published in Teaching and Teacher Education, Teachers College Record, and Journal of Language and Literacy Education. Russell Cross is associate professor in Language and Literacy Education in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. His research focuses on teachers’ work, with particular attention to the social, cultural, and political dimensions of professional teacher knowledge and practice from a Vygotskian sociocultural perspective. Kezia M. Curry, Ph.D., is the founder of Global Kaleidoscope, LLC, education consulting. Formerly, she was full time faculty at Georgia State University and University of Hawaii at Mānoa. Currently, as the spouse of an active duty military member, she serves as adjunct faculty for University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Erika Daniels, Ed.D., is professor of literacy education and coordinator of the Middle Level Education program at California State University San Marcos. Her teaching and research focus on creating productive, motivating contexts for young adolescents. Paul D. Deering is a professor of Education at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He directs the synchronous-online Curriculum Studies M.Ed. programs: Middle and Secondary Level Emphasis; & Pacific Islands Place-Based STEAMS Subjects Emphasis (science, technology, engineering, arts, math, social sciences). Robin Dever, Ph.D., is associate professor and program coordinator of the Middle Childhood Education program at Kent State University-Geauga (OH). She is the Past-President of Ohio Middle Level Professors and serves on the Board of Trustees of The Ohio Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. Janna Dresden, Ph.D., is a clinical professor of Early Childhood Education in the Department of Educational Theory and Practice at the University of Georgia. She previously served as director of the Office of School Engagement and is chair of the Professional Development School Research Special Interest Group of AERA. Cheryl Ellerbrock is an associate professor of Middle Grades Education at the University of South Florida. She studies responsive school experiences for young adolescent learners. Cheryl is program chair of AERA’s MLER SIG; editorial board member for Research in Middle Level Education Online, Middle Grades Review, and Middle Grades Research Journal; and member of AMLE‘s Research Advisory Committee.

x

Contributors

Shawn A. Faulkner, Ph.D., is professor of Middle Grades Education at Northern Kentucky University. He is past-chair of the Middle Level Education Research Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association, and he serves on the Editorial Board of Research in Middle Level Education Online. Rachel Flenley is a Ph.D. candidate at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on the history and sociology of education. She has a particular interest in examining educational keywords and their impact on policy and practice. Walter S. Gershon, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the School of Teaching, Learning & Curriculum Studies, Kent State University (OH). His scholarship focuses on questions of social justice about how people make sense, the sociocultural contexts that inform their sense-making, and the qualitative methods used to study those processes. Jessica Allen Hanssen (dr. philos, University of Oslo) is associate professor of English at Nord University, Bodø, Norway, where she is faculty coordinator for the Bachelor of English degree. She specializes in American literature, narratology, young adult fiction, and English for middle grades teacher education. Jennifer Harrist is an Educational Psychology and Research Ph.D. student at the University of South Carolina. She was a middle grades math teacher and team lead for six years. Her research interests include rural teacher recruitment and retention and the influence of teacher efficacy on student achievement and peer relations. Penny B. Howell, Ed.D., is associate professor in the Department of Middle and Secondary Education at the University of Louisville (KY). She is chair of the Middle Level Education Research Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association and serves on the editorial board of Research in Middle Level Education Online. Zafer İbrahimoğlu, Ph.D., is a lecturer in Social Studies Education at Marmara University Ataturk Faculty of Education in Istanbul. He focuses on citizenship education, social studies education, and museum education. Matthew J. Irvin is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Studies and director of the Yvonne & Schuyler Moore Child Development Research Center at the University of South Carolina. He serves as a board member of the Research and Higher Education Committee for the National Rural Education Association. Maja Henriette Jensvoll (cand. Philol., University of Tromsø, Norway) is assistant professor of English at Nord University, Bodø, Norway, where she is also the project manager for School Development and development partner for school teachers, school managements and school stakeholders. She specializes in foreign language teaching and learning, school development, curriculum development, and implementation and collective learning processes amongst teachers. Sarah M. Kiefer is an associate professor of Educational Psychology at the University of South Florida. She studies adolescent motivation, peer relationships, and responsive teaching practices. Sarah is vice-president of American Educational Research Association’s Division E and editorial board member for Research in Middle Level Education Online, Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, and Journal of Experimental Education. xi

Contributors

Karynne L. M. Kleine, Ed.D., is professor and head of the Department of Education at Young Harris College (GA). She is president-elect of the Georgia Association of Colleges of Teacher Education and active member of AERA, AMLE, IHPST, and NAPoMLE as well as the MLER and S-STEP Special Interest Groups. Jane M. Kuehne, Ph.D. is associate professor of Music Education at Auburn University (AL). An active state, regional, and national clinician, her research interests include addressing prejudice in classrooms, teaching sight-singing, and equal access to music education in public schools. She serves as the Alabama Music Educators Association Research Chair. Torrey Kulow is an assistant professor of Mathematics Education at Portland State University (OR). She is interested teacher candidates’ learning and development during their time in preparation programs as well as supporting teachers in enacting standards-based mathematics instruction. Gina Kunz is a research associate professor in the Department of Educational Studies and director of the College of Education Research Institute at the University of South Carolina, and she was co-PI for a large-scale instructional coaching RCT study for middle and high school rural science teachers funded by IES. Susan Y. Leonard is a doctoral student in the Educational Theory and Practice with emphasis in Middle Grades Education Ph.D. program at the University of Georgia. She is a teacher and teacher educator who also serves as Graduate Student Representative for the AERA Middle Level Education Research Special Interest Group. Dodie Limberg is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of South Carolina. She is a certified K-12 school counselor. Her research interests include school counselors’ role in STEM career development, identifying factors that influence counselor education doctoral student’s research identity development, and altruism. Susi Long is a professor in the Department of Instruction and Teacher Education at the University of South Carolina. She has published five books and numerous articles with a focus on issues of culture, equity, race, and pedagogy. Robert L. Lyda, Ph.D., is a music teacher in Auburn City Schools (AL) and an instructor of music at Auburn University (AL). He is chair of the National Association for Music Education’s Council for General Music Education. His research interests focus on creativity, life-long music participation, and general music education. Katherine Main, Ph.D., is a senior lecturer and program leader in the School of Education and Professional Studies, Griffith University, Australia. She is the research adviser to the Australian Middle Years Association, Adolescent Success and is a sub-editor of the Australian Journal of Middle Schooling. Craig M. McFarlane, M.Ed., MYSL, is head of a boys’ school in Melbourne, Australia. He is a lead member of the Adolescent Success Association and has been a leader in middle schools and boys’ schools for twenty years. Julie McLeod is a professor of Curriculum, Equity and Social Change, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, and pro Vice-Chancellor (Research Capability), University of Melbourne. xii

Contributors

Julie researches the history and sociology of education, focusing on youth, gender, and inequalities. She formerly co-edited Gender and Education and currently co-edits History of Education Review. Nancy B. Mizelle, Ed.E., is professor and program coordinator of Middle Grades Education at Georgia College in Milledgeville. She is treasurer of the Georgia Middle School Association and co-chair of the Collegiate Middle Level Association Advisors Committee. She serves as reviewer for the Middle School Journal and RMLE Online. Matthew J. Moulton, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Indiana State University. He is a council member for the Middle Level Education Research Special Interest Group and the chair of AMLE‘s Research Advisory Committee. Ashley S. Nylin, Ed.S., is a doctoral candidate at the University of Georgia. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in Educational Theory and Practice with an emphasis in Middle Grades Education. Before returning to graduate school, Ashley taught sixth grade in metro Atlanta for six years. Karen L. Peel, Ph.D., is a lecturer in Initial Teacher Education at the University of Southern Queensland. Her fields of expertise relate to classroom behavior management and self-regulated learning. Karen has extensive experience teaching young adolescents in Australian schools and her research focuses on pedagogical practices that empower students as learners in supportive environments. Donna Pendergast, Ph.D., is professor, dean, and head of the School of Education and Professional Studies at Griffith University, Australia. Donna has an international profile in the field of teacher education, particularly in the junior secondary years of schooling, which focuses on the unique challenges of teaching and learning in the early adolescent years. Priya M. Poehner is an associate professor in the Department of Pre-K–Grade 8 Education and Professional Studies at Lock Haven University (PA). She serves on the executive board of the Pennsylvania Association for Middle Level Education and is an AMLE reviewer for the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation. Joanne L. Previts, Ph.D., is associate professor of Middle Grades Education in the John H. Lounsbury College of Education at Georgia College in Milledgeville. She is the co-chair of the Collegiate Middle Level Association Advisors Committee and serves on the AMLE Research Advisory Committee. George J. Roy is an associate professor of Mathematics Education and the Middle Level Education program coordinator at the University of South Carolina. Prior to becoming a professor, he was a middle school teacher earning National Board for Professional Teaching Standards in Early Adolescence Mathematics (ages 11–15). Rebecca Seward-Linger, Ph.D., completed her doctorate in middle years’ reform with the University of Southern Queensland in 2017. She has 15 years’ experience working in middle level education and currently works as a middle years’ teacher and researcher in the state of Tasmania, Australia.

xiii

Contributors

Kimberly J. Stormer, Ph.D., is chair of the Department of Education and Professional Programs at Langston University in Oklahoma. Her research focuses on culturally responsive instruction, pre-service teacher preparation, the implementation of the middle school concept, and the writing habits of underrepresented populations. Her work has been published in Middle Grades Review. Sabrina Suluai-Mahuka, M.Ed., is a secondary education teacher at American Samoa’s Department of Education, Samoana High School. In American Samoa, she assists and advises teachers in their pursuit of higher education, under the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (UHM) teacher education programs. Currently, she is a Ph.D. student with UHM in pursuit of a doctorate in Learning Design and Technology. Katherine F. Thompson, Ph.D., is a clinical professor of Middle Grades Education at the University of Georgia. She serves on the Georgia Middle School Association board of directors and is a member of the Middle School Journal editorial board and the executive board of PDS SERVE (an NAPDS affiliate). Holly Thornton, Ph.D., professor of Middle Grades and director of the Graduate Certificate Program at Appalachian State University (NC), has served on the AMLE board, Georgia and North Carolina middle level boards, and was president of the North Carolina Professors of Middle Level Education. She is a NBPTS certified Early Adolescence Generalist. Steven L. Turner is an associate professor in the School of Teaching, Learning and Curriculum Studies at Kent State University (OH). His research interests include the learning sciences, classroom assessment in the middle grades, and how teachers teach and how students learn. David C. Virtue, Ph.D., is professor and head of the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Auburn University (AL). He is president of the Alabama Association for Middle Level Education and serves as editor of Research in Middle Level Education Online and a member of the AMLE Research Advisory Committee. Toni M. Williams, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Instruction and Teacher Education, at the University of South Carolina. She is a member of the AMLE Research Advisory Committee, and she is also president-elect of the South Carolina Professors of Middle Level Education. Boni Wozolek, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Penn State University, Abington College. Dr. Wozolekʼs work considers questions of social justice, qualitative research methods, and teaching practices that focus on the examination of race, gender and sexual orientation in schools. Deborah K. Zuercher, Ph.D., is professor and principal investigator in the Institute for Teacher Education at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She administrates and instructs candidates in teacher education programs in American Samoa and the Republic of Marshall Islands, is the founding school board chair of Dreamhouse E`wa Charter Middle School and a long term member of the Association of Middle Level Education.

xiv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I thank my wife and partner-in-life, Shannon, whose love, patience, and faith were both a support and inspiration throughout this project. I am also grateful to my children— James, the young adolescent, and Evie and Halden, the future young adolescents—for understanding when I was away or sequestered working on “daddy’s book.” You three have taught me more about life than any book ever could. I am deeply grateful to Catherine Bernard at Routledge, who first contacted me about this project more than two years ago. Her keen insight and vision were invaluable as I conceptualized and developed the volume. I also wish to thank Rachel Dugan and Matt Friberg at Routledge for their support in making this project possible, and thanks to Gail Harper Yeilding, a doctoral student at Auburn University, who provided editorial assistance during the final stages of this project. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the 55 authors who contributed to this volume. Some of these scholars are people I have known for many years, and others I met through their involvement in this project. These authors represent what’s best about middle level education—passionate, collegial, brilliant adult people who care deeply about the education and life trajectories of young adolescent people. Because of them, I have great hope for the future of middle level education.

xv

PART I

Introduction to the Volume

1 CAPTURING A MOMENT IN MIDDLE LEVEL EDUCATION THEORY, RESEARCH, AND POLICY1 David C. Virtue

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the release of Turning Points: Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century, a report from the Carnegie Corporation of New York that put a spotlight on the condition of young adolescents in the United States. The report called attention to the unique nature of human development during early adolescence, highlighted the many risk factors young people face at this critical time in their lives, and described the status of educational opportunities for young adolescents with an emphasis on the status of middle schools in the United States. Turning Points was an authoritative wake-up call that resonated with educators, health and human services professionals, government leaders, and philanthropists alike. A year after the release of Turning Points, the Carnegie Corporation launched the Middle Grade School State Policy Initiative (MGSSPI) as a way to incentivize states to implement the report’s eight reform principles and to provide targeted support to schools serving low-income students. During the 1990s, MGSSPI awarded 27 states planning grants to develop middle level reform initiatives, and 15 states received implementation awards that led to lasting reforms in the middle grades ranging from school organization, classroom instructional strategies, educator preparation, and innovative curricula. Other foundations that invested in middle grades reform at this time included the Lilly Endowment, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (Kronley & Handley, 2003). These investments led to numerous research studies that documented the effectiveness and impacts of these reforms. Eight years after Turning Points was published, several philanthropic foundations supported the formation of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, an organization that seeks “to make every middle-grades school academically excellent, responsive to the developmental needs and interests of young adolescents, and socially equitable” (National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, 2018, Vision section, para. 1). In 1999, the National Forum launched its “Schools to Watch” program, which currently operates in 18 states, for identifying high-performing middle level schools. Along with investment in middle level research and reform, the 1990s witnessed the founding of the Middle Level Education Research Special Interest Group (MLER SIG) of the American

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Educational Research Association in 1991, and National Middle School Association (NMSA) published its first comprehensive research agenda (NMSA, 1997). This attention on young adolescents and middle grades education in the United States during the late 1980s and through the 1990s mirrored work in other countries, including Australia, Canada, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and New Zealand (see, e.g., Barratt, 1997; Hargreaves & Earl, 1990; Prosser, 2008). When I was in graduate school, a professor suggested that education trends and reforms operate on a 30-year generational cycle. The publication of Turning Points, and the resources that followed, engendered a wave of middle level reform that began in 1989 and accelerated through the 1990s; and now, 30 years later, middle level education is again at a turning point. Current trends in research and policy offer favorable conditions for the advancement of middle level education: •

• •

•

The emphasis on the integration of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)—as well as arts (STEAM) and social sciences (STEAMSS)—has engendered P–20 curriculum reform and opens unique opportunities to realize meaningful, student-focused curriculum integration in the middle grades (Weilbacher, 2019). The reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act in the United States relaxed some of the rigidity in testing and accountability provisions and offers opportunities for educators to implement more useful systems of assessment, as Turner notes in this volume. Ongoing large-scale and longitudinal research opens new horizons for inquiry in middle level education. For example, the Middle Grades Longitudinal Study of 2017–18 (National Center for Education Statistics, n.d.) will offer researchers opportunities to investigate relationships between contextual factors and student outcomes in mathematics and literacy, and the Global Early Adolescent Study (Institute for Reproductive Health, 2018) may present middle level scholars opportunities for collaborative and translational research connecting health, education, and human development. The MLER SIG drafted a bold research agenda to provide focus and direction for middle level education research. The MLER SIG Research Agenda (Mertens et al., 2016) reflects the efforts of more than 40 scholars from the United States, Australia, and New Zealand and is endorsed by the Association for Middle Level Education (AMLE) and the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform.

This is, indeed, an important moment in middle level education.

Purpose and Organization of the Volume The purpose of this volume is to provide an overview of the current state of middle level education theory, research, and policy; offer analysis and critique of the extant literature in the field; and map new directions for research and theory development in middle level education. Contributing authors critique, analyze, and synthesize existing theoretical, conceptual, and empirical literature related to middle level education. In the chapters that follow, they describe rationales for middle level education research and definitions of the field; discuss philosophical approaches and underpinnings for middle level education research; describe and critique frameworks for quality in middle level education; review research about young adolescent learners, middle level school programming, and educator preparation; and analyze public policies affecting middle level education at national, regional, and local levels. The volume is organized into seven parts, including this introductory chapter that constitutes Part I.

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Part Part Part Part Part Part Part

I: Introduction to the Volume II: Visions and Frameworks for Quality and Equity in Middle Level Education III: Characteristics of Learners in Middle Level Education Communities IV: Characteristics of Middle Level Education Learning Environments V: Microcontexts of Middle Level Education Praxis VI: Macrocontexts of Middle Level Education Praxis VII: Future Directions

Rather than treat theory, research, and policy as separate topics or foci, the authors in the volume weave the three together in their analyses. The chapters illustrate the ways in which research informs theory, theory often drives behavior and shapes policy, and policy may constrain or engender research and theory development. A central idea in many of the chapters is that middle level schools are learning communities—sites of transformation—in which experienced, adult learners and novice, young adolescent learners learn and grow together. Therefore, chapters focusing on young adolescent students and in-service or pre-service teachers are not organized into separate parts but, instead, are presented in tandem.

Overview of the Volume Following the introduction, the authors of chapters in Part II critically explore visions of “good” middle level education. Authors offer analyses of well-established frameworks from the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform (Leonard & Andrews), International Baccalaureate (IB; Dever), and Association for Middle Level Education (AMLE; Deering and colleagues), and they propose new frameworks to help inform the education of adult learners (Kleine and colleagues) and young adolescent learners (Williams & Long) in middle level schools. Considered together, the analyses of the established frameworks highlight the orthodoxy of “good” or “quality” middle level education evident in the intersection of ideas across frameworks and in the mainstream middle level literature (see, e.g., the crosswalk between the IB’s Middle Years Programme and AMLE’s This We Believe in Dever & Raven, 2017). Despite the widespread agreement about essential middle level principles, Leonard and Andrews argue that middle level education will fall short of its mandate to serve every student if the field does not confront and challenge the systems, structures, and practices that perpetuate inequities in educational opportunities and outcomes. A path forward is to conceptualize middle level learning spaces as sites of democratic living and learning, as Kleine and colleagues recommend for middle level teacher preparation, and as sites of culturally-relevant caring, as Williams and Long propose. Finally, Deering and colleagues remind us that education—as it is enacted and practiced—is highly contingent and contextual. While frameworks attempt to provide common language and shared understandings about middle level education, the English language does not adequately express certain indigenous ways of knowing and communicating important ideas (e.g., akamai, fa’aaloalo,‘aiga). The authors of the chapters in Part III focus attention on the characteristics of learners in middle level communities—both novice, young adolescent learners and experienced, adult learners. Daniels explores the ways in which knowledge from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and pedagogical sciences influence theoretical understandings of developmentally-appropriate practices in middle level education. Importantly, her discussion takes a critical turn as she privileges the understandings of young adolescents themselves and positions their words alongside the ideas of adult “experts.” The chapters by Cardullo and by Poehner and Brown explore the intersections of digital technology and young adolescent learning and development. Grounded in theories of cognition and metacognition (Flavell, 1979; Sternberg, 1988), Cardullo illustrates how educators

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can use a cognitive apprenticeship approach (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1988) to make digital learning visible for students and empower them to regulate their own learning. While educators can leverage technology to enhance student learning, Poehner and Brown offer a compelling analysis of the effects technology use can have on young adolescent learning and development in multiple domains including sensory awareness, reading comprehension, cognitive engagement, and overall wellness. McFarlane calls attention to young adolescent boys in the middle grades. Writing from the perspective of a practitioner with oversight of boys’ education in a school in Australia, he argues that male students are often misunderstood, inaccurately stereotyped, and poorly supported in the middle grades. Like Daniels, he tethers his arguments to the words of young adolescents themselves and offers a set of recommendations for practice. Thornton turns attention to adult learners in middle level settings—specifically, teachers—and explores the particular dispositions that make teachers well suited to teach young adolescents. Drawing on knowledge from cognitive, developmental, and personality psychology (e.g., Carducci, 2006; Dweck, 2006; Semple, Reid, & Miller, 2005), she offers a practice-based framework for responsive dispositions in action that calls for teachers who are critical, challenging, facilitative, creative, empowering, connected, change-driven, and inclusive. Part IV focuses on characteristics of middle level learning environments, including organizational structures, curricula, and instructional practices. Kiefer and Ellerbrock propose to enhance student motivation in the middle grades by implementing an adolescent-centered community of care framework in which school organizational structures, teacher characteristics and instructional practices, and peer relations are responsive to and aligned with the nature and needs of young adolescents. Peel describes a research-based, self-regulatory approach to classroom behavior management that is grounded in psychological theories of motivation and cognition (e.g., Bandura, 1997; Csíkszentmihályi, 2008; Flavell, 1979; Vygotsky, 1978) and is specifically designed to empower students to take control of their learning. The chapters by Bailey and Lyda and colleagues explore two vitally important, yet underemphasized, aspects of middle level education—play and creativity. Bailey offers a conceptualization of young adolescent play as a fundamental human right that is too often neglected in middle level schools, particularly in the United States. She reviews research and theoretical literature related to play in middle level schools and includes an analysis of play in specific subject areas. Lyda and colleagues challenge the traditional content and structure of traditional music programs in the middle grades and call for developmentally-appropriate, non-traditional music options that incorporate creativity and informal music learning strategies. Main and Pendergast focus on adult learners—middle level teachers—and the optimal ways to provide continuous professional development. They contend that professional learning for middle level teachers must be focused, relevant, and continuous, and they emphasize the importance of evaluation measures that focus on student learning. The authors of chapters in Part V address the microcontexts in which middle level education is situated, including schools, classrooms, and local communities. Stormer and colleagues provide a definition of culturally responsiveness at the middle level and offer a framework developed from a review of relevant research and theoretical literature (e.g., Gay, 2002; Ladson-Billings, 1995). They contend that culturally responsive practitioners must recognize and affirm students’ ethnic and racial identities, provide multicultural texts and teaching materials, and leverage the funds of knowledge in students’ homes and local communities so they can build bridges between them and school (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005). Similarly, Kulow and Caskey offer an assets-based approach to academic programming that is responsive to middle level students’ developmental needs and integrates their personal assets—cultural backgrounds, knowledge, and experiences—with academic content. Irvin and colleagues discuss the concept of place-based education, which is grounded in contextual and constructivist approaches to pedagogy and offers

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a powerful framework for career development at the middle level. Baker and colleagues illustrate through personal narratives the power and potential of clinically-intensive, school-based educator preparation. Their chapter highlights the reciprocal nature of learning in these environments— where young adolescents and adults at all stages of the profession learn together. Wozolek and Gershon conclude the part with an overview of ethnography, an under-utilized research methodology in middle level education that offers great possibilities for understanding the interrelationships among people, places, and ideas within microcontexts such as schools and classrooms. The authors of the chapters in Part VI situate their work in macrocontexts—large-scale national or regional perspectives. Seward-Linger identifies six key factors that challenge middle years’ reform in the Australian context, and she proposes a capacity-building approach (see, e.g., Crowther, 2011; Fullan, 2010; Harris, 2011) that holds promise for fostering lasting, sustainable change. Flenley and colleagues review literature related to middle level student engagement within the last three decades (e.g.,Csíkszentmihályi, 2008; Dweck, 2006), and they explore how student engagement became a public policy concern in Australia. They document how explanations of disengagement converged on the mismatch between the developmental characteristics of young adolescents and the organizational structures and practices in schools (Eccles et al., 1993), and they discuss policies and practices implemented to remedy the issue. While the authors focus on the Australian case, they note that adolescent engagement in school has been an international concern. Hanssen and Jensvoll explore recent developments in Norwegian education policy that impact middle grades English education. They discuss a humanities-forward shift in policy related to teaching and learning English that affects teacher preparation, curriculum, and the status of English as an arena for lifelong learning. İbrahimoğlu traces the historical development of social studies and citizenship education programs in Turkey today, with a focus on the curriculum taught to middle grades students. The chapter concludes with a discussion of teacher training and explains briefly its historical development process and the current teacher training system. Part VI concludes with two chapters set in the United States. Turner reviews research examining how measuring school accountability by standardized test scores is influencing middle level education. He views the 2015 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—titled the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)—as a window of opportunity to reform middle grades accountability systems in the United States and to rethink measures of scholastic achievement so schools “measure what matters.” Moulton frames his chapter about young adolescents who experience homelessness using the McKinney-Vento Homeless Education Assistance Improvements Act of 2001. He describes the nature and extent of homelessness in the United States and reviews relevant literature. Moulton concludes with a plea for further work “with and for” young adolescents experiencing homelessness. Echoing calls throughout this volume to re-center middle level education on young adolescents themselves, Moulton urges educators to listen to the voices to youth experiencing homelessness and ensure they contribute to the discourse. Part VII concludes the volume with two chapters that call for new directions for middle level education. Faulkner and colleagues take a historical perspective on middle level reform and use that vantage point to look ahead to the future and recommend “next steps” to enhance the educational experiences of middle grades students. Virtue concludes the volume with an essay calling for a “grassroots epistemology” in middle level education research and he advocates for more translational and applied research to push the frontiers of knowledge in the field.

Conclusion According to Dan Westergren (2013), director of photography for National Geographic Traveler magazine, “Almost every good shot captures a unique moment in time” (para. 2). Like a good photograph, this volume captures middle level education theory, research, and policy at a unique

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moment in the history of the field. The International Handbook of Middle Level Education Theory, Research, and Policy is a resource for researchers, graduate students, policy makers, practitioners, and others who work in middle level education and associated fields of study. The volume— which includes contributions from American Samoa, Australia, Norway, Republic of the Marshall Islands, Turkey, and the United States—provides analyses that reflect the current state of middle level education theory, research, and policy; offers critiques of the extant literature in the field; and maps new directions for research and theory development in middle level education.

Note 1 An early draft of the ideas in the introduction to the essay appeared in Virtue (2019).

References Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York, NY: Freeman. Barratt, R. (1997). The national middle schooling project. Deakin West: Australian Curriculum Studies Association. Carducci, B. (2006). The psychology of personality. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Collins, A., Brown, J. S., & Newman, S. E. (1988). Cognitive apprenticeship. Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 8(1), 2–10. Crowther, F. (2011). From school improvement to sustained capacity. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Csíkszentmihályi, M. (2008). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers. Dever, R., & Raven, S. (2017). Intersection of principles: How This We Believe and International Baccalaureate align. Middle School Journal, 48(4), 36–44. Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York, NY: Random House. Eccles, J. S., Midgley, C., Wigfield, A., Buchanan, C. M., Reuman, D., Flanagan, C., & Mac Iver, D. (1993). Development during adolescence: The impact of stage-environment fit on young adolescents’ experiences in schools and families. American Psychologist, 48(2), 90–101. Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive–Developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34(10), 906. Fullan, M. (2010). Motion leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Gay, G. (2002). Preparing for culturally responsive teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 53(2), 106–116. González, N., Moll, L., & Amanti, C. (Eds.). (2005). Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices in households, communities, and classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Hargreaves, A., & Earl, L. (1990). Rights of passage: A review of selected research about schooling in the transition years. Toronto, ON: Ministry of Education. Harris, A. (2011). System improvement through collective capacity building. Journal of Educational Administration, 49(6), 624–636. Institute for Reproductive Health. (2018). Growing up GREAT! Baseline report. Washington, DC: Author. Kronley, R. A., & Handley, C. (2003). Maturing investments: Philanthropy and middle grades reform. Washington, DC: Grantmakers for education. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American educational research journal, 32(3), 465–491. Mertens, S. B., Caskey, M. M., Bishop, P., Flowers, N., Strahan, D., Andrews, G., & Daniel, L. (Eds.). (2016). The MLER SIG research agenda. Retrieved from http://mlersig.net/mler-sig-research-agendaproject/ National Center for Education Statistics. (n.d.). Middle Grades Longitudinal Study of 2017–18. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/mgls/ National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform. (2018). About the forum [Webpage]. Retrieved from www.middlegradesforum.org/about-us Prosser, B. (2008). Unfinished but not yet exhausted: A review of Australian middle schooling. Australian Journal of Education, 52(2), 151–167. Semple, R., Reid, E., & Miller, L. (2005). Treating anxiety with mindfulness: An open trial of mindfulness training for anxious children. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 19(4), 379–392. Sternberg, R. J. (1988). The nature of creativity: Contemporary psychological perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Virtue, D. C. (2019). President’s message. ALAMLE Newsletter, 1(1), 1. Retrieved from www.smore.com/ aux7v-spring-newsletter Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher mental processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weilbacher, G. (2019). Rediscovering the middle school mission. Phi Delta Kappan, 100(6), 34–38. Westergren, D. (2013). How to capture the moment. National Geographic Traveler. Retrieved from www.natio nalgeographic.com/travel/intelligent-travel/2013/07/12/how-to-capture-the-moment/

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PART II

Visions and Frameworks for Quality and Equity in Middle Level Education

2 HOPE IS WORK A Critical Vision for Middle Grades Education Susan Y. Leonard and P. Gayle Andrews

In 2003, the Task Force on Developing Research in Education Leadership asserted that schools need “visions that embody the best thinking about teaching and learning” (p. 3). Vision statements represent “the good” in education, encompassing shared goals and aligning stakeholder efforts. As such, vision statements inherently reflect a larger contemporary American discourse about education (Laitsch, 2013). For example, the discourses at play in vision statements influence how schools construct youth identities, enact teaching and learning, build relationships, and pursue student achievement. In the introduction to an issue of Middle School Journal that focused on conceptualizing curriculum as a means to cultivate social justice, Harrison, Hurd and Brinegar (2018) argued that the discourse in middle grades education must be open to critique if we are to move “towards a more inclusive and liberating middle level education” (p. 3). In this chapter, we will use a method adapted from Bakhtinian critical discourse analysis (Bakhtin, 1984; Tobin, 2000) to analyze the vision statement of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform (1998). We contend that the National Forum’s vision for high-performing middle grades schools both synthesizes the narrative in middle grades education dating back to the late 19th century and serves as the lighthouse guiding current and future efforts to improve schooling for young adolescents (Andrews, 2013a; Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1989; Jackson & Davis, 2000; Lesko, 2005; Lounsbury, 2013). We aim to critically analyze the National Forum’s vision to explore how ideologies intersect to guide middle grades education philosophy. Investigating the National Forum’s vision may inform justice and equity-oriented work in middle grades education.

Historical Context of Visions In their piece on critical literacies, Jones and Woglom (2016, p. 443) asked, “From where do you read the world?” They argued that educators should consider how their cultural and historical locations—those forces that “existed prior to their birth and will continue throughout life” (p. 443)—inevitably affect how we perceive and interact with the world. We further contend that the historical and cultural locations of middle grades education inevitably, even inexorably, affect the visions we construct to represent “the good” in middle grades schools. As a field, we cannot disconnect ourselves from our origins, experiences, and the network of systems in which we always already participate (e.g., Andrews, Moulton & Hughes, 2018). To acknowledge the 13

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powerful influence of the cultural and historical locations of middle grades education and set the stage for our analysis, we outline the historical and cultural locations of visions for middle grades schooling. As John Lounsbury (2013) described in his compelling and thorough chronological history of middle grades education, visions that represent the best thinking about teaching and learning for and with young adolescents, youth ages 10 to 15, can be traced back to 1888 with Harvard President Charles W. Eliot’s landmark speech, Shortening and Enriching the Grammar School Course. As Andrews (2013a) noted, Eliot offered the first widely acknowledged public complaint about the quality of schooling for young adolescents. The Harvard president was far from the last to embed that complaint in a concern about how well the middle grades prepared young people for college and career, linking “secondary school reforms with concerns for economic productivity and social unity” (Lesko, 2005, p. 193). That rhetoric seems to resonate with calls for college and career readiness as the goal of all schooling as demonstrated, for example, in the resources devoted to supporting state standards and strategies by the federally funded College and Career Readiness and Success Center (American Institutes for Research, 2018). Take a quantum leap forward a century from Eliot’s speech and one can trace the thread of attention to concerns about the quality of middle level schooling to the late 1980s. From 1987 to 1989, Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY) provided support for a task force to study education for young adolescents. Carnegie Corporation published the report that resulted from the task force’s discussions: Turning Points: Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century (Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1989). The vision that drove the 1989 Turning Points report described a 15-year-old who has been well served in the middle grades and has emerged intellectually reflective, en route to a lifetime of meaningful work, a good citizen, caring and ethical, and healthy. The report outlined eight recommendations for achieving that vision of a 15-year-old. Considered groundbreaking at the time for its attention to the systems that intersect and influence the lives of youth inside school and outside of it, those recommendations touched on everything from curriculum to community resources and re-engaging families. The task force designed the recommendations to serve as a conceptual framework for middle grades schooling that positions the school as central to achieving the report’s vision of a 15-year-old well served in the middle grades. For many people in middle grades education through the 1990s, the original Turning Points report became almost biblical. In fact, the 1989 Turning Points report generated tremendous publicity for efforts to improve middle grades education that helped to launch a decade of philanthropic initiatives across the nation. Taken together, the Turning Points vision and recommendations informed other subsequent noteworthy vision statements for middle grades education. The elements of the 1989 report’s vision can also be seen as the steel girders that support the National Forum vision that we spotlight in this chapter. In the halcyon days of the 1990s, four key foundations were funding a great deal of work in middle grades education: Carnegie Corporation of New York (think steel), the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation (think Avon money), the W. K. Kellogg Foundation (think breakfast cereal), and the Lilly Endowment (think pharmaceuticals). Each foundation had a program officer assigned to oversee the foundation’s program tied to middle grades education. Here’s a list of the foundations, programs related to middle grades schooling, and the program officers: •

Carnegie Corporation of New York. Middle Grade School State Policy Initiative (MGSSPI). Program Officer: Anthony W. Jackson, also lead author of the 1989 original Turning Points report and co-author with Gayle Andrews (then Davis) of Turning Points 2000: Educating Adolescents in the 21st Century (Jackson & Davis, 2000). 14

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• • •

Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. Program for Disadvantaged Youth/Program for Student Achievement. Program Officer: M. Hayes Mizell. W. K. Kellogg Foundation. Middle Start. Program Officer: Leah Meyer Austin. Lilly Endowment. Middle Grades Improvement Program (MGIP). Program Officer: Joan Lipsitz, who also founded the Center for Early Adolescence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Someone in the foundation community knew the work of all four program officers well, and he also knew that they were not consistently collaborating or even communicating with each other. He suggested that they get together, along with key leaders from their respective funded middle grades education programs, and talk about how they might work together and support each other’s efforts. Andrews (second author), as national director of Carnegie’s MGSSPI, was one of the key leaders involved in the conversations about how to collaborate and communicate around strengthening middle grades schools. In 1997, after two years of conversations, these four program officers and the leaders from their respective initiatives created the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform with the idea that speaking with one voice to advocate for improving schooling for young adolescents would “accelerate” the process of improving middle grades education. The National Forum is an alliance of about 60 people who represent researchers, middle grades educators and teacher educators, policymakers, and every major national organization that has an intersection with the field of middle grades education: e.g., the Association for Middle Level Education (AMLE), the National Association of Secondary School Principals (now formally known as NASSP), the National Association of Elementary School Principals, ASCD (formerly known as the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development), the National Education Association (NEA), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and Learning Forward (formerly known as the National Staff Development Council). After a year’s worth of conversations about a vision for high-performing middle grades schools, the National Forum published its vision statement in 1998 (see Appendix A). As a founding member of the National Forum, Andrews was involved in all of the conversations that led to the vision statement. The National Forum’s members agreed that a vision for great middle grades schools was all well and good, but it needed what Joan Lipsitz called demonstration proof (personal communication, July 31, 2009). A vision on its own could be criticized as pie-inthe-sky, unrealistic in light of the gritty reality of endlessly varied contexts and the constraints on educators and students embodied in ever-expanding systems of accountability in the days surrounding the passage of the federal legislation, No Child Left Behind Act (2002), that encoded accountability into law. Demonstration proof of the National Forum’s vision would live in the examples of middle grades schools, in a huge variety of settings and contexts, that were on a promising trajectory toward fulfilling the vision’s key dimensions: academic excellence, developmental responsiveness, organizational structures, and social equity and supports that make those first three dimensions possible. With the National Forum’s vision statement as a launch pad, in 1999 the Forum’s members generated a set of criteria for a middle grades School to Watch (rev. 2013a) and created a comprehensive rubric (rev. 2013b) with indicators for each of the four key dimensions in the Forum’s vision. What would a high-performing middle grades school look, feel, and sound like? What is happening in those settings? Schools to Watch are not like the Blue Ribbon Schools identified by the U.S. Department of Education (2018). A Blue Ribbon School can keep the sign out front celebrating that designation until the building falls down. In contrast, Schools to Watch must go through a rigorous application process—including a one- to two-day site visit by a team of experts—to earn designation for three years. The school must apply for re-designation 15

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at the end of that three-year period—going through the whole process again—to be redesignated and maintain status as a School to Watch. The National Forum started with a national search for Schools to Watch, and then launched a state-level Schools to Watch program in 2002. At the last count, 18 states have state Schools to Watch programs and well over 400 middle grades schools across the country have been designated Schools to Watch. Some of those schools have been re-designated as many as three or four times, representing a sustained journey on that promising trajectory.

Journey of “The Good” in Education Many voices have contributed to conceptions of what “the good” in education entails and what it does not. We briefly trace the journey of the good in middle grades education in developmental perspectives on young adolescents and the implications for their schools, progressive conceptions of schooling as centered on students, and what we are calling the critical turn that links to progressive influences in middle grades education and delineates a path that leads to equity- and justice-oriented middle grades schools. The psychological studies of G. Stanley Hall (1905) are the most oft-cited source of the attention to early adolescence as a stage of development set apart and characterized by “storm and stress.” Hall’s research helped to naturalize that young adolescents share certain defining characteristics—e.g., they are driven by hormones, impulses, peers, mass media. This idea that young adolescents universally share naturally occurring characteristics also supports the assertion that young adolescents share certain developmental needs (e.g., Dorman, 1984; Lipsitz, 1977; Nesin & Brazee, 2013). If middle grades students share developmental needs, then “good” middle grades schools are responsive to those needs. Advocates for junior high schools as educational organizations set apart from both elementary and high schools called for developmental responsiveness in their visions and recommendations for the junior high (e.g., Briggs, 1920; Gruhn & Douglass, 1947; Koos, 1920, 1927). In a similar fashion, middle school advocates have woven calls for addressing young adolescents’ developmental needs into their conceptions and recommendations of middle grades schooling since the middle school movement launched in the 1960s (e.g., Dorman, 1984; Lipsitz, 1977; Lounsbury, 1991; Stevenson, 2002). However, Lesko (1996) critiqued the developmental perspective of young adolescents, arguing that early adolescence was a social construction and that efforts to improve school programs without examining such assumptions create barriers that slow educational reform efforts. Lesko (2005) argued for “denaturalizing” adolescence, challenging the notion that young adolescents are doomed by their hormones and desire to fit in and contending that they instead could and should be seen as critical actors in their own lives. Walkerdine (1993) asserted that the ways in which teachers and students understand their psychological and pedagogical roles inform and constitute ideas that describe practices of “progressive education” and determine what is acceptable and normal. These ideas are always cultural and gained through social interactions and observations of others (Esteban-Guitart & Moll, 2014). In describing the field of middle grades education as fertile ground for attention to issues of social justice, Andrews, Moulton and Hughes (2018) depicted the field’s roots in “progressive conceptions of schooling that center on students as engaged, active agents in their own learning and communities.” One could argue that conceiving of middle grades students as change agents actually runs counter to developmentalist depictions of young adolescents as passive puppets controlled by hormones, impulses, and desires to please their peers. Progressive scholar and philosopher John Dewey argued that students’ learning should address societal issues and challenges, positioning curriculum as a means for social change (Dewey, 1910; Spencer, 1870). Legacy leaders in middle grades education (Smith & McEwin, 2011) picked up Dewey’s charge, placing 16

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young adolescents and the schools that serve them as leaders in democratic education (e.g., George, 2009a, 2009b; Lounsbury, 1991: Lounsbury & Vars, 1978). Curriculum theorist and middle grades scholar James Beane (1997) published Curriculum Integration: Designing the Core of Democratic Education, a book in which he claimed curriculum is shaped by policies and goals that mandate certain practices as well as the beliefs, desires, and demands of school stakeholders he designated as “local politics.” Beane pointed out, over time, middle grades curriculum has demonstrated “the sad fact … is [that] both social integration and democratic practice has largely eluded the schools … and their traditional curriculum organizations have too often been among the persistent sources of inequity and ‘disintegration’ found across the whole society” (Beane, 1997, p. 6). Beane (1997) picked up the threads of progressivism that reach back to Dewey in his call for a reorientation of knowledge that seeks “meaningful integration of experience and knowledge” (p. 5) rather than fragmentation into content-specific subjects. The curriculum integration that Beane described is organized around young adolescents’ questions and concerns about themselves and the world, a move toward the critical turn in middle grades education that leads to Freire (1970/2000). According to Freire (1970/2000), a “banking education” molds students into the “passive role imposed on them … [and] tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them” (p. 54). A banking education seems to mirror much of the standards-focused and accountability-obsessed culture in schools that Beane pushed back against (2005). That testing culture seems particularly dominant in the middle grades where No Child Left Behind (2002) required annual testing in grades 3 through 8, with all the anxieties for adults and youth that mandated standardized tests represent. To distinguish between banking education and the critical turn that he advocated, Freire (1973) discussed the important differences in the effects that adaptation versus integration has on students. Integration with one’s context, as distinguished from adaptation, is a distinctively human activity. Integration results from the capacity to adapt oneself to reality plus the critical capacity to make choices and to transform that reality. To the extent that man loses his ability to make choices and is subjected to the choices of others, to the extent that his decision is no longer his own because they result from external prescriptions, he is no longer integrated. Rather, he has adapted. He has ‘adjusted’…The integrated person is person as Subject. In contrast, that adaptive person is person as object. If a man is incapable of changing reality, he adjusts himself instead. Adaptation…is symptomatic of his dehumanization. (p. 4) Freire believed that banking education was oppressive to students and that education needed emancipation from such practices because “literacy could not merely be transmitted through instruction in established bodies of knowledge” (Flinders & Thornton, 2017, p. 163) but rather had to be constituted together. Freire’s (1973) literacy program positioned students as active creators who could develop “vivacity which characterizes search and invention” (p. 43) and promote man’s ability to attain his full humanity. Such an emancipatory program came to be known as critical pedagogy. In this chapter, ideas, beliefs, and practices that reflect critical pedagogy will be referenced as a critical perspective. For the purpose of this work, we define critical perspectives in two ways that represent “the good” in education: • •

Students co-construct knowledge and question, analyze, and act on their world as beings of power and influence. Schools and its members critically analyzing their practices and act to push back against practices that marginalize or oppress any student. 17

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Investigation and identification of the discourses present in the National Forum’s vision may not only reveal the social and cultural histories present but also dominant discourses currently driving or slowing efforts. Freire (1973) claimed that the difference between adaptation and integration is a critical attitude and critical capacity to make choices and transform reality. For critical perspectives to be represented in the National Forum’s (1998) vision statement, evidence of such a mindset should be present.

Conceptual Framework Our work draws from literary analyst Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1984) dialogic theory, which posits that our speech and communications are filled with other voices from our social histories. For example, in his essay, “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin (1984) made the argument that words always bring context with them—through what he called heteroglossia—and that words are always “entangled in someone else’s discourse about it” (p. 330) and “associated with an ideological motif and occupies a definite ideological position” (p. 334). Bakhtin (1984) believed that “our ideological development is just such an intense struggle within us for hegemony among various available verbal and ideological points of view, approaches, directions and values” (p. 346). To what extent are critical perspectives integrated in the National Forum’s vision? In search of this answer, we conducted a critical discourse analysis. According to van Dijk (1993a), Control of knowledge crucially shapes our interpretation of the world, as well as our discourse and other actions. Hence the relevance of a critical analysis of those forms of text and talk, e.g. in the media and education, that essentially aim to construct such knowledge. (p. 258) Because knowledge and ideologies are shared social constructions and understood through the texts that are produced to enact them, a critical discourse analysis allowed us to explore the National Forum’s vision statement in search of rhetoric that may support seemingly rational and commonsensical language but mask inequitable ideologies that “play a role in the reproduction of or resistance against dominance or inequality” (van Dijk, 1993b, p. 18). Van Dijk asserted that underlying critical discourse analysis “requires good theories of the role of discourse in enactment and reproduction of social dominance and resistance” (1993b, p. 19), which we will do through identifying ideologies through the multiple heteroglossic voices present (Bakhtin, 1984) in the National Forum’s vision statement, which was co-constructed by researchers, educators, policymakers, and educational organizations.

Data Collection Our study aimed to investigate how equity and social justice are or are not present throughout vision statements and frameworks that guide middle grade philosophy. Middle grades education philosophies have transformed throughout time as developmentalist, progressive, and now critical perspectives influence the decisions schools make to prepare students for successful futures. As a leader in middle grades education, the National Forum’s criteria for Schools to Watch (2013a) sets the bar for what excellence in schools looks like. Subsequently, the practices that the Forum identifies as excellent represent ideologies about what is “the good” in education and the beacon towards which schools should strive to achieve. Due to its position of power in dictating, identifying, and evaluating “the good” in schools across the nation, we decided to analyze the National Forum’s vision statement. Taking a critical perspective on the vision statement allowed us to investigate a chronic problem: Social justice continues to be emphasized in education but is too often perceived as a checkmark—an 18

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isolated professional development session, a diversity bulletin board, or a cultural night to name a few. The more we continue to position social justice in this manner, the more we continue to reinforce social justice as an option rather than a necessity. Our recent history has been filled with protests (e.g., Black Lives Matter and #MeToo) that highlight continued equities we face in our society, and Harrison, Hurd and Brinegar (2018) asserted that “since schools are a microcosm of society, these protests also echo the inequities that are present within educational spaces” (p. 2). Schools that hope to tackle the reform must continuously resist the ideologies, structures, and policies that sustain inequities in education. They must promote critical reflection, analysis, and action to push back against such practices in order to create meaningful change and model a new path forward for the future generations we serve as educators.

Analysis In our analysis, we looked for evidence of developmentalist and progressive perspectives that built the foundation of and continue to guide middle level philosophies, with a specific focus on how critical perspectives are adapted to or integrated into the vision statement. We began by looking at the structure of the vision statement. Then, we looked for key terms or phrases that were repeated or emphasized. Next, we identified phrases and statements that served as qualifications of a “good” education and associated the text with developmentalist, progressive, and/or critical perspectives as we were able. We read through the vision statement separately, adding our own comments, and then responded to each other’s comments. The discussion eliminated some of the initial themes and categories identified. Then, we wrote around the text, identifying perspectives, making connections between related statements and ideas, and analyzing the discourse represented in the text. We recognize that, as teachers, we carry assumptions and biases that influence our interpretation and analysis of the vision statement. We approached the vision statement from a place of respect and appreciation for the work that organizations like the National Forum do in the field of education.

Vision Organizational Structure The National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform Vision Statement (1998) is organized into four paragraphs: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Statement of belief and goal for middle grades schools Description of high-performing middle grades schools as academically excellent. Description of high-performing middle grades schools as developmentally responsive. Description of high-performing middle grades schools as socially equitable.

The vision identifies three main focus areas that characterize high-performing schools. The order in which the categories are arranged implies levels of priority, positioning academics first and social equity last. Creating a separate category for social equity creates an implicit divide between equity and the ways in which equity relates to academics and development.

“Good” as Academic Excellence Academic excellence is defined in terms that are familiar to the field of education, and the first sentence introduces “excellent” schools: “They challenge all students to use their minds well, providing them with the curriculum, instruction, assessment, support, and time they need to meet rigorous academic standards.” The first and deepest belief about middle grades schools is that they prioritize academics and support other student needs (e.g., intellectual, emotional, and social). Emphasis on 19

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academic rigor can be traced back to criticisms of developmental perspectives by Cheri Yecke, the former state school superintendent in Florida, who argued that the middle school concept leads a “war against excellence” by diminishing the role of academics in favor of attention to the whole child, engendering a “rising tide of mediocrity” that derails the upward trajectories of young adolescents identified as gifted (Yecke, 2003). Andrews recalled Rick Wormeli (personal communication, October 10, 2016) once saying to her that the word “rigor” makes him think of rigor mortis, with all the inflexibility that term implies. Test scores are not mentioned, though it is implicit that for students to prove they have mastered the “rigorous academic standards” they must also produce high test scores. Buzz words such as “challenge” and “rigorous” reinforce beliefs that curriculum with those qualities will enable students to learn. The term “challenge” appears only twice in the vision statement and both times are in this paragraph on academic excellence. The vision dictates that schools, curriculum, and standards challenge students. The way “challenge” is positioned in the vision statement states that schools, meaning the adults, challenge students, capturing only one direction of what should be a bidirectional dynamic in which both schools and students challenge curriculum, ideas, and each other with a shared goal of acting positively on their reality. Students demonstrate learning by “meeting” standards. The rest of the paragraph on academic excellence is largely devoted to describing “excellent” curriculum. They recognize that early adolescence is characterized by dramatic cognitive growth, which enables students to think in more abstract and complex ways. The curriculum and extra-curricular programs in such schools are challenging and engaging, tapping young adolescents’ boundless energy, interests, and curiosity. Developmentalist perspectives through phrases such as “dramatic cognitive growth” and “young adolescents’ boundless energy” seem to convey a deep understanding of middle grades students. Simultaneously, the phrases appear to essentialize young adolescents and may reinforce stereotypes and social constructions of young adolescents, which could unintentionally create binaries that designate perceptions of “normal” and “abnormal” student behavior. The vision emphasizes a traditional relationship between adult and child: the adult—represented as “school”—is the knower and the child is the learner. Turning Points (CCAD, 1989) and Turning Points 2000 (Jackson & Davis, 2000) both talked about rapid cognitive development, and the focus on cognitive development may have reinforced and substantiated the need to emphasize academics in the middle grades. Additionally, positioning adolescents as having “boundless energy‘makes us think of the stereotype identifying young adolescents as “hormones with feet” (Andrews, 2013b) and evokes an image reminiscent of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh who said, “Their tops are made out of rubber, their bottoms are made out of springs.” Ideas about “extra-curricular,” “interests,” and “curiosity” build on the progressive perspective that schools can be rigorous and simultaneously a place that students enjoy. The student outcomes of an academically excellent school are categorized as follows: “Students learn to understand important concepts, develop essential skills, and apply what they learn to real-world problems.” The paragraph thus circles back to reiterate that the vision of academic excellence is meeting standards through concepts, skills, and connection to the real world. We had many questions about this statement: Who decides what concepts are important? Who are the actors making those designations? Whose knowledge is privileged? What knowledge is privileged? Whose knowledge is ignored and/or silenced? What knowledge is ignored or silenced? It is unclear who determines what counts as “important,” “essential,” and “problems.” However, students are designated solely as recipients of all such choices. 20

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The decisions about what is important and what is not have implications for society’s cultural and historical locations. Consider, for example, the implications of deciding that what is important to know about Christopher Columbus is the year that he “discovered” America. The knowledge that has not been deemed important—the devastating impacts on cultures, the environment, indigenous peoples, etc.—means that those cultural and historical locations are absent and the implications of those locations can be dismissed. White privilege has been created, designed as Mckesson points out (2018a), in the absence of the complexities that “important” concepts ignore. The decisions about what is important and what is not have implications for society’s cultural and historical locations. Learning related to real-world problems ties to progressive and critical education. Indeed, progressive and critical perspectives might argue that students choosing real-world problems and revolving instruction around addressing those problems would present an integrated approach to curriculum (Beane, 1997). However, advocates of the critical turn might suggest going a step further: real-world problems should be the central focus that guides all learning. The vision statement completes its picture of academic excellence by outlining the responsibilities that adults have for supporting this vision: “Adults in these schools maintain a rich academic environment by working with colleagues in their schools and communities to deepen their own knowledge and improve their practice.” Drawing from the statement, we wonder what knowledge schools seek to deepen in order to improve their practice. Teachers are generally the stakeholders identified as responsible for the academic component of student learning. The designation of “adults,” “colleagues,” and “communities” implies that teachers are not the only ones responsible for student academic achievement and evokes the “it takes a village” proverb to expand the responsibility of successfully raising children to an entire community. Undoubtedly, “it takes a village” seems to weave together developmentalist (adults who “supervise” youth because youth need supervision); progressive (communities are involved in enculturating youth), and critical (the collective has responsibility for co-creating with youth) perspectives into this vision of a “good” education. However, given the ambiguous nature of this statement about adults in the vision, we took a closer look at the indicators for demonstrating this outcome as described with more detail within the Schools to Watch rubric (National Forum, 2013b). General Criteria: The adults in the school are provided time and frequent opportunities to enhance student achievement by working with colleagues to deepen their knowledge and to improve their standards-based practice. Detailed Evidence of Criteria: • •

Teachers collaborate in making decisions about rigorous curriculum, standards-based assessment practice, effective instructional methods, and evaluation of student work. The professional learning community employs coaching, mentoring, and peer observation as a means of continuous instructional improvement.

Within the rubric, the criteria related to this specific statement identify a focus on improving standards-based practice. This seems to point to teachers, an argument which is supported in the subsequent detailed evidence. The evidence asserts that teachers make the decisions about curriculum, instruction, and assessment and the professional learning community is focused specifically on instructional improvement and, thus, answers our previous question about what “knowledge” schools seek to deepen in support of student achievement. The criteria do not outline specific evidence for how administration, staff, families, and community partners maintain the rich environment. Our conclusion is that teachers are valued as having the biggest impact on student achievement and, thus, are mostly responsible for making the academically excellent component of this vision come to fruition. 21

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“Good” as Developmental Responsiveness In transitioning to the second major component of its vision, the National Forum describes highperforming middle grades schools as developmentally responsive. In the second paragraph, the vision outlines how schools know and respond to their students’ needs. We kept asking why the vision statement emphasized developmental responsiveness instead of, for example, cultural responsiveness. The second sentence sets the tone for the remainder of the paragraph: “Such schools create small learning communities of adults and students in which stable, close, and mutually respectful relationships support all students’ intellectual, ethical, and social growth.” Communities are introduced at the end of the first paragraph and reintroduced as the hero of this paragraph on responsiveness. The developmentalist perspective of adults having the knowledge and means to cultivate healthy students appears. Adults and students are positioned as the two main characters in the school story. Adults are teachers, staff, and parents while students are everyone else. The “good” described in this part of the vision statement is defined by students benefiting from positive relationships with the adults in the school. How might the adults benefit from their relationships with the students? In the Schools to Watch rubric, the visibility of “stable, close, and mutually respectful” relationships serve as evidence that the “staff creates a personalized environment that supports each student’s intellectual, ethical, social, and physical development.” Student development is framed underneath structures created by the staff thus gives control of subjective terms including “stable,” “close,” “respectful,” and “ethical” to the staff. With college education programs continuing to be dominated by middle class, white females who have shared cultural and social histories can conceal behaviors that are subjective, and teachers can claim them to be objective behaviors that are punishable to students who do not conform. Lesko (2005) pointed out that “community” can be a seemingly innocuous enactment of social control “as a basis for order, stability, and progress” (p. 189). Much of the language in this section on developmental responsiveness could be seen through the lens of control. As Lesko (2005) noted: The Turning Points image of a good middle school emphasizes affectional ties among adults and youth. Such relationships may seem unequivocally good to White, middle class professionals, but they are institutional creations that use emotional connections to shape behavior and thinking. (p. 190) The good feelings that the word “community” evokes could actually be used to manipulate children; what Schlossman (1977) called “their capacity to receive and reciprocate affection” (p. 53). The vision recognizes various types of development, beyond academic, that are necessary for students to be successful. The second paragraph lends itself to the developmental perspective and even seems to include the voices of health professionals when it states that schools “provide comprehensive services to foster healthy physical and emotional development.” Health care language and the influence of pediatricians and other professionals concerned with public health appear in this education discourse, including Joy Dryfoos’s work on full-service schools with wraparound services (e.g., Dryfoos, 1998). The paragraph turns to focus on what developmental responsiveness looks like for students in the academic sense: “Students have opportunities for both independent inquiry and learning in cooperation with others. They have time to be reflective and numerous opportunities to make decisions about their learning.” Words and phrases that are emphasized to delineate responsiveness center on academics and are provided to students through “numerous opportunities” as opposed to a regular component of learning. While the paragraph on academic excellence discusses cognitive growth, energy level, and sense of curiosity, this paragraph on developmental responsiveness emphasizes more

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academic language such as “inquiry,” “cooperation,” “reflection,” and “decision making.” All of these terms reflect progressive perspectives in education and center the idea that students need time to be reflective and that they should have a voice in decisions about their learning (Nesin & Brazee, 2013). The fact that the language is so intertwined in the vision’s beliefs about students and learning conveys a deep integration of developmentalist and progressive perspectives. The developmental perspective in this part of the vision turns to specifically name and incorporate families for the first time in the complete statement. Developmentally responsive schools involve families as partners in the education of their children. They welcome families, keep them well informed, help them develop their expectations and skills to support learning, and assure their participation in decision making. These schools are deeply rooted in their communities. Families are emphasized as the beneficiaries of schools who “welcome,” “inform,” and “help” them support student learning. The inclusion of family reflects influences of Joyce Epstein’s work on parent and family involvement in the middle grades and Mapp’s (1997) meta-analysis of “studies conducted over the last 30 years [that] have identified a relationship between parent involvement and increased student achievement, enhanced self-esteem, improved behavior, and better student attendance” (p. 1). Community is brought back into the forefront as the vision states that “schools are deeply rooted in their communities. Students have opportunities for active citizenship. They use the community as a classroom, and community members provide resources, connections, and active support.” We believe that the last sentence above reflects an asset-based approach to describing communities with the idea that communities, by definition, have resources, connections, and the potential for support for schools. The word “opportunities” continues to be used to convey “instances of” rather than continuous integration into the curriculum. Does it reflect that adults can giveth and taketh away opportunities? Once again, the adults are the actors in “responding.” When are the kids the actors? We received a response to this question when we looked into the criteria for schools using “community as a classroom.” The criteria clarify that “Students take on projects to improve their school, community, state, nation, and world.” This language identifies students as actors whose work relates to positive change at local to global levels. While progressive and critical perspectives are present here, we wondered why the identified projects are a practice that students “have opportunities” to do rather than it becoming an integral part of school curriculum.

“Good” as Socially Equitable The vision statement discusses schools that “are” rather than schools that “strive to be.” One effect of doing so is that schools may think they have “arrived,” so to speak. We contend that schools face chronic challenges related to integrating social justice practices into school cultures that have been dominated for centuries by a colonized curriculum that represents and normalizes whiteness. Because whiteness others those who are not white, schools may unintentionally reinforce whiteness through curriculum, policies, and interactions that reinforce racism and marginalize students of color. The vision states, “High-performing schools with middle grades are socially equitable. They seek to keep their students’ future options open.” In reading this statement above, our first thought went directly to “college and career readiness;” but we did not want to make assumptions, so we referred to the Schools to Watch rubric. Unlike other concepts shared in the vision statement, we were unable to locate language that explicitly outlined what “future options” means. Is it up 23

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to the schools, parents, or students to determine its meaning? Either way, the vision statement does not make its intent clear. We also noticed that the language of schools keeping students’ options open seems to convey the belief that schools are gatekeepers with people who have power over students to hold the door open or allow it to swing shut. Where is student efficacy in this concept? Why is it necessary to state that kids’ future options need to be held open? Without educators, the implication goes, those doors would close. The emphasis that schools must work to keep doors open for students speaks to the recognition that there are many threats that can close doors for students. Perhaps the most pervasive threats to students are the ways in which issues of race, class, and gender, to name a few, influence society’s ideas of who can be successful and who cannot. Intentional acts of social justice require moving away from a conception of “all students,” when that often means “most students” in reality and towards a focus on “every student” (Jackson & Davis, 2000, p. 24). Throughout the vision statement, students are grouped as “all” every time except for twice, one appearing in the excerpt below: [Schools] have high expectations for all their students and are committed to helping each [emphasis added] child produce work of high quality. These schools make sure that all students are in academically rigorous classes staffed by experienced and expertly prepared teachers. The phrase referencing “each child” is in regards to work production, which evokes the factory model of education. Students are positioned as workers on the line of our economy who require our guidance to ensure they reach success rather than students who create, discover, and affect change. We believe that the vision’s claim that “all students are in academically rigorous classes” is intended to be an act of equity in the sense that all students are challenged by the curriculum (as stated in the first paragraph on academic excellence) at the level they need. We also acknowledge that placing students in classes that “challenge” them often means the use of tracking, which is an epidemic across schools. Disguised as a means for being responsive to individual student needs, we know tracking is a harmful practice that sustains white supremacy (Welner & Burris, 2013). In the first section of the analysis on academic excellence, we identified developmental and progressive perspectives in the vision’s description of curriculum and instruction. We perceive the reference to academic rigor in this paragraph to be the vision’s efforts to integrate critical perspectives into ideas about academic excellence. Until this point, the vision statement dictates what schools and adults should be doing to enact high-performing schools but fails to identify specific titles or positions within those categories. We have already discussed potential reasons why the National Forum chose to do this. However, there is one statement in the vision that explicitly references teachers, and it happens within this section on social equity: “These teachers acknowledge and honor their students’ histories and cultures. They work to educate every child well and to overcome systematic variation in resources and outcomes related to race, class, gender and ability.” The expectation that teachers acknowledge and honor their students’ backgrounds reflects progressive and critical perspectives that advocate for student learning to integrate student experiences and ways of knowing that stem from their historical and cultural backgrounds that form their funds of identity (Esteban-Guitart & Moll, 2014). At the same time, the words “acknowledge” and “honor” seem out of place and almost represent a surface level incorporation into the school as in, for example, Black History Month and Women’s History Month. These are designated periods that serve as checkmarks through which teachers can acknowledge and honor cultures of non-white persons. The fact that teachers are specifically assigned this duty seems to position culture as something that exists along the outskirts of the school culture. The National Forum envisions social equity as teachers educating “every child well,” but does not define what “well” means. We compared this word usage to the way it was presented when 24

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described in academic excellence, where the Forum provides examples of how students will “use their minds well” that, as we previously analyzed, clearly draw from developmental and progressive perspectives. In the same sentence, teachers are called to ensure the equitable distribution of resources and outcomes for students. It is only in the second to last sentence of this paragraph on social equity—and in the vision statement as a whole—that the National Forum acknowledges inequalities in schools that affect outcomes, which we translate to mean academic achievement. Communities appear yet again in this last paragraph, almost repeating a phrase from the previous paragraph on developmental responsiveness regarding how communities are involved in creating high-performing schools: (a) [Schools] engage their communities in supporting all students’ learning and growth (from paragraph on social equity). (b) [Students] use the community as a classroom, and community members provide resources, connections, and active support (from the paragraph on developmental responsiveness). Communities are characterized as partners in education throughout the vision statement. Again, we see each perspective included in the idea that every person within a community shares responsibility for every student’s education. Community is pulled together in this abstract idea of a unit that blurs the diversity and cultural differences that exist, much like the use of all versus every student. In this section on social equity, it may clarify how community involvement supports equity by identifying the community as culturally diverse and connecting that diversity to the community’s power to support students’ learning.

Findings and Discussion Bakhtin’s (1984) dialogic theory asserts that heteroglossia reflects multiple voices present in words and ideas communicated verbally and in text. As seems to be the case in the National Forum’s vision statement, a wide variety of perspectives allowed people to “communicate by cobbling together a text composed of citations, allusions, and repetitions of the words of others” (Tobin, 2000, p. 143) to establish “the good” in educational institutions. Such vision statements infused with heteroglossia often create contradictions that generate both satisfaction and skepticism because they represent “various common ideological positions from the larger social discourse” (Tobin, 2000, p. 22) that cannot be essentialized into one unified ideology. Our analysis found that “the good” in middle grades education continues to be described through developmentalist and progressive perspectives, with the critical turn adapted to the vision rather than integrated into it. Progressive perspectives appear throughout all parts of the vision. In the paragraph on academic excellence, “good” education is articulated as meeting rigorous standards, a challenging and engaging curriculum, knowledge of students’ interests, and learning of important concepts and skills and applying them to the real world. Collaboration occurs with and between students. A variety of characteristics unite as learning communities, both inside and outside of the school, to influence and support student learning. As a result, students will be prepared to be “good” citizens because of their “good” education. Developmentalist perspectives supplement the progressive perspectives, providing all of the justifications for how “good” schools are prepared to support young adolescents, based on the characteristics youth demonstrate at this age. For example, because young adolescents experience “dramatic cognitive growth,” the curriculum must be challenging and engage students in complex thinking. Most evident of the developmentalist perspective is the way that many of the sentence structures in the statement identify the schools and adults as the providers and young adolescents as the beneficiaries of the collective adult knowledge around them. “Experienced and expertly prepared teachers” know how to provide all students with the level of academic rigor they need. Developmentally responsive schools welcome families and “develop their expectations and skills to support learning” because they know how to help parents support students in this 25

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stage of growth. From the developmentalist perspective, schools and adults do for students as opposed to with them. Critical perspectives may appear throughout the statement in a variety of ways. Students use their learning for real-world application, problem-solving, and decision making. Students are ethical, reflective, and active citizens whose cultures are recognized in school by teachers who care about them. They are independent inquirers and collaborative learners who are regularly challenged by the curriculum. Students are given voice and choice through various methods. These beliefs appear throughout each section of the vision statement. However, while we see the ideologies of the three different perspectives within the vision, we believe that the critical perspectives are much less integrated into what “good” middle grades schools do than are developmentalist and progressive perspectives. Drawing on many of the principles of progressives, the critical turn must include a shift away from traditional schooling that has produced the problem that the National Forum sought to address: high-performing middle grades schools are the exception, not the rule. Critical perspectives might contradict much of the National Forum’s conception of social equity. As previously stated, one of the main themes present in “the good” in middle grades education is what schools do for students. Integration of a critical perspective would see middle grades schools treat students as subjects who act, rather than objects who receive, and co-create knowledge with students rather than decide for them what is “good.” Critical perspectives assert that all stakeholders are change agents who can work to improve their world and the world of those around them through raising cultural consciousness. Acknowledging and honoring students includes creating policies, materials, and structures that respect the ways students are similar and different. Integrating a justice and equity-oriented vision into the day-to-day decisions that mark the days of educators and youth alike is very difficult. The vision ostensibly addresses social equity; in fact, one of the three paragraphs is devoted solely to valuing equity as an essential part of a vision for high-performing middle grades schools. However, pulling social equity into a separate paragraph seems to reinforce the idea that equity somehow stands apart from the rest of the ideal middle grades school. The other two paragraphs feature academic excellence and developmental responsiveness, respectively, and seem to assume elements of inequity and injustice as part of the natural order, (unintentionally) ignoring the inequities inherent in ideas about academic excellence and developmental responsiveness. Adapting to and thus accommodating oppressive systems can seem like a fait accompli, simply accepted as necessary and unavoidable practice beneath the crushing weight of inevitability.

Conclusion In analyzing the National Forum’s vision statement, we did our best to read generously, keeping in mind the cultural and historical locations from which the vision statement was drawn, including the context of when it was written. In 1989, the National Governors Association (NGA, 1990) released their clarion call for standardization, Goals 2000. With its focus on schools a means for ensuring “U.S. economic and educational competitiveness,” (Kearney, 2010, p. 410) Goals 2000 was the seemingly inevitable result of A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), which served as an arguably unwarranted “panic button” of sorts about the quality of American schooling. During the 1990s, the middle grades leaders who would eventually become the founders of the National Forum could see the tsunami of standards and accountability looming on the horizon, with Goals 2000 as the latest in a series of earthquake tremors leading to the tidal wave. How could we protect the villages—the communities of practice centered on young adolescents that we had been building for decades—from the flood? Testing, rigor, and standardization all cast long shadows on the work that middle grades advocates 26

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had pursued so passionately. The core strategy used to resist the flood was adaptation (Freire, 1970/2000). For example, advocates shifted the discourse of middle grades education from a focus on developmentalism and progressivism to the boldface prominence of academics. Social equity, which in some ways can be traced through historical enactments of developmentalism and progressivism in middle grades education, had to take a back seat if middle grades advocates had any hope of protecting the youth about whom they claimed to care so deeply. Eisner (1985) believed that a problem surrounding schools is the fact that stakeholders become “so immersed in a culture that is so natural a part of our way of life that it is almost taken for granted” (p. 87), which can result in stakeholders’ lack of belief that they have the efficacy to change cultures surrounding school. Culture has become a way of referring to race and difference, which too often translate into a negative connotation for defiance. Culture is used “with authority as one of the primary explanations for everything from school failure to problems with behavior management and discipline” (Ladson-Billings, 2006, p. 104). As a consequence, the “goal of education becomes how to ‘fit’ students constructed as ‘other’ by virtue of their race/ ethnicity, language, or social class into a hierarchical structure that is defined as a meritocracy” (Ladson-Billings, 1994, p. 467). In our analysis of the discourse within the National Forum’s vision statement, we aim to better position the vision to support a critical turn and push for social justice within middle grades education. The vision’s language shares an attitude of social justice in a way that masks the always, already network of systems and oppression that are rampant throughout schools and embedded in our beliefs and identities. Whether explicit or implicit, intended or unintended, schools sustain white supremacy through textbooks that feature mostly white characters, a Eurocentric way of thinking, tracking students, and discipline plans that disproportionately discipline students of color for failure to assimilate to white teachers’ expectations of subjective behaviors (e.g., respect, defiance, and noise levels). A middle grades school that fails to recognize the ways that it buys into these networks of systems cannot authentically and effectively shift its practice to restore justice. We conclude that even the passionate and knowledgeable leaders in middle grades education— including second author, Andrews who co-authored the National Forum’s vision statement—found it very challenging to truly integrate social justice and related critical stances into the entire vision of the ideal middle grades school. If the National Forum’s goal is to change the norm, then the norm has to change. Schools must work with students rather than for students. DeRay Mckesson (2018b), noted organizer of Black Lives Matter, drew a clear distinction between faith and hope in his book, On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope. Faith is the belief that certain outcomes will happen and hope the belief that certain outcomes can happen. So when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. says, “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” he is speaking from a place of faith. He is confident that justice is inevitable even if it may come in another lifetime. Faith is often rooted in a belief in a higher power, in God. Hope, on the other hand, would mean reframing this statement to say, “The arc of the moral universe is long and it will bend toward justice if we bend it…. Hope is not magic; hope is work. I am not certain that a new world, one of equity and justice, will emerge, but I am certain that it can emerge.” (pp. 6–7) In middle grades education, our vision as represented by the National Forum may reside more in the realm of hope than magic. Our use of critical discourse analysis to examine the vision “helps to understand many of the unseen, unspoken, and unannounced practices and happenings” (Rose, 2015, p. 147). In highlighting the previously invisible, we can see the work to be done. 27

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We argue that critical discourse analysis of visions and frameworks for middle grades education surfaces the real work of equity and justice-oriented schooling for young adolescents. The field of middle level education can bend toward justice if we bend it, with the recognition that realizing hope takes work.

References American Institutes for Research. (2018). College and Career Readiness and Success Center. Retrieved from https://ccrscenter.org/ Andrews, P. G. (2013a). Past as prologue in middle grades education. In P. G. Andrews (Ed.), Research to guide practice in middle grades education (pp. 51–74). Westerville, OH: Association for Middle Level Education. Andrews, P. G. (2013b). Advancing middle grades reform: Lessons learned. In P. G. Andrews (Ed.), Research to guide practice in middle grades education (pp. 777–810). Westerville, OH: Association for Middle Level Education. Andrews, P. G., Moulton, M. J., & Hughes, H. E. (2018). Integrating social justice into teacher education. Middle School Journal, 49(5), 4–15. Bakhtin, M. (1984). Discourse in the novel. In M. Holquist (Ed.), (M. Holquist & C. Emerson, trans.), Dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Beane, J. A. (1997). Curriculum integration: Designing the core of democratic education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Beane, J. A. (2005). A reason to teach: Creating classrooms of dignity and hope. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Briggs, T. H. (1920). The junior high school. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development. (1989). Turning points: Preparing American youth for the 21st century. The Report of the Task Force on the Education of Young Adolescents. New York, NY: Carnegie Corporation of New York. Dewey, J. (1910). How we think. New York, NY: D.C. Heath. Dorman, G. (1984). Middle grades assessment program: User’s manual (2nd ed.). Carrboro, NC: Center for Early Adolescence. Dryfoos, J. (1998). Full-service schools: A revolution in health and social services for children, youth, and families. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Eisner, E. (1985). Chapter 4: The three curricula that all schools teach. In The educational imagination: On the design and evaluation of school programs (3rd ed., pp. 87–107). Columbus: Merrill Prentice Hall. Eliot, C. (1888, February 16). Shortening and enriching the grammar school course. Address to Department of Superintendence, National Education Association, Washington, DC. Esteban-Guitart, M., & Moll, L. C. (2014). Funds of identity: A new concept based on the funds of knowledge approach. Culture & Psychology, 20(1), 31–48. doi:10.1177/1354067X13515934 Flinders, D. J., & Thornton, S. J. (2017). The curriculum studies reader (5th ed.). New York, NY: Taylor & Francis. Freire, P. (1970/2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed: 30th anniversary edition. New York, NY: Continuum. Freire, P. (1973). Education for critical consciousness. New York, NY: The Seabury Press. George, P. S. (2009a). Renewing the middle school: The early success of middle school education. Middle School Journal, 41(1), 4–9. doi:10.1080/00940771.2009.11461698 George, P. S. (2009b). Renewing the middle school: The manufactured crisis. Middle School Journal, 41(2), 51–55. doi:10.1080/00940771.2009.11461712 Gruhn, W. T., & Douglass, H. R. (1947). The modern junior high school. New York, NY: Ronald Press. Hall, G. S. (1905). Adolescence: Volume I. New York, NY: Appleton-Century. Harrison, L., Hurd, E., & Brinegar, K. (2018). Middle school movement phase II: Moving towards an inclusive and justice-oriented middle level education. Middle School Journal, 49(4), 2–3. Jackson, A. W., & Davis, G. A. (2000). Turning points 2000: Educating adolescents in the 21st century. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Jones, S. R., & Woglom, J. F. (2016). From where do you read the world? A graphica expansion of literacies for teacher education. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 59(4), 443–473. doi:10.1002/jaal.472 Kearney, J. (2010). Goals 2000. In T. C. Hunt, J. C. Carpter, T. J. Lasley, & C. D. Raisch (Eds.), Encyclopedia of educational reform and dissent (Vol. 1, pp. 410–411). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Koos, L. (1920). The junior high school. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe. Koos, L. (1927). The junior high school. Boston, MA: Ginn.

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Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African-American children. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). It’s not the culture of poverty, it’s the poverty of culture: The problem with teacher education. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 37(2), 104–109. Laitsch, D. (2013). Smacked by the invisible hand: The wrong debate at the wrong time with the wrong people. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 45(1), 16–27. doi:10.1080/00220282.2012.754948 Lesko, N. (1996). Denaturalizing adolescence: The politics of contemporary representations. Youth and Society, 28(2), 139–161. Lesko, N. (2005). Back to the future: Middle schools and the Turning points report. In E. R. Brown & K. J. Saltman (Eds.), The critical middle school reader (pp. 187–195). New York, NY: Routledge. Lipsitz, J. (1977). Growing up forgotten: A review of research and programs concerning early adolescence: A report to the Ford Foundation. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Lounsbury, J. H. (1991). As I see it. Westerville, OH: National Middle School Association. Lounsbury, J. H. (2013). Middle level education: A chronological history and a personal perspective. In P. G. Andrews (Ed.), Research to guide practice in middle grades education (pp. 11–49). Westerville, OH: Association for Middle Level Education. Lounsbury, J. H., & Vars, G. F. (1978). A curriculum for the middle school years. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Mapp, K. (1997). Making the connection between families and schools. The Harvard Education Letter, XIII(5), 1–3. Mckesson, D. (2018a, September 28). DeRay Mckesson: The vest is yet to come. Ask me another [Radio show]. New York, NY: National Public Radio. Mckesson, D. (2018b). On the other side of freedom: The case for hope. New York, NY: Viking. National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983). A nation at risk: The imperative for educational reform: A report to the nation and the Secretary of Education, United States Department of Education. Washington, DC: Author. National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform. (1998). Vision statement. Newton, MA: Education Development Center. National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform. (1999/rev. 2013a). Schools to Watch criteria and evidence. Champaign, IL: Author. Retrieved from www.middlegradesforum.org National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform. (1999/rev. 2013b). Schools to Watch: A school self-study and rating rubric. Champaign, IL: Author. Retrieved from https://www.middlegradesforum.org National Governors Association. (1990). Goals 2000. Washington, DC: Author. Nesin, G., & Brazee, E. N. (2013). Developmentally responsive middle grades schools: Needed now more than ever. In P. G. Andrews (Ed.), Research to guide practice in middle grades education (pp. 469–493). Westerville, OH: Association for Middle Level Education. No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Pub. L. No. 107-110, 115 Stat. 1425 (2002). Rose, J. (2015). Ethnographic research for social justice: Critical engagement with homelessness in a public park. In C. W. Johnson & D. C. Parry (Eds.), Fostering social justice through qualitative inquiry: A methodological guide (pp. 129–160). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Schlossman, S. (1977). Love and the American delinquent: The theory and practice of “progressive” juvenile justice, 1825-1920. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Smith, T. W., & McEwin, C. K. (Eds.). (2011). The legacy of middle school leaders: In their own words. Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Spencer, H. (1870). The principles of psychology (Vol. 1, 2nd ed.). London, UK: Williams and Norgate. Stevenson, C. (2002). Teaching ten to fourteen year olds (3rd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Task Force on Developing Research in Educational Leadership. (2003). What we know about successful school leadership. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Tobin, J. (2000). Good guys don’t wear hats. New York, NY: Teachers College. United States Department of Education. (2018). The national blue ribbon schools program. Retrieved from www2. ed.gov/programs/nclbbrs/index.html van Dijk, T. A. (1993a). Principles of critical discourse analysis. Discourse & Society, 4(2), 249–283. van Dijk, T. A. (1993b). Aims of critical discourse analysis. Japanese Discourse, 1, 17–27. doi:10.1177/ 0957926593004002006 Walkerdine, V. (1993). Sex, power, and pedagogy. In M. Alvarado, E. Buscombe, & R. Collins (Eds.), The screen edition reader (pp. 3–15). London, UK: Palgrave. doi:10.1007/978-1-349-22426-5_15 Welner, K. G. & Burris, C. C. (2013). The potential, process, and effects of detracking. In P. G. Andrews (Ed.), Research to guide practice in middle grades education (pp. 355–374). Westerville, OH: Association for Middle Level Education. Yecke, C. (2003). The war against excellence: The rising tide of mediocrity in America’s middle schools. Westport, CT: Praeger.

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Appendix A NATIONAL FORUM TO ACCELERATE MIDDLE-GRADES REFORM VISION STATEMENT (1998) We, the members of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, believe that youth in the middle grades are capable of learning and achieving at high levels. We share a sense of urgency that high-performing schools with middle-grades become the norm, not the exception. High-performing schools with middle grades are academically excellent. They challenge all students to use their minds well, providing them with the curriculum, instruction, assessment, support, and time they need to meet rigorous academic standards. They recognize that early adolescence is characterized by dramatic cognitive growth, which enables students to think in more abstract and complex ways. The curriculum and extra-curricular programs in such schools are challenging and engaging, tapping young adolescents’ boundless energy, interests, and curiosity. Students learn to understand important concepts, develop essential skills, and apply what they learn to real-world problems. Adults in these schools maintain a rich academic environment by working with colleagues in their schools and communities to deepen their own knowledge and improve their practice. High-performing schools with middle grades are developmentally responsive. Such schools create small learning communities of adults and students in which stable, close, and mutually respectful relationships support all students’ intellectual, ethical, and social growth. They provide comprehensive services to foster healthy physical and emotional development. Students have opportunities for both independent inquiry and learning in cooperation with others. They have time to be reflective and numerous opportunities to make decisions about their learning. Developmentally responsive schools involve families as partners in the education of their children. They welcome families, keep them well informed, help them develop their expectations and skills to support learning, and assure their participation in decision making. These schools are deeply rooted in their communities. Students have opportunities for active citizenship. They use the community as a classroom, and community members provide resources, connections, and active support. High-performing schools with middle grades are socially equitable. They seek to keep their students’ future options open. They have high expectations for all their students and are committed to helping each child produce work of high quality. These schools make sure that all students are in academically rigorous classes staffed by experienced and expertly prepared teachers. These teachers acknowledge and honor their students’ histories and cultures. They work to educate every child well and to overcome systematic variation in resources and outcomes related to race, class, gender and ability. They engage their communities in supporting all students’ learning and growth.

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3 THE INTERNATIONAL BACCALAUREATE MIDDLE YEARS PROGRAMME (MYP) IN US MIDDLE LEVEL SCHOOLS Robin Dever

When people hear the term middle school they may think of young adolescents, common planning time, advisory periods, teaming, flexible scheduling, and service learning. These characteristics of a successful middle level school described in This We Believe (National Middle School Association [NMSA], 2010) are associated with best practices for educating young adolescents, and one may assume that most middle level schools try to incorporate some, if not all, of these components to help students achieve success. In recent years, one more term has been added to this list of essential middle school components: International Baccalaureate (IB); specifically, the Middle Years Programme (MYP). This philosophy and model of teaching have grown in popularity in school districts, especially in middle level schools in the United States, where a spike in adoption has occurred in the past decade. As district and school personnel decide whether or not to adopt IB, they must understand its history and overarching framework and philosophy. They must also explore the benefits to students and weigh them against the constraints placed on a school by its teachers, students, district finances, and the community.

The IB Continuum International Baccalaureate is a continuum that includes four programs that meet the larger goals of IB while addressing the unique, individual needs of the students at each level. The IB continuum begins with the Primary Years Program (PYP), designed for students age 3–12 (grades Pre-K–5 in the United States) and focused on the development of the whole child. It also aims for students to “become active, caring, lifelong learners who demonstrate respect for themselves and others and have the capacity to participate in the world around them” (IB, n.d.-a, para. 1). Following the PYP, the MYP is designed for students aged 11–16 (grades 6–10 in the United States); its curriculum centers on students making “connections between their studies and the real world” around them (IB, n.d.-b, para. 1). For students to make these connections, the program is presented via an integrative approach in which they relate subject-specific material to other

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domains. This approach is meant to include all students, not only a select group. The next segment on this continuum is the Diploma Program (DP) for students aged 16–19 (grades 11–12), the mission of which is to help students “flourish physically, intellectually, emotionally, and ethically [while acquiring an] excellent breadth and depth of knowledge” (IB, n.d.-c, para. 1). In addition to the DP, students in grades 11 and 12 can also enroll in the Career Related Program (CP) designed for students aged 16–19 focused on career-related education culminating in employment or an apprenticeship (IB, n.d.-d). Since 2004, approximately 5% of IB schools worldwide have offered the entire continuum, excluding the CP. Districts typically choose to add a program in isolation and build upon it over time, commonly beginning with the DP and then add the MYP followed by the PYP. Other districts start with the PYP and move through the continuum to the DP. Rarely do districts offer only the MYP. The majority of IB districts (82%) offer one IB program with 55% of them offering only the DP, 13% percent offering only the MYP, and 14% offering only the PYP. Because of these percentages and the high number of schools offering only the DP, most members of the general public associate the term International Baccalaureate with the DP and are unaware of the MYP and the PYP (Bunnell, 2011). Even though most people associate the IB with the DP, the number of students enrolled in these programs does not reflect this notion. Many high schools offer the DP as an elective, so the number of students enrolled per district can be low and not necessarily reflective of the district’s overall enrollment in IB; because the MYP is all inclusive and is not elective, entire populations of students in a district are enrolled, resulting in a higher number of students taught in the MYP than in the DP despite the lower number of schools offering it (Bunnell, 2011). As of 2018, the number of IB schools in the United States totaled 1,834. These schools combined with those in Australia and Canada constitute almost 50% of all IB schools in the world (IB, n.d.-e). By 2020, IB expects to serve 2.5 million children in 10,000 schools (Bunnell, 2011). Although each program has its own unique structure and teaching designs, they all include summative assessment, which focuses on the students’ ability to demonstrate knowledge and developing dispositions while connecting them to the larger global context. In the PYP, students in grade 5 organize an exhibition in which they complete an “in-depth inquiry into a real-life issue or problem” and present it to the community (IB, n.d.-f, para. 8). When MYP students finish the program, they either complete a community or personal project, depending on which grade their districts choose to end the MYP—either grade 8 or grade 10. Each of these assessments entails student-directed investigation, focusing on inquiry, action, and reflection (IB, n.d.b). At the conclusion of the DP, students can elect to take subject-specific examinations, which can often lead to college credit if they earn a particular score (IB, n.d.-c).

History of the MYP Dating back to 1978, the history of IB involved multiple agencies coming together to form what is now considered one institution. The MYP was conceived in 1983 around the notion that an initial two-year pre-IB course would evolve into a five-year program devoted to students aged 11–16, which would officially be adopted by IB in 1994. The foci of this new program were global issues, global responsibility, and preparation of students to enter the DP upon completion (Nicolson & Lister, 2010). A full understanding of the history of the MYP depends on knowledge of the beginnings of the DP, the first IB program, adopted in 1968. The DP derived from the International Schools Association (ISA) which aimed to create an internationally recognized college-entry program (Nicolson & Lister, 2010). In 1964, the ISA turned this project over to what was then called the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO). Once the DP was established, 32

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schools, particularly in Africa, expressed concern over the lack of a pre-IB course to prepare students to enter the DP and take the required examinations. A call went out for a program that could not “be too academic; practical subjects must be included. There must be a broad range of options, and flexibility in the curriculum to meet the needs of the individual schools” (ISA, 1980, p. 14). At this point, emphasis was on interdisciplinary approaches along with student-centered activities (Nicolson & Lister, 2010). The ISA continued to develop this notion over the next several decades, expanding it to include a five-year program for students aged 11–16. This new curriculum was to focus on the student in the context of global issues and global responsibility. Piloted at several schools from 1988–1990, it continued to evolve with the addition of the community and personal projects. In 1994, this curriculum was officially adopted by IB and became the MYP. In 1994, IB authorized the first 15 MYP schools (Nicolson & Lister, 2010). Since IB adopted the MYP from the ISA in 1994, it continued to develop its curriculum and overall framework. Once the PYP was adopted in 1997, all three programs were examined to assess alignment among them and how students transition from one to the next. In 2014, IB updated the MYP curriculum and assessments and published its latest guiding document, MYP: From Principles to Practice (IB, 2014).

MYP Curriculum and Framework As a whole, IB focuses not only on what is taught but also on the IB learner, the methods by which the curriculum is taught, and larger global contexts into which the content is placed. The interaction of all of these aspects are what lie at the core of the IB framework. All four programs on the IB continuum focus on the student through the learner profile, a recognition that all students learn in accordance to their personal learning styles, strengths, and limitations (IB, 2014). In order to meet all learners’ needs, IB was designed to motivate students to become inquirers, knowledgeable, thinkers, communicators, principled, open-minded, caring, risk-takers, balanced, and reflective. IB determined that these are characteristics of people who move beyond academic content and take responsibility for the greater world around them. Educators are responsible for fostering and developing these attributes through their instruction and classroom environments (IB, 2014). Instruction and learning in IB take place in an on-going cycle of inquiry, action, and reflection. This cycle, based on a constructivist approach to learning, allows the learner to value many views and perspectives. It also allows them to be independent learners as well as learners in a larger community (IB, 2014). IB recognizes that the years between the ages of 11 and 16 are critical to student development; thus, the curriculum of the MYP must focus not solely on academic development but also on life skills, which will motivate students to be successful both inside and outside the classroom (IB, 2014). A tenet of IB is that the MYP should be inclusive, not selective. All students can benefit, not only those who excel in academic areas. These benefits are guided by three major principles: holistic learning, intercultural awareness, and communication with a focus on higherlevel thinking (IB, 2014). The overarching framework of the MYP is shown in Figure 3.1. The innermost ring focuses on shared attributes of all IB programs. These include developing and applying a learner profile to teach concepts, using various approaches to learning to meet the needs of all learners, engaging in an age-appropriate culminating experience (i.e., community or personal project), and developing international-mindedness as the primary aim and context for learning. For each of the subject areas in the MYP, at least 50 hours of instruction must be included in an IB unit along with at least one interdisciplinary unit (IB, 2014). 33

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Figure 3.1 Middle Years Programme framework (IB, n.d.-b).

The next ring of the circle focuses on the desired outcomes of the MYP, including service activities, which result in action taking place in a community (IB, 2014). They typically occur in the context of a community project completed in grade 8 or the personal project that occurs in grade 10. Which project students complete depends on when the MYP ends in the school district they attend. The outermost ring of the circle contains the eight subject areas taught in the MYP: language and literature (most commonly known as English language arts in non-IB schools), individuals and societies (social studies), mathematics, design (technology), arts, sciences, physical and health education, and language acquisition (foreign language). Each of these subject areas includes various sub-subjects, such as biology, chemistry, and geography; but IB does not isolate them or treat them as separate entities (IB, 2014). These rings do not work in isolation but instead move concentrically around one another, each dependent on the components located on the ring inside and outside it. School administrators cannot choose to implement singular elements of the MYP and expect the same effect on school and student success as those schools who adopt the program in its entirety.

Adoption of the MYP School district leaders must consider many issues when deciding whether or not to adopt the MYP. Typically, IB is chosen for multiple reasons in a given district. Sperandio (2010) found

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that most districts adopt IB to help raise student achievement levels or to use IB marketing and branding as external quality control for teaching and professional development; they may also adopt IB because it matches the district’s philosophy. No matter the reason for the adoption, IB should not be viewed as an add-on to the existing philosophy of the district but instead one that is integral to its mission. Districts adopting IB must commit to increased financial obligations and organizational changes, including adding staffing positions, such as IB coordinators for each program on the IB continuum and often one coordinator per building if multiple buildings house a program (Siskin & Weinstein, 2008). Districts must also commit to professional development, including an increase in professional development time throughout the year. For most districts, this will include time away from the classroom for teachers to attend IB trainings. The cost of sending teachers to these training sessions includes registration fees and travel expenses along with the cost of hiring substitute teachers to cover the classroom in the teachers’ absence; districts must commit to these additional on-going expenses. For middle level schools, best practices of the MYP and This We Believe (NMSA, 2010) align. A comparison of these two foundations (see Appendix) shows a parallel path at almost every point in regard to their philosophy of educating young adolescents and the values at their core (Dever & Raven, 2017). Both value a challenging, interdisciplinary, active, and engaging curriculum and organizational structures like common planning time (IB, 2016a; NMSA, 2010). AMLE and IB also align in their stances on the role of the community in educating young adolescents. In both organizations, the inclusion of the larger community, both locally and globally, is regarded as imperative to teach students how to be successful members of society (Dever & Raven, 2017). Despite these similarities, the academic language associated with each philosophy differs, and school personnel need to welcome this language and use it consistently and regularly. New language and terms such as the IB learner profile, approaches to learning (ATL) and subject names like individuals and societies (instead of social studies) must be fully integrated into the school vernacular, but not in a way that is forced or superficial as teachers often report (Bunnell, 2011). Once leaders in a middle level school and its district decide that adoption of the MYP is a good fit for their students, the process of becoming an IB World School can commence. This is a multiyear process guided by IB. First, a school becomes a candidate school for two or three years, during which personnel work with a consultant from IB to move toward authorization. The school undergoes a two-day authorization visit from an IB team, whose members determine whether a school is ready to move from candidacy to the authorization phase in which they become an IB World School (IB, 2016b). During the process of becoming an IB World School, many changes will affect the teachers, students, and administrators. As with all changes in a school, some will be well received, and other aspects may meet resistance. Storz and Hoffman (2018) explored teachers’ perceptions of one district’s adoption of the MYP and found both positive and negative ones. Some positives included an increase in the time allotted to teachers to spend time with colleagues and plan their IB units, the use of the learner profile to unify teaching across all grade levels and subject areas, an alignment between IB philosophy and the teachers’ personal philosophies, and an increase in professional development opportunities. In contrast, teachers also cited the barriers they confronted in the process, including an inability to plan with an interdisciplinary team because the planning time was content based, criticism of the quality of professional development they received with regard to the number of and conflicts with competing district initiatives. In addition to these concerns, the most surprising finding was that only three of 31 teachers stated that IB was a good fit for all of their students, who included minorities as well as low-income and poor-performing students. Although any school reform may evoke some of the same positives and negatives, when considering the adoption of IB, school district personnel should examine every facet that will be 35

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affected and determine whether the positives outweigh the negatives. The most serious of these is deciding whether the IB mission and philosophy align with the district’s core values. In addition, they must consider how adopting IB will impact all student subpopulations because the MYP is not meant to be adopted only for certain students. Unlike the DP, the MYP is meant to be adopted by the entire school and for all students, not just those who are high achieving or those who elect to take it. Thus, the MYP may or may not be a good fit for all the students at a particular middle level school. If it is determined to be a good fit for all students, on-going and relevant professional development is essential for teachers and staff, but only if district administrators has committed to this initiative and see it as more than just another fad to try out until the next one comes along. This commitment includes a financial one. As districts decide whether or not to commit large amounts of money to an IB program, competing needs for these funds must be considered as well as the perception stakeholders have of the fiscal precedence that an IB program requires over other programs and initiatives. If, and only if, the proper steps are completed and personnel work closely with IB consultants during the candidacy phase can a school district resolve issues raised by teachers and the community.

Outcomes of MYP As school leaders consider adopting IB, they must think about how such an adoption will influence student outcomes. These outcomes may range from students’ views on globalization as well as student engagement, future performance in high school, critical thinking skills, and performance on standardized assessments. Although IB focuses its own research on finding these outcomes, external research, although scant, often finds only marginal gains in these areas. Student outcomes research falls into two categories: outcomes observed while students are engaged in the MYP, and their performance once they enter the DP. Of the studies in which outcomes were examined while students were in the MYP, the focus was on dispositional outcomes like student engagement and critical thinking skills. This aligns with the goals of the MYP because it is less content focused than the DP and focuses instead on the holistic growth of the student. When MYP students are compared to non-MYP students in comparable settings and with similar demographics, MYP students demonstrate a greater level of open-mindedness concerning cultural differences (Stevenson, Thomson & Fox, 2014). Open-mindedness is defined as an intellectual value characterized by a commitment to international-mindedness. When this disposition is examined, MYP students demonstrate higher levels of open-mindedness toward the values and practices of other cultures and religions; however, this increased level of openmindedness is truer of female students than male students, who showed no significant increase (Stevenson et al., 2014). In addition to demonstrating greater open-mindedness, MYP students also exhibit a higher level of global-mindedness than non-MYP students. This includes a deeper concern about what happens on a global level, a view of themselves as citizens of the world, the obligation to speak up when they disagree with the government, a concern for human rights, and increased interest in speaking to people from other cultures. In addition, when the two groups of students were compared, MYP students showed a higher level of cultural pluralism than non-MYP students; that is, they demonstrated an appreciation of other cultures and the belief that everyone in the world has something of value to offer (Wade & Wolanin, 2013). In relation to an increase in global awareness and respect for diverse cultures, MYP students are more likely to act upon their sense of obligation to help others on community and global levels. Students who have completed the MYP are more likely to engage in service- learning activities in the contexts of both their school and their community. In a study examining service36

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learning activities, MYP students demonstrated a deeper concern for environmental problems and issues surrounding other cultures than non-MYP students (Wade & Wolanin, 2013). Research has suggested that MYP students have not only a deeper sense of commitment to global issues and concerns, but they are also more likely to act on service learning that further develops the global context in which they engage. Studies of MYP student outcomes on standardized assessments and performance measures once they are in high school have produced inconclusive results. Examining the performance on the DP exams by students who completed the MYP, the Australian Council for Educational Research (2015) found that they scored higher on these exams than those students who did not complete the MYP; however, the researchers recognized many variables that may have contributed to this finding were not considered in the study, such as demographics and school characteristics. Another study of this relationship found extremely small correlations between completion of the MYP and individual components of the DP (Reimers, 2004). Of the individual components of the DP that showed some correlation, the only one with a positive correlation was performance on the DP extended essay. In fact, student performance on the DP exam for mathematics showed a negative correlation. To further examine the correlation between participation in the MYP and student outcomes in high school, Wade and Wolanin (2015) researched former MYP students’ performance on the Advanced Placement (AP) and DP exams. They first found that a higher number of students who took these exams had previously completed the MYP. Of the students who took either the AP or IB exam, former MYP students were more likely to have at least one college-ready score compared to non-MYP students. As a whole, MYP students took significantly more AP and IB exams and had more college-ready scores than their counterparts; however, they also examined how MYP and non-MYP students performed on ACT and SAT exams and found no correlation. Following the completion of another study, Wade and Wolanin (2013), concluded that MYP students were more likely to enroll in advanced level science and mathematics in high school than non-MYP students. When examining how MYP students performed in those courses, they found that a significantly higher number of MYP students earned a C or higher in these courses than non-MYP students. In addition, when they analyzed these students’ scores on state-administered exams, they found that the MYP students were more likely to pass the biology exam; however, the effect size was small, and no effect was found on other exams. To further quantify the effects of the MYP on students, attendance and behavior have been examined. Two comparable middle level schools were studied to determine whether enrollment in an MYP school affected attendance rates. Wade (2011) found that sixth-grade students in one MYP school attended at significantly higher rates than those in the non-MYP school; however, this did not hold true for seventh- and eighth-grade students. In the same study, eighth-grade students in the MYP school showed a significantly lower rate of school suspensions than those in the non-MYP school. Although some of the research regarding student outcomes during and after enrollment in the MYP is inconclusive, some positive correlations have been demonstrated. Whether these outcomes are in quantifiable areas, such as attendance and suspension rates and performance on standardized exams and coursework or on less quantifiable areas, such as students’ level of openmindedness and global concern, they all contribute to the holistic growth of MYP students. All these areas of growth contribute to a young adolescents’ success in life. It should be recognized that limitations to this research are present. The first of these is that positive outcomes cited are limited in scope and often outweighed by negative or no correlations. To single out positive effects without recognizing the negative/neutral outcomes would be short-sighted. In addition, the majority of the research available on the MYP is sponsored or 37

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conducted by IB. There are few independent research studies related to MYP’s outcomes. Of those available, most focus on dispositional characteristics and not student achievement. These gaps in the research are problematic and should serve as a future direction of research regarding MYP. Having more research that is conducted independently from IB and focusing on academic outcomes will help schools make the decision whether or not adopt MYP.

Perceptions of MYP Student and teacher perceptions of IB, specifically the MYP, can influence levels of engagement and, in turn, performance. When MYP students were asked about the perceived benefits of MYP, they cited a better understanding of the world around them, new and varied learning opportunities, a more challenging and rigorous curriculum, and knowledge of other cultures (Storz & Hoffman, 2018; Wade & Wolanin, 2013). They also stated that they engaged in writing essays and that their English writing skills were highly developed. This included their ability to reflect, work with their peers to achieve a goal, and use metacognition (Australian Council for Educational Research, 2015). Students stated that they were “proud” to study in an IB school. By contrast, they also reported the perceived challenges of IB. Most frequently cited were that they felt the work was harder than at a non-MYP school and that they experienced a heavier workload of assignments, projects, and overall coursework (Wade & Wolanin, 2013). With regard to specific academic skills, MYP students reported a belief that they had developed good critical thinking skills along with higher-level abilities to analyze and evaluate information because of the MYP. Students stated that the MYP was not sufficiently content focused and caused them to struggle when they entered high school or the DP. They reported covering a breadth but not depth of material. As they experienced the assessment-driven world of high school, they believed that the MYP did not prepare them sufficiently to take standardized exams and use test-taking strategies. Wade and Wolanin (2013) also studied teacher perceptions of MYP and found that the majority of teachers believed that the MYP moderately or greatly influenced their teaching strategies and the content they taught. In addition, almost 75% reported that MYP affected their school-wide practices. These researchers also found that MYP teachers perceived their levels of professional development were essential and most supported their ability to develop unit plans and assessments and incorporate the IB learner profile into their classrooms. This includes teaching critical thinking skills in their classrooms and connecting content to real-life issues. Teachers reported a higher level of critical thinking and analytical skills in their students as a result of the MYP compared to nonMYP students (Australian Council for Educational Research, 2015). The teachers stated that they were more likely to teach these skills than if they had not taught in the MYP. In discussing the negatives associated with the MYP, teachers noted insufficient time during the day for them to fully engage in teaching in the MYP because district and statewide priorities demanded their time. Specifically, teachers indicated that IB rubrics and assessments were not aligned with those dictated by their districts and the state, causing tension over which to prioritize in their classrooms. Despite these negative perceptions, the majority of MYP teachers still thought that they were better teachers because of the MYP (Wade & Wolanin, 2013).

Conclusion IB is not a panacea for all issues confronting a school district. Closely aligned with This We Believe and the best practices that it promotes (NMSA, 2010), the MYP provides an option for middle level schools to further support their mission of developing young adolescents who are prepared not only academically but who can also apply content knowledge to a global context. While the research related to student outcomes mainly focuses on student dispositions and outcomes related to 38

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performance in IB-related areas, such as achievement in the DP, and lacks thorough research conducted by independent agencies, it does demonstrate positive outcomes for middle level students. Through the incorporation of critical thinking skills, service learning, and intercultural awareness, students who are part of the MYP are prepared to enter high school and the world with the ability to connect with their local communities and the global community as well. Although adoption of the MYP can pose challenges to a district, teachers, and students, it is an option to consider when middle level school personnel seek to incorporate new models that align with their current mission and increase the overall growth of their students.

References Australian Council for Educational Research. (2015). The international baccalaureate (IB) middle years programme (MYP): Comparing IB diploma programme outcomes of students who complete the MYP and other middle years courses of study. Bethesda, MD: International Baccalaureate Organization. Bunnell, T. (2011). The international baccalaureate middle years programme after 30 years: A critical inquiry. Journal of Research in International Education, 10(3), 261–274. Dever, R., & Raven, S. (2017). Intersection of principles: How This We Believe and International Baccalaureate align. Middle School Journal, 48(4), 36–44. International Baccalaureate. (2014). MYP: From principles into practice. Cardiff, Wales: Author. International Baccalaureate. (2016a). Programme standards and practices. Cardiff, Wales: Author. International Baccalaureate. (2016b). Middle years program: Guide to school authorization. Bethesda, MD: Author. International Baccalaureate. (n.d.-a). Primary years programme. Retrieved from https://ibo.org/programmes/ primary-years-programme/ International Baccalaureate. (n.d.-b). Middle years programme. Retrieved from www.ibo.org/programmes/ middle-years-programme/ International Baccalaureate. (n.d.-c). Diploma programme. Retrieved from www.ibo.org/programmes/dip loma-programme/ International Baccalaureate. (n.d.-d). Career related programme. Retrieved from www.ibo.org/programmes/ career-related-programme/ International Baccalaureate. (n.d.-e). Facts and figures. Retrieved from www.ibo.org/about-the-ib/facts-andfigures/ International Baccalaureate. (n.d.-f). Assessed curriculum. Retrieved from www.ibo.org/programmes/pri mary-years-programme/curriculum/assessed-curriculum/ International Schools Association. (1980). ISA annual conference report: International Schools Association Annual Conference, Tanzania, 1980. Geneva, Switzerland: International Schools Association. National Middle School Association. (2010). This we believe: Keys to educating young adolescents. Westerville, OH: Author. Nicolson, M., & Lister, H. (2010). History of the middle years programme. Cardiff, Wales: International Baccalaureate Organization. Reimers, C. (2004). From MYP to diploma: An investigation into the impact of the international baccalaureate middle years programme on international baccalaureate diploma candidates. International Schools Journal, 24(2), 11–18. Siskin, L., & Weinstein, M. (2008). The district role in the international baccalaureate. Retrieved from www.ibo. org/contentassets/d1c0accb5b804676ae9e782b78c8bc1c/thedistrictroleintheib2008-1.pdf Sperandio, J. (2010). School program selection: Why schools worldwide choose the international baccalaureate middle years program. Journal of School Choice, 4(2), 137–148. Stevenson, H., Thomson, P., & Fox, S. (2014). Implementation practices and student outcomes associated with the learner profile attribute “open-minded.”. Bethesda, MD: International Baccalaureate Organization. Storz, M., & Hoffman, A. (2018). Becoming an international baccalaureate middle years program: Perspectives of teachers, students, and administrators. Journal of Advanced Academics, 29(3), 216–248. Wade, J. (2011). Student performance and student engagement in the international baccalaureate middle years programme. Bethesda, MD: International Baccalaureate Organization. Wade, J., & Wolanin, N. (2013). Continuation study of student performance and engagement in the middle years programme. Bethesda, MD: International Baccalaureate Organization. Wade, J., & Wolanin, N. (2015). A comparison of MYP and non-MYP students’ participation and performance in high school. Bethesda, MD: International Baccalaureate Organization.

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Appendix ALIGNMENT OF THIS WE BELIEVE CHARACTERISTICS AND IB STANDARDS (DEVER & RAVEN, 2017) This We Believe – 16 Characteristics (NMSA, 2010)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

IB Standards (IB, 2016a)

Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment Value young adolescents C2(5–7); C3(2–16) Active learning C2(4–7); C3(2–16) Challenging curriculum C2(1,3,4,8); C3(2–16) Multiple learning approaches C2(4–8); C3(2–16) Varied assessments C2(8); C4(3–4,7–9) Leadership and Organization Shared vision A(1,8); B1(5); C2(9–10); C3(1); C4(1,5) Committed leaders A(2,3,8); B1(1–3,5); B2(1) Courageous/collaborative leaders B1(3,5) Professional development B1(6); B2(3) Organizational structures B1(1,2,4,5); B2(4); C1(1–9); Culture and Community School environment A(4,9); B2(5–7) Adult advocate Guidance services A(6,9); B2(8–9) Health and wellness Family involvement Community and business A(5); B2(11); C2(2); C4(2) Not Included A(7); B1(7); B2(2,10,12)

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4 DEMOCRATIC LIVING AND LEARNING AS A SIGNATURE PEDAGOGY FOR MIDDLE LEVEL TEACHER PREPARATION Karynne L. M. Kleine, Joanne L. Previts, and Nancy B. Mizelle

There is something unique about middle level educators. Although they vary in personality, members of this field have a predominant way of being. To our eyes, those who work with young adolescents are easily distinguishable in any gathering of teachers. For instance, we have noticed that middle level teachers, scholars, practitioners, and learners have a habit of seeking integration and, when they have been able, a history of avoiding fragmentation—of ideas; of processes; of perspectives; of the social, emotional, physical, and cognitive domains of human development; of society; and, especially, of curricula—perhaps as a way to harmonize rather than to isolate (Beane, 1997). We (the authors) are a collaborative group of teacher educators who have found that we often think together rather than separately, and we observe this propensity in our teacher candidates as well. How do the middle level teachers we prepare learn this distinguishable way of thinking and being and this commitment to bring together and synthesize rather than to separate and segregate? For some time, we have been eager to understand our roles in the complex progression of our teacher candidates’ development as their identity shifts from teacher candidate to professional educator. We investigated our teacher preparation program for evidence that explained our graduates’ success and longevity as middle level educators and we discussed our findings in an article entitled “A New Professionalism in Teacher Preparation” (Previts, Kleine, & Mizelle, 2013). We found significant parallels between middle level philosophy advocated by the Association for Middle Level Education (AMLE, formerly National Middle School Association [NMSA]) in This We Believe (NMSA, 2010) and the structures and protocols that undergirded instruction and candidate experiences throughout our middle level teacher preparation program. We continued to build upon our initial inquiry and, in this chapter, we share our further understanding of the process of professionalizing middle level teacher candidates beginning with a historical perspective on teacher preparation. We then explicate the concepts of signature pedagogies and disciplinary habits of mind and describe our work predicated on the seminal publications of Lee Shulman (2005a) and other scholars at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

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related to the idea of “signature pedagogies of the professions.” We conclude by positing a signature pedagogy for middle level teacher education.

Historical Recommendations for the Preparation of Middle Level Professional Educators Middle grades teacher educators are situated in an educational movement that was designed to attend to the needs of a distinct population—young adolescent learners—and is also the only educational level born of the American perspective. As early as the 1900s, educators began to recognize early adolescence as a period of swift change; thus, they saw these students were in need of an educational experience that was especially suited to them (Alexander, 1963; Briggs, 1920; NMSA, 2010). Briggs recognized the “peculiar” characteristics that came gradually to young adolescents between the ages of 12 and 16 and asked “what differences in school practice, if any, should be introduced because of them” (1920, p. 4). In 1963, Alexander proposed changes to the existing junior high schools that were then serving as many as 82% as of the country’s 10- to 16-year-olds (Lounsbury, 1998a) and advocated for an increased emphasis on individualization to address young adolescents’ many different motivations and interests. Today, middle level educators are challenged to provide a multitude of diverse, rapidly changing 10- to 15-year-olds … an education that will enhance their healthy growth as lifelong learners, ethical democratic citizens, and increasingly competent, self-sufficient individuals who are optimistic about the future and prepared to succeed in our ever-changing world. (NMSA, 2010, p. 3) Throughout the history of the middle level education movement, educators have recognized the importance of teachers who are prepared to work with young adolescents (Alexander, 1963; Briggs, 1920; Lounsbury, 1998b; NMSA, 2010). Briggs wrote that the newness of the junior high school movement and the particular issues of young adolescents called for especially effective teachers in the new junior high schools. He recommended that teachers should be “college graduates with practice-teaching experience and one year of successful classroom experience in the grades” along with special preparation to teach one or two subjects (Briggs, 1920, p. 50). Teacher preparation remained a critical issue as calls for the education of young adolescents found focus in the middle school movement in the early 1960s. Lounsbury (1998b) wrote in 1960 that the junior high school had not “grown up” due, in part, to the lack of specially-prepared teachers to work with students. He noted colleges had not developed specific programs, content knowledge was a key criteria for employment rather than understanding of the young adolescent, and only a few states required special certification for junior high and, where there were certification requirements, they were vague and minimal. Thus, it was not surprising that in his proposal for the “new” middle school, Alexander (1963) encouraged institutions of higher learning to reorganize to provide competent teachers to work specifically with 10- to 15-year-olds. In recent decades, notable recommendations for specially-prepared, expert teachers have included those from the Task Force on Education of Young Adolescents (Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1989) and NMSA (2010). NMSA characterized successful schools for young adolescents as schools served by “educators who value young adolescents and are prepared to teach them” (pp. 15–16), and the organization further challenged institutions of higher learning to develop appropriate programs to specifically prepare middle level teachers. Despite these continued calls for differentiated preparation for middle level educators, the question remains to be answered: What should be the nature of a middle level teacher preparation program? It is well-established that young adolescents are unique in their development and, 42

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thus, require particular learning experiences within a specially-designed learning environment (see, e.g., Howell, Faulkner, Cook, Miller, & Thompson, 2016; Jackson & Davis, 2000). While there is common recognition of the need for specially-prepared educators, the literature provides little guidance on the practices teacher educators should use to effectively and reliably prepare the teachers of young adolescents. Are there particular learning experiences, distinctive pedagogies, “core practices” (McDonald, Kazemi, & Kavanagh, 2013), or even a “signature pedagogy” (Shulman, 2005a) critical for preparing middle level teacher candidates for their profession? We are guided by the belief that responding to this inconclusiveness and determining how to effectively educate professionals to capably meet the demands of this complex occupation is essential for advancing middle level education substantially, further professionalizing teacher education, and contributing to successful educational outcomes of future young adolescents.

Roots of Signature Pedagogy Research The concept of signature pedagogy was first introduced by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT) whose mission is to facilitate innovation and implementation of new organizational practices in global education to address long-standing inequities in educational outcomes (https://www.carnegiefoundation.org/). Signature pedagogies are those routines and practices used across all types of institutions to prepare aspiring professionals to emulate and become members of that profession—in terms of how to think, act, and value—in accordance to exemplars of that profession. Former CFAT president Lee Shulman began the signature pedagogy project in 1994 to examine professions with the hope of uncovering those routines and practices with moral, practical, and cognitive dimensions that could be identified as or incorporated into teacher education to help professionalize the field of teaching. Noting that other prominent fields were consistent in using certain pedagogies for preparing new professionals, he began national discussions to locate the signature pedagogy of teacher education. Shulman surveyed schools of education for potential signature pedagogies for preparing teachers and found more dissimilarity than similarity, unlike what he found in surveys of divinity or engineering schools. From these findings, then, he concluded that due to the wide variability in preparation that graduates experienced, most of them would not have the opportunity to internalize the necessary moral, practical, and cognitive dimensions unique to professional educators. Moreover, he held that there should be signature pedagogies that addressed the preparation of all manner of teachers alike—general and special education, kindergarten and secondary, Spanish and English teachers—in contrast to the status quo then and now whereby virtually every pathway for becoming a teacher is an idiosyncratic one (Shulman, 2005b). As a teacher educator, Shulman lamented that identifying signature pedagogies for the preparation of teachers did not seem to be valued to the same degree as the preparation of other professions, though preparing teachers is as complex as preparing lawyers, engineers, and doctors. Improving professional teacher education systematically stood to have much positive impact on society and was one of the reasons the attention on teacher preparation became one of the chief aims of CFAT. Dismayed with the findings, yet also motivated to ensure that the teaching field be comprised of qualified professional educators, Shulman has overseen decades of work advancing the concept of signature pedagogy in teacher preparation. He expressed his goal of identifying and systematizing the pedagogical inputs of the teaching profession in order to be able to predict the outputs of teacher education by declaring “that teacher education would no longer be a field where we let a thousand flowers bloom” (Falk, 2006, p. 76).

Signature Pedagogies Explained Signature pedagogies are the “types of teaching that organize the fundamental ways in which future practitioners are educated for their new professions” (Shulman, 2005a, p. 52). These teaching and 43

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learning experiences, such as clinical rounds used throughout medical education and case dialogue method found in law schools, are considered signature pedagogies because they are (a) ubiquitous and habitual in that these practices are integrated into the curriculum for preparing essentially all future professionals within that field; (b) require students to perform in a public setting; and (c) generate learning opportunities that have unpredictable elements, are witnessed by others, and foster accountability of participants (Shulman, 2005a). Shulman has outlined additional indicators and parameters that are helpful in providing systematic, structured processes for analyzing and identifying the multi-faceted concept of signature pedagogies (Gardner & Shulman, 2005; Shulman, 2005a, 2005b). For example, Shulman (2005b) contended that signature pedagogies are a combination of three apprenticeship models of professional education that seek to develop professionals’ abilities to think (cognitive apprenticeship), perform (practical apprenticeship), and embody ethical reasoning when thinking and carrying out one’s professional responsibilities (moral apprenticeship). We see these aims—for professionals to habitually reflect, perform, and act with integrity—serving as learning outcomes from the application of any signature pedagogy that then influences the formation of the learner’s professional identity as exhibited through actions, thoughts, and ways of being of the evolving professional. This holistic approach to the development of professionals is also described figuratively by Shulman as helping to cultivate the professionals’ “head, hands, and heart” (2005a, p. 59). We have been struck by the strong similarities between Shulman’s work on signature pedagogies to address educational inequities and Dewey’s influential philosophy of educating the whole child, wherein the complexity and integrated nature of one’s thoughts, actions, and values are foundational in the construction of the “whole professional.” In addition to the formation of professional thoughts, actions, and values, Shulman clarified that any signature pedagogy is composed of three dimensions: surface structure, deep structure, and implicit structure. He contends that a signature pedagogy: has a surface structure, which consists of concrete, operational acts of teaching and learning, of showing and demonstrating, of questioning and answering, of interacting and withholding, of approaching and withdrawing. Any signature pedagogy also has a deep structure, a set of assumptions about how best to impart a certain body of knowledge and know-how. And it has an implicit structure, a moral dimension that comprises a set of beliefs about professional attitudes, values, and dispositions. (2005b, p. 55) These three dimensions of structures can be used as guideposts for conducting a stringent analysis for determining whether any teaching practice, resource, or artifact can be designated as a signature pedagogy. Shulman (2005b) also characterized signature pedagogies as being comprised of pedagogies of uncertainty, pedagogies of engagement, and pedagogies of formation. A signature pedagogy provides opportunity for professionals to cultivate their ability to exercise their professional judgment during unforeseeable circumstances in which they must exercise professional knowledge to make decisions (uncertainty). Another feature of a signature pedagogy is that it requires active participation (engagement) for learning to occur while also promoting the development of habits of the mind and heart (formation). Indeed, Shulman has presented multiple markers, qualities, and viewpoints to serve as a framework for identifying a signature pedagogy in a field or discipline and for analyzing activities, experiences, or outcomes (pedagogical exemplars) to determine their validity as signature pedagogies. Additionally, Shulman offered a figurative interpretation of signature pedagogy in order to help others visualize this intricate concept for the formation of professionals’ head, hands, and heart. These multiple concretizations of “signature pedagogy” guided our 44

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efforts to determine whether there exists a signature pedagogy for middle level teacher education. Although we agree with Shulman that there should be consistencies in preparing a teacher of any type, in our professional judgment there exist unique pedagogies for preparing middle level educators.

Seeking a Signature Pedagogy for Middle Level Teacher Education We devised a process for using Shulman’s characteristics and dimensions for the nomination, identification, and analysis of activities, experiences, or outcomes used in one teacher preparation program for their potential designation as a signature pedagogy. Based on our original understanding of signature pedagogies, each author proposed two to four pedagogical exemplars, along with written justifications, for their viability as signature pedagogies and shared them with the others, creating a pool of between eight and 30 entities for analysis. To begin our analysis, we applied criteria from Shulman’s framework that calls for interpretation based on three dimensions of a signature pedagogy: surface, deep, and implicit structures along with the six characteristics attributed to any profession (Gardner & Shulman, 2005). For our purposes we determined that (a) the surface structure category drew from candidates’ concrete experiences, (b) deep structures developed teacher candidates’ ability to discern and implement effective practices, and (c) implicit structures led teacher candidates to integrate features from surface and deep structures to enact the ways of being of professional middle level teachers. Having established a shared understanding, we then categorized each entity as to whether or not it fulfilled one or more of the dimensional structures. Using our best fit process, more than half of the pool was eliminated, and iterations continued until one candidate remained. The pedagogical exemplar that met the above-listed criteria was subjected to further analysis using additional Shulman frameworks, including apprenticeship outcomes, pedagogical typology, metaphorical features, and distinguishing features.

Democratic Living and Learning: A Signature Pedagogy We propose the experiences from democratic living and learning—with respect for the history that brought us to this point and a commitment to improve the future for young adolescents—as a signature pedagogy for middle level teacher education. Our conception of democratic living and learning is comprised of a series of scaffolded experiences threaded throughout our teacher education program that result in teacher candidates’ integration of the domains of knowing, enacting, and valuing as a middle level educator by living out the tenets of This We Believe. Candidates live and learn democracy much as John Dewey advocated in his “Pedagogic Creed” (1897) and envisioned for the Chicago Laboratory School—that is, through a curriculum based on the continuous cognitive integration of the interactions among self, others, and the environment in order to contribute to a democratic way of life. His vision is captured most famously in his statement from his pedagogic position that claims that education should not merely be preparation for life, it is life. For our candidates this means that they prepare to be middle level teachers by being middle level teachers; they live the lives of middle level learners by being continuous learners themselves; and they learn to use their individual and collective voice as a tool of democracy by operating as a community. Over a two-year period, we support the signature pedagogy of democratic learning and living with development of a respect for the history of middle level education and a commitment to improving educational outcomes for young adolescents. This encompasses early experiences in which candidates come together in a mentored cohort and, through consensus, they design a name for themselves that represents the group’s highest aspirations as middle level educators. 45

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The program continues with a curriculum course that is democratically co-created by the teacher candidates’ to meet their own aims and—for many of them for the first time—in consideration of the aims of others. This experience helps candidates learn to dwell in uncertainty and to build their reflective capacity as a way of being. They become intellectually developed as they are regularly called upon to justify their choices to their colleagues as well as their supervisors, identify tools of inquiry in disciplinary as well as interdisciplinary coursework such as content area reading assignments, and select and assess consequential courses of action in their field placements. Their intellectual development is facilitated by dialogue and reflection with a host of others including colleagues, supervisors, students, and community members for the purposes of goal setting, accountability, mutual motivation, and learning. It is furthered by the integration of field experience with theory through authentic work with young adolescents such as developing and implementing school-wide, problem-based, service learning projects. Most importantly, the signature pedagogy serves as a catalyst for each candidate to assume an increasing level of responsibility for maximizing the potential of all young people—those in their classrooms as well those who have yet to be born. Our teacher candidates fulfill the democratic living and learning signature pedagogy through their informed beliefs and actions as they become empowered advocates. In proposing this pedagogic signature of our teacher preparation program, we also claim it as the most significant vehicle by which candidates transform into middle level educators with the professional habits of mind that will ensure their success as in-service teachers. Moreover, through this well-conceived and experientially validated preparatory process they will be able to demonstrate the primary feature of a profession—that is, “to serve responsibly, selflessly, and wisely” (Gardner & Shulman, 2005, p. 14). Thus, evidence of the professionalism of our graduates and their acquisition of the necessary habits of mind of middle level educators is apparent in the discernment they apply and decisions they make in the field and on the college campus while their positive impact on young adolescent learning is visible to observers. Ultimately, the purpose of identifying and implementing any signature pedagogy for middle level teacher education is to improve pre-service teachers’ preparation so that they might serve young adolescents more capably and, with increased influence of professionals, make greater contributions to the whole of society. Just as valuable as it is for society to have competent clergy and lawyers, it is equally beneficial that there be professional educators. Shulman’s study of the professions tells us that being a professional educator would be no small task.

Professions and Professionals Professions have operated historically as an important mechanism for broad-based development in industrialized societies, raising the standard of living for those in developed nations without fail (Epstein & Yuthas, 2012). As such, members of professions have been accorded status for their work and, with that status, have been expected to undertake the complementary obligations of their profession to those they serve. Consider how those in the ministry, law, or medicine are charged to serve others and, in carrying out that charge, serve the needs of the greater society as well. Many would agree that people in developed societies are healthier, happier, and safer as a result of their interactions with various professionals. Professionalizing the work of some in a society provides a clear pathway for upward mobility and seems to benefit many. Gardner and Shulman (2005) identified medicine, law, the ministry, engineering, and nursing as professions that use particular, ubiquitous practices to reliably impart the knowledge, skills, and dispositions of their professions to the next generation of practitioners, thereby ensuring the health of the field as well as contributing to the vigor of the society. Those of us concerned about the quality of middle level education and the wellbeing of young people in the middle grades might do well then to consider what constitutes a profession in order to have confidence 46

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in countering those who would have society accept that “those who can’t, teach.” Furthermore, at a time when there is much disruption in our various social enterprises and educational institutions, having evidence of a signature pedagogy that consistently prepares professional middle level educators would put teachers of young adolescents on equal footing with members of other professions and provide stability to the commonwealth. Gardner and Shulman (2005) also maintained that all professions have defining characteristics that determine the validity of the designation “profession”: They (a) serve the welfare of society and individuals who use the service; (b) have a body of specialized knowledge developed through practice; (c) have a unique set of professional skills, practices, and performances required to carry it out; (d) are experts who have the capacity to render judgments with integrity under conditions of uncertainty; (e) belong to an organized community of professionals who pass down knowledge to individuals and the collective; and (f) belong to an organized community who assume the responsibility for the oversight and monitoring of quality in both practice and professional education (pp. 14–16). It is likely that a profession exists if all of these conditions are met. One of Shulman’s goals was to learn how the profession, and thereby the industrialized society, could be made stronger by improving the preparation of professionals (2005a). He argued that valuable insights can be gained by studying the preparation of professionals and, by extension, we believe that some of those gains might be employed to improve the field of middle level education. In particular, the element of signature pedagogy that has most strongly guided our curriculum design is the development of teacher candidates’ habits of mind through program experiences that are evidenced in their professionalism. Professional dispositions indicate certain values, beliefs, and ways of being; thus, they are strong indicators of how pre-service teachers will practice when they have graduated their preparation program and begun working in middle level schools.

Complexity of Preparing Teachers as Professionals Darling-Hammond (2006) acknowledged the complexity of teacher education in light of the characteristics that teaching shares with other professions. She further stressed that teachers, at a minimum, must be prepared to “understand, monitor, and capitalize on student thinking; be aware of the cognitive and motivational consequences of their moment-to-moment teaching decisions; and simultaneously address the social and academic needs of individuals and of the group within a cultural and community context” (Darling-Hammond, 2006, p. 8). Clearly, such an occupation demands skilled, mindful, professional practitioners. The mindfulness necessary for teaching that Darling-Hammond references is particularly important to be cultivated in middle level teacher candidates. This type of outcome may be brought about through the application of a signature pedagogy when signature pedagogy is framed as having three dimensions of structure. Utilizing this perspective, teachers’ “knowing and doing” is seen to be executed within a set of assumptions about how to impart the values and beliefs, or dispositions, of the professional educator. In other words, the surface and deep structures become integrated by the pedagogy’s implicit structure. This is where the importance of preparing middle level educators who have professional dispositions that will enable them to manage and make good decisions in a complex, continually changing environment becomes clear. Dottin (2009) considered professional dispositions and disciplinary habits of mind that describe the signature pedagogy’s implicit structure and advised teacher educators to “create cultures in which the habits of pedagogical mindfulness and thoughtfulness that facilitate intelligent action and professional judgment are seen by candidates, are encouraged and orchestrated through candidate/candidate interaction, and are taught directly” (p. 86). A democratic living and learning environment fosters such a culture in which habits of inquiry and reflection are imbued in its 47

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members. In addition, Dottin (2009) joined middle level advocates in assigning the responsibility for designing effective preparation for teachers to the university. The need to heed the call, by some, that building intellectual dispositions must be higher education’s obligation (Broadbear, n.d.) takes on more urgency for teacher education programs in higher education institutions if teaching is seen through the lens of a clinical profession that requires discernment and judgment, problem solving skills, continuous learning and the utilization of content knowledge to address problems. (Dottin, 2009, p. 87) The complication then, once that a potential signature pedagogy for middle level teacher preparation has been identified, is in its becoming pervasive and extended beyond a single institution. For that to occur, a problem of a different sort must be solved—namely, one of further inquiry and adoption by the professional community of middle level teacher educators.

Conclusion Shulman understood that the power of any practice for producing consistent outcomes lay in its preponderance of application. He noted that signature pedagogies are important “precisely because they are pervasive. They implicitly define what counts as knowledge in the field and how things become known” (Shulman, 2005a, p. 54). Thus, if a goal is to dependably prepare professional educators to work with young adolescents, the field must identify some ubiquitous, successful practices and they must be adopted on a widespread basis. It is common knowledge that “rounds” are practiced in every medical school as an integral and standard part of learning to become a medical doctor. The graduates of medical schools are considered professionals precisely because during their intensive preparation they experienced some uniform practices that taught them how doctors act, think, and believe and that enculturated them into the profession. When they begin to practice on their own, society expects them to be competent professionals and, overwhelmingly, they are. The same would be said of middle level teacher candidates if they experienced uniform practices across programs that taught them how teachers act, think, and believe. The connection between implementing a signature pedagogy on a prevailing basis and the consistency with which professionals enter society making significant contributions to its welfare is clear. A strong case exists for applying Shulman’s concept of signature pedagogy—with its integral focus on the pedagogies of uncertainty, formation, and engagement in order to reliably develop candidates’ capacity to make informed, accurate judgments—as a dependable route for creating professional middle level educators in every sense of the term. By acknowledging the positive outcomes from education for our parallel professionals, and by recognizing our obligation to improve our field, we should commit to extending the signature pedagogy of democratic living and learning that has been identified in this program to other middle level teacher preparation programs. At the same time, we should monitor those efforts to determine how difficult it is to purposefully diffuse a signature pedagogy. Additionally, middle level teacher educators should work collaboratively to identify other signature pedagogies of our profession, should they exist. Adopting signature pedagogies does not mean programs need to be identical, if that were even possible (Falk, 2006). Institutions will continue to have different missions and serve different learners. But using the signature pedagogies across institutions will ensure that educator preparation providers are applying the best, current practices and are providing the best learning opportunities for teacher candidates. Because educator preparation providers share the same goals about the outcomes for middle level teacher education, members of the professional community must be able to speak intelligently with each other to understand the essence of the profession. 48

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Professional preparation using signature pedagogies assures that necessary enculturation occurs and provides us a commensurate language for communication. No doubt, this systematic effort would require middle level teacher educators to come together and, perhaps, to operate away from their familiar style and to consider how collective efforts might better serve the greater good—indeed, to integrate rather than stand alone. But this should not be a move that unsettles. After all, the tendency to collaborate to solve problems does have a hearty legacy in the field. Integration just seems to be the nature of middle level education.

References Alexander, W. M. (1963). The junior high school: A changing view. In R. David (Ed.), Moving forward from the past: Early writings and current reflections of middle school founders (pp. 3–13). Columbus, OH: National Middle School Association. Beane, J. (1997). Curriculum integration: Designing the core of democratic education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Briggs, T. H. (1920). The junior high school. Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press. Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development. (1989). Turning points: Preparing American youth for the 21st century. New York, NY: Carnegie Corporation of New York. Darling-Hammond, L. (2006). Powerful teacher education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Dewey, J. (1897). My pedagogic creed. School Journal, 54, 77–80. Dottin, E. S. (2009). Professional judgment and disposition in teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 25(1), 83–88. Epstein, M. J., & Yuthas, K. (2012). Redefining education in the developing world. Stanford Social Innovation Review. Retrieved from https://ssir.org/articles/entry/redefining_education_in_the_developing_world Falk, B. (2006). A conversation with Lee Shulman—Signature pedagogies for teacher education: Defining our practices and rethinking our preparation. The New Educator, 2(1), 73–82. Gardner, H., & Shulman, L. S. (2005). The professions in America today: Crucial but fragile. Daedalus, 134(3), 13–18. Howell, P. B., Faulkner, S. A., Cook, C. M., Miller, N. C., & Thompson, N. L. (2016). Specialized preparation for middle level teachers: A national review of teacher preparation programs. Research in Middle Level Education, 39(1), 1–12. Jackson, A. W., & Davis, G. A. (2000). Turning points 2000: Educating adolescents in the 21st century. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Lounsbury, J. H. (1998a). How the junior high school came to be. In R. David (Ed.), Moving forward from the past: Early writings and current reflections of middle school founders (pp. 110–114). Columbus, OH: National Middle School Association. Lounsbury, J. H. (1998b). What keeps junior from growing up? In R. David (Ed.), Moving forward from the past: Early writings and current reflections of middle school founders (pp. 106–109). Columbus, OH: National Middle School Association. McDonald, M., Kazemi, E., & Kavanagh, S. S. (2013). Core practices and pedagogies of teacher education: A call for a common language and collective activity. Journal of Teacher Education, 64(5), 378–386. National Middle School Association. (2010). This we believe: Keys to educating young adolescents. Westerville, OH: Author. Previts, J. L., Kleine, K. L. M., & Mizelle, N. B. (2013). A new professionalism in middle level teacher preparation: Toward a signature pedagogy. Middle School Journal, 44(4), 22–29. Shulman, L. S. (2005a). Signature pedagogies in the professions. Daedalus, 134(3), 52–59. Shulman, L. S. (2005b). The signature pedagogies of the professions of law, medicine, engineering, and the clergy: Potential lessons for the education of teachers. A speech delivered at the Math Science Partnerships (MSP) Workshop: “Teacher Education for Effective Teaching and Learning” Hosted by the National Research Council’s Center for Education, Irvine, California.

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5 A FRAMEWORK FOR CLASSROOM CARING THAT CHALLENGES THE EUROCRATIC NORM IN MIDDLE LEVEL SCHOOLS AND CLASSROOMS Toni M. Williams and Susi Long

Toni’s Introduction Published in Volume 41 of Research in Middle Level Education, my article, Do no harm: Strategies for culturally relevant caring in middle level classrooms from the community experiences and life histories of Black middle level teachers (Williams, 2018) opened by bringing readers into the world of Shakara, an African American teenager, who “was thrown across the floor by a school resource officer as she was holding onto her seat for refusing to put away her cell phone” (p. 1). I followed with other examples that represent the overwhelming number of Students of Color inequitably disciplined and suspended and expelled from school far more often than their White peers for similar behaviors (Gilliam & Shahar, 2006; Morris, 2016) in what is known as the “criminalization of Black and Brown youths as a foundation of the school-to-prison pipeline” (Williams, 2018, p. 1). I also described a study in which I used life history methodology to glean insights from the experiences of four Black middle level teachers around issues of caring, particularly caring as it reflected learning from their home and family worlds. Findings revealed particular elements in their successful teaching that were anchored in their upbringing in Black communities. They saw adults in students’ lives – in addition to parents – as otherparents or fictive kin (Cage, 1997; Cook, 2010) who (a) reminded students that they were somebody and had worth, value, knowledge, and ability and (b) used students’ knowledge, or assets, to build teaching practices. They helped students see the classroom as home away from home. They worked with other adults to form a village of caring support for students. They saw their caring roles as including being role models, taking responsibility for students’ achievement and well-being, and confronting and countering negative stereotypes inflicted on Students of Color. They saw caring as encompassing (a) honesty by letting students know what they were up against and teaching them strategies to work through barriers, (b) getting to know students well, (c) believing in students’ success, and (d) holding them to high expectations. Finally, 50

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they drew from their communities the conviction that true caring is built on “genuinely loving relationships with students” (p. 9), taught African and African American history ethnic and racial pride, taught students to speak back to negative profiles, and never sugarcoated injustices but taught for success in spite of them while teaching a critical consciousness to stand against them.

Susi’s Introduction In a recent book that I co-authored with teachers Janice Baines and Carmen Tisdale titled “We’ve been doing it your way long enough”: Choosing the culturally relevant classroom (Baines, Tisdale, & Long, 2018), my coauthors and I also drew on the story of Shakara in the context of communicating to teachers the often unrecognized and unexamined biases that lead to physical, emotional, and academic violence inflicted on Children of Color in and out of school and the long overdue need for change. As this young high school student was thrown down by a school resource officer, it was clear that a world of information, insight, love, and caring was missing from the scenario and that negative profiling and an uninformed response to student behavior dominated. We wrote about how this kind of dehumanization of children is not just found in overtly violent acts like this one but in the insidious ways that educational systems and human beings within them can communicate a lack of caring for Students of Color through policies, practices, and pedagogies. We also drew on the work of educators such as Bettina Love (2016) who writes about the “spirit murdering” of Students of Color as just as deadly as murders in the streets; Johnson and Bryan (2016) who use bullets as a metaphor for describing the ways that students are dehumanized through silencing, disrespect, rejection, and omission; and scholars who write about the criminalization of Black females in school (e.g., Butler, 2017; Morris, 2016; Muhammad & Haddix, 2016). Toni’s work focusing on the insights of Black educators (Williams, 2018, 2019) deepens my thinking about these issues and what we must learn from Black educators and their communities to transform educational institutions to become truly caring spaces for young people. Toni’s research pushes me to look more closely at scholars who urge educators to humanize and decolonize pedagogy, practice, and policy; work that is foundational to genuinely caring educational environments. With this in mind, I also turn to the work of Dillard (2012), King and Swartz (2016), and Asante (2014) who urge educators to relearn histories so that our pedagogies can be more caring because they counter the ongoing colonized (Eurocratic) focus that can send messages leading to the negative profiling students of African descent while positively profiling students of European descent. Like Toni, I also turn to those who point out the inequities that occur in schooling when negative profiling leads to the over-referral of Students of Color to special education (Codrington & Fairchild, 2013), under-referral to gifted and talented programs (Ford, 2013), deficit views regarding the support provided by Communities of Color (Myers, 2013), and disproportionate suspensions and expulsions of Students of Color for behaviors more often ignored or justified when exhibited by their White peers (Gilliam, Maupin, Reyes, Accavitti, & Schic, 2016). Findings from my work, encouraged and informed by scholars like Toni, help me identify foundational aspects of caring classrooms as those that require teachers to affirm humanity by (a) examining themselves and their institutions for bias, (b) acknowledging the need for change and being courageous enough enact it, (c) rejecting and countering paternalization and deficit narratives about Students and Families of Color, (d) dedicating to learning from the wise elders in students’ lives, (e) unlearning and relearning mistaught histories and re-centering the voices of Indigenous Peoples, and (f) making the commitment to developing a critical consciousness for themselves as teachers and for their students (Baines et al., 2018).

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Blending Our Work to Offer a Framework Blending our work and situating it within the larger context of research in culturally relevant caring, we offer a conceptual framework for the caring classroom at any grade level. For the purposes of this paper, we focus on middle level education. Others have written about culturally relevant caring (Gay, 2010); caring ethics in middle level teaching (Powell & Seed, 2010); caring as creating safe spaces for families’ to engage and collaborate in schools (Rodríguez-Castro, Salas, & Murray, 2016), and engaging adolescents, families, and community members in conversations about caring (Bauer & Previts, 2016). Similarly, broad summaries of literature include topics about caring as empathy, showing interest in students, encouraging and instilling confidence, physical affection, flexibility, and sharing oneself (Williams, 2012). Our framework differs because it focuses explicitly on caring as learned from the insights of Black teachers and their own community cultural experiences. We offer these insights in conjunction with work that recognizes the need to decolonize the current Eurocratic (White) pedagogical status quo to create caring classrooms. We use the term Eurocratic (rather than Eurocentric) inspired by the work of King and Swartz (2016, 2018) who emphasize the ongoing stronghold of colonial ideologies which diminish, distort, or silence Indigenous and African descent voices in pedagogy, practice, curricula, and educational policy in the U.S. and globally. The term “Eurocratic” insists that we pay attention to the institutional aspects of Eurocentrism – the “officially sanctioned constraints … on knowledge and systems that maintain [colonial] authority and hegemony” (King & Swartz, 2018, p.13). Thus, this framework does not ignore or skirt issues of race and racism or the Eurocratic nature of schooling, but rather puts it front and center. We see the framework as part and parcel of work being done across the field of education to normalize humanizing, decolonizing, culturally relevant pedagogies as foundational to equity in education. We see tremendous possibilities for the future of student-teacher and family-teacher relationships if educators and students commit to recognizing and navigating the path of challenging and decolonizing the status quo. We anchor this work in one of the major characteristics of This We Believe – the belief that every adolescent “thrives academically, socially, and emotionally in a democratic learning environment where trust and respect are paramount and where family and community are actively involved” [italics added] (National Middle School Association, 2010). The framework we offer speaks to those characteristics by insisting that democratic learning environments defined by trust, respect, and active involvement cannot exist while the Eurocratic center and systemic effects of educational racism continue to define most educational settings. In the work to dismantle and replace those realities, we offer suggestions for self- and institutional-examination in the work to use this framework to affect and sustain change.

Culturally Relevant, Responsive, and Sustaining Caring For years, educators looked to the work of Nell Noddings (1984) to understand caring in education as “both self-serving and other-serving” (p. 711); building authentic relationships with students while empowering students as learners. This ethic of care focused on the reciprocal relationship between the “one caring” and the “cared for” and included helping students set and achieve goals anchored in building trusting relationship with them (Noddings, 1992). Years later, Owusu-Ansah and Kyei-Blankson (2016) emphasized caring as an unselfish act, something that must be demonstrated by teachers even if it is not reciprocated or if they do not perceive that it is reciprocated. They saw caring as demonstrated through knowing, loving, and acting for students by connecting with them and showing support not only from classroom teachers but from the entire school staff. Bauer and Previts (2016) challenged us with the question, “How do we

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expand that caring in order to transform indifference, ignorance, or disdain into curiosity, interconnectedness, and conceptual understanding?” (p. 2). In our work, we build from these important elements to embrace the work of educators who see caring from a revolutionary (Asante, 2017), liberatory stance and who posit that traditional views about caring as merely professing love for students are not enough. These educators put forward strong statements about the need for equity in education and see it tied to culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining teaching. They understand these pedagogies as those that decolonize the Eurocratic norm as a necessary and humanizing act. Key among those scholars is Ladson-Billings (1995) who coined the term and conceptualized culturally relevant teaching as a pedagogy of liberation intended to counter academic oppression experienced by Students of Color who are dehumanized through the curricular omission, marginalization, and distortion of their heritage, histories, and communities. Ladson-Billings described culturally relevant pedagogy as focused on building students’ (a) academic success, (b) cultural competence, and (c) critical consciousness thereby building the knowledge that will enable them to identify injustices and understand strategies for acting against them. Among other characteristics, Ladson-Billings (1994) maintained that culturally relevant teachers (a) facilitate students’ knowledge construction and do not engage in the mere transmission of information; (b) communicate high expectations; (c) learn about the cultural backgrounds of students and, in particular, about cultures, heritages, and languages typically marginalized or omitted in curriculum; (d) use that knowledge to reshape the curriculum and engage in culturally mediated instruction; and (e) embrace positive perspectives about families and parents. Alongside the work of Ladson-Billings, culturally-focused educators draw from the work of Geneva Gay (2010) who wrote about culturally responsive teaching. Like Ladson-Billings, Gay discussed multiple aspects of this stance but also included a particular focus on culturally responsive caring. She wrote about caring in the culturally responsive classroom as encompassing basic characteristics that include attending to person and performance, teaching in ways that are action-provoking, prompting effort and achievement, and understanding teaching and learning as multidimensional. She is perhaps most known for her emphasis on culturally responsive caring as warmly demanding. Warm demanders build strong relationships with students and then hold them “accountable for high academic efforts … complemented with an uncompromising faith in their students and relentless efforts to help them meet high academic standards” (p. 75). At the same time, they implement practices that reflect knowledge students bring to the classroom and motivate them toward achievement in culturally responsive ways. To make this kind of caring possible, Gay emphasized that teachers must dedicate to continually “build[ing] a knowledge base about ethnic and cultural diversity in education” (p. 69) in conjunction with a constant awareness of “their own cultural blinders [that can cause them to] obstruct educational opportunities for students of color” (p. 70). To accomplish this, Gay asked educators to engage in ongoing dialogue about issues of diversity particularly with regard to ethnic and racial issues. Recently, Paris (2012) and Paris and Alim (2017) expanded the notion of culturally relevant teaching by offering the concept of culturally sustaining pedagogy. Their intent was to push educators to think about the need to teach in ways that lead to sustained – not momentary – change in pedagogy, policy, and practice that permanently puts marginalized cultural knowledge at the center of the curriculum. They wrote that culturally sustaining pedagogy “explicitly calls for schooling to be a site for sustaining the cultural ways of being of communities of color” (p. 6), not merely drawing on it for a lesson or a unit of study. This work aligns with that of Delpit (1998) who described the need to shift the culture of power from one that has been largely Eurocratic (King & Swartz, 2016) to one that re-centers Indigenous cultural knowledge throughout every program, practice, and policy. This also connects to the call for decolonizing pedagogies (Battiste, 2013; Thiong’o,1986) as well as work that emphasizes the importance of embracing the 53

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cultural community wealth of students most disenfranchised from schooling (Yosso, 2005). Finally, in their discussion of culturally sustaining pedagogies, Paris and Alim (2017) wrote that culturally relevant teaching has been widely misunderstood resulting in the reality that “much of the work done under the umbrella of [culturally relevant pedagogy] comes up far short” (p. 5) of a sustained critical and truly culturally relevant stance. Ladson-Billings (2014) addressed this as she discussed the ways her original design is corrupted, for example, when teachers focus on culture at a surface level through the inclusion of token bits of information – an hour on Kwanza here, a few words about a tired Rosa Parks there – or when the notion of developing a critical consciousness focuses merely at the “activity” and White savior level with events such as food drives and fund raisers rather than on helping children recognize injustices and learn strategies for acting toward actual change. In sum, we see the caring classroom as intimately tied to these conceptualizations of culturally relevant, responsive, sustaining, and decolonizing teaching that are fundamentally tied to “broadening the curricular center … so that students are competent, knowledgeable about, and feel pride in their own heritage while centering, valuing, and committing to sustain the dignity, lives, and histories of everyone else” (Baines, Tisdale, & Long, 2018, pp. 12–13). This kind of caring necessitates teachers’ questioning of self and the institutional structures within their educational spaces (referral policies, testing, material and textbook selection, discipline procedures, hiring practices, family involvement practices) to identify where caring is truly foundational and where it is merely another Eurocratic version of what counts. This means broadening what educators value as ways of being, reacting, and interacting. It means learning from families and communities and coming to value ways of supporting students at home that may differ from Eurocratic models. It means centering mutually respectful relationships between student and teacher as well as reciprocally respectful relationships with communities and families – respecting communities enough to learn from them and continuously acknowledging students’ and families’ competence as reflective of a full range of human talents (Noddings, 1995). Far more than being merely warm and fuzzy toward others, this conceptualization of caring has everything to do with teachers’ ability to recognize the elements of schooling that humanize students and those that dehumanize them, and then to be able to transform pedagogy, policy, and practice accordingly.

The Framework We join our work – Toni’s research focusing on insights from the community cultural wealth of Black teachers and students, and Susi’s work focusing on decolonizing, culturally relevant pedagogies – to offer a framework for caring (Figure 5.1) that encompasses key elements of each. These elements include educators’ commitment to (a) understanding caring as a humanizing process; (b) warmly demanding; (c) relearning histories to broaden the curricular center by normalizing (not tokenizing) the histories, heritages, languages, and communities of those most marginalized and omitted; (d) assessing views of students, families, and communities for stereotype and negativity; (e) listening to and trusting family and community members’ insights; and (f) learning about students’ cultural community wealth and normalizing it in day-to-day curriculum that builds a critical consciousness.

Understand Caring as a Humanizing Process Watson, Sealey-Ruiz, and Jackson (2016) defined culturally responsive caring as grounded in a “strong sense of community, rigorous demands, an integration of different cultures, and a general affirmation of one’s humanity” (p. 981). However, for European American, White 54

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Figure 5.1 Intersecting elements of educators’ commitments in caring classrooms

educators and Educators of Color who have internalized messages that Whiteness is the dominant source of accomplishment throughout history and reflects the only “appropriate” ways of behavior, interaction, and support for students at home, this is easier said than done. It requires a commitment to identifying where a lack of humanity or dehumanization occurs in schooling. In the introduction to this paper, we outlined some examples regarding inequitable rates of referral for special education and gifted education and inequitable enactment of discipline. We also mentioned the dehumanization of students as described by Johnson & Bryan’s (2016) use of “bullets” as a metaphor to emphasize the devastating impact of educational silencing, disrespect, rejection, and omission. Thus, an initial aspect of our framework is the acknowledgement of and ability to recognize when pedagogy and practice dehumanize as a preface for change. Educators can look for evidence of dehumanization by interrogating the content of our teaching to see if we actually normalize the histories, languages, heritages, contributions, and communities of Peoples of Color or if we only teach about those contributions in tokenized ways. This interrogation can be engaged in easily. In fact, middle level students can join teachers as they examine book collections and other classroom materials, websites, testing, posters and other artifacts that fill the walls and halls looking for rich and authentic evidence of a range of ways to be with regard to race, ethnicity, religion, family structure, sexual orientation, and gender identification. Strategies for action can be a part of this interrogation as students and teachers plan not only for an inclusive curriculum, but also one that actively critiques narrow views of what and who count and communicates those critiques to those with the power to affect change. In Susi’s work with Janice Baines and Carmen Tisdale, questions for reflection about typical educational institutions (e.g., curriculum, books and materials, policies, practices, physical environments) were offered to support faculty and administrators as they engage in self- and institutional-examination focused on the humanizing nature of caring in their educational settings. Those questions are reprinted below followed by a list of educational institutions that can be examined using those questions: Looking carefully at the following institutions [italics added] in my classroom, school, and district, what elements of bias do I discern as I consider oppression and privilege: Where do I see omission, marginalization, over- and under-representation, tokenization, and misrepresentation? Is change needed? What kind of change? How will I ensure that change occurs?

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• • • • • • • • • •

Curriculum? Books and materials? Pacing guides? Discipline policies and enforcement? Academic referrals (special education and gifted programs?) Daily practices? Individualized Educational Program (IEP) meetings? Response to Intervention (RTI) meetings? The walls of hallways, front office, classrooms? Attitudes and practices involving families? Language used to describe and label students and families? (Baines, Tisdale, & Long, 2018, p. 27)

Humanization or dehumanization of students can also be seen in the kinds of relationships teachers build with students; relationships that either support or destroy potential for students to be motivated, feel confident in their abilities, and achieve academically. Teachers cannot expect relationships to be reciprocally warm and supportive just because they believe them to be so. Even the most loving teachers may not recognize when they are condescending or patronizing toward students and families from backgrounds different from their own: “You know that family; from that neighborhood” or “Parents just aren’t home in that community” or “His behavior is clearly tied to his father not being in the house; that’s what happens in those families.” Thus, any form of humanity in the classroom must start by first believing that there is wisdom and love in students’ communities, and then by getting to know who and how that wisdom is shared by building strong bonds by spending time in the community not as voyeurs but as collaborators and learners. Toni described ways that she commits to humanizing pedagogies in her pre-service teacher education courses. Through demonstrations, she teaches strategies for building humanizing practices that she hopes the university students will use in their future middle level classrooms: In my first few classes of the semester, I begin by sharing about myself, my family and my teaching and life experiences. I do this to show students that who we are is important, in fact, foundational to our classroom as a caring, humanizing community. Then I ask students to share from their own life’s experiences, in writing or in verbal sharing. I am also sure to share the responsibility for building trust with them, just as I want them to do with their middle level students. So, at the end of the first class session, I ask them to reflect in writing about how we can build trust as a group. Toni’s students’ respond in ways that can help them think about the similar needs of their middle level students. They wrote that trust can be built by: • • • •

Being open with each other about our mistakes and experiences, Respecting each other’s opinions and thoughts, Talking about the problems we’ve been having and giving quality advice to help, and Being open minded and actively listening to each other (no interrupting).

We see these insights as humanizing strategies that are just as important for the middle level classroom as they are for the pre-service teacher. They align beautifully with Toni’s earlier work looking at the insights from Black teachers’ who remind us that students are humanized when they know that they matter and that they have worth, value, knowledge, and ability (Williams, 2018). 56

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Warmly Demand: Warmth + Expectation + Humanizing, Culturally Relevant Pedagogy Gay (2010) described caring in culturally responsive classrooms as warmly demanding, “characterized by patience, persistence, facilitation, validation, and empowerment” (p. 49). She wrote that teachers who truly care about their students “have high performance expectations and will settle for nothing less than high achievement” (p. 49). However, there are keys to the success of this conviction. According to Gay they are: (a) warm relationships; (b) ensuring that expectations are explicit, direct, and deliberate not generalized or incidental; (c) “work[ing] tenaciously to see that success for students happen” (p. 49); and (d) “an uncompromising faith in … students” (p. 75). In other words, it is not enough to demand high achievement; it must be paired with warmth, persistence, belief in students, and the kind of teaching that will ensure it. Thus, Gay characterized caring relationships as grounded in teachers’ “patience, persistence, facilitation, validation, and empowerment” (p. 49). This directly counters the kind of teaching that Gay wrote about as “academic neglect” and that Ladson-Billings (1995) described as giving students “permission to fail.” This can occur when teachers, guided by negative stereotypes and/ or White savior attitudes, teach down to Students of Color rather than teaching to high expectations. James Baldwin (1963) described this as requiring students to “make peace with mediocrity” (p. 7). The notion of warm-demanding teaching was originally coined by researcher Judith Kleinfeld (1975) whose studies of effective teachers of American Indian students in Alaska led to her descriptions of teaching that was personally warm and actively demanding. In Susi’s work, teacher Janice Baines described first steps in being able to warmly demand as “finding the heartstring” or “the loving connection that will allow her to establish high expectations” (p. 48). It is significant to note that this warm-demanding support for students was a dominant ideology for many Teachers of Color pre-desegregation. This has been described repeatedly in academic literature (Foster, 1997; Siddle Walker, 1996). Elders today remember a time when many neighborhood schools in Black communities supported students through this kind of loving insistence on achievement. A school board member interviewed in Baines and colleagues (2018) talked about how, in his youth, Black students were “instilled with, ‘Hey, you’re brilliant, you’re talented, you’re gifted, and we’re not going to allow you to fail’ … a sense of worth and value and uplift that was second to none” (p. 48). Janice and Carmen worked to bring the same heartstrings into their classrooms by developing warm relationships with student through their respect and trust for children and families and by using specific strategies such as researching the term, “scholar,” creating books and raps about their roles and responsibilities as scholars, making a point of regularly helping students see their brilliance, and letting them know that they come from brilliance through their broadened cultural base in the teaching of histories, heritage, and contemporary events.

Relearn Histories to Broaden the Curricular Center Critical to classrooms that demonstrate caring through culturally relevant and humanizing practice is educators’ commitment to build knowledge so they can broaden the curricular center from its Eurocratic dominance. This is what is meant when scholars write about decolonizing pedagogies. It is widely acknowledged that schools in colonized countries (e.g., the United States) were designed to promote and sustain European ideologies (Roediger, 2007). In fact, the curricula of today are not far removed from curricula instituted, in the interest of power and control, during initial days of European colonization (Kendi, 2016). To propagandize European superiority, colonizers systematically communicated falsehoods about Indigenous Peoples in Africa, Asia, and

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North and South America as barbaric, lacking intelligence, and being “uncivilized.” These falsehoods became accepted truths bolstered by the propaganda of enslavement and Jim Crow, many of which continue today and underlie deficit views of People of Color in and out of schools. In turn, “deficit notions of the resources of Communities of Color have fueled intolerance, bigotry, and assimilation throughout the history of U.S. public education” (Salazar, 2013, p. 122). Of course, genuine caring cannot exist while Eurocratic practices and policies persist; when curriculum marginalizes, omits, or distorts any Peoples’ history and contributions to the world’s knowledge. Rather than demonstrating caring, this ideology perpetuates the privileging of one People and the oppression of other Peoples. Not only does it marginalize or invisibilize students whose histories are left out, distorted, or on the periphery, but it unfairly informs students from dominant cultural groups that they descend from the primary contributors to the world’s knowledge (Nieto, 2017). This perpetuation of negative stereotypes communicates to White students that their peers of Color are less capable and less tied to ancestry of accomplishment. The result, as Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1970) wrote, is not only a dehumanization of those most marginalized, but a dehumanization of every student. To address these issues, educators interested in developing caring classrooms commit to the rigorous study of histories from Indigenous and Indigenous-descendent perspectives as opposed to the commonly-told versions from the perspective of the colonizer. They work in faculty study groups, on their own, and with their students to interrogate typical representations in history books, websites, maps, popular culture, fiction and nonfiction texts, and other artifacts. Through their interrogations, they look for the voices telling the stories: Are these colonized or Indigenous accounts? How can we seek Indigenous representations of history and of contemporary issues in science, geography, exploration, invention, literature, music, art, mathematics?

Assess Your Views of Students, Families, and Communities; Listen to and Trust Family and Community Members’ Insights It is likely clear by now that we hold a strong belief in classroom caring as grounded in teachers’ commitment to learn from students, their families and communities, histories, and heritages. Toni’s research helps us think carefully about this as she drew from Yosso’s (2005) descriptions of community cultural wealth as rich significant, but often dismissed when educators describe Communities of Color. Toni wrote about community cultural wealth as a source of strength, knowledge, and sustenance for Black students and for Black teachers (Williams, 2019). In that work, she outlined Yosso’s (2005) delineation of the kinds of knowledge (cultural wealth) that provide that strength and sustenance, including: • • • • •

Aspirational capital: Aspirations for achievement and success. Familial capital: Resources we draw from family and fictive kin networks. Social capital: Support we gain through organizations like churches, community centers, and schools. Navigational capital: Abilities to navigate the institutions in which we study and work that are often racialized and Eurocratic. Resistance capital: Understandings – situated in history – about the realities of racism and other inequities and our ability to recognize and resist them.

Identifying community cultural wealth can be challenging for teachers because they receive negatively-biased messages about homes and communities through school mythology and stereotypes about communities and families. One way that Toni addresses this with her pre-service teachers is by asking them to think about what Milner (2012) called mindsets in his book, Start 58

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Where You Are but Don’t Stay There: Understanding Diversity, Opportunity Gaps and Teaching in Today’s Classrooms. In the chapter titled, “A Diversity and/Opportunity Gaps Explanatory Framework,” Milner explained how deficit mindsets can lead teachers to “operate primarily from their own cultural ways of knowing [meaning that] the learning milieu can be foreign to students whose cultural experiences are different and inconsistent with teachers’ experiences” (Milner, 2012, pp. 23–24). From this point, Toni engages teacher candidates in considering their own biases, and then they get to know students and families with a mindset that acknowledges bias and strives to grow beyond it. Similarly, Susi works with teachers to engage them in interrogating their attitudes, which have often become “truths” borne of negatively-biased stereotype. Baines and colleagues (2018) suggested the following questions are foundational for teachers’ assessment of self with regard to families and community members: • • • • • •

What are my assumptions about and expectations for Students of Color, immigrant students, students from low-income households, and their families? What knowledge and expertise do my students and their families bring to my classroom? Do I recognize and utilize that knowledge and their brilliance? If so, how? If not, why not? Do I use deficit- or assets-based language when thinking and talking about students and their families? Do I hear it from colleagues and administrators? How do I react in ways that lead to change? What can I learn by video-recording my teaching to reflect on who I call on most and least frequently? Who do I position as smart, beautiful, dependable? How do I do that? Who is disciplined the most and the least? Are there demographic patterns in these observations? What can I do to change that? How do I make decisions about who I will refer to special education or gifted programs? What are the demographics of each? (p. 25)

Using this kind of assessment, educators can examine their attitudes toward students, families, and communities and, from this foundation, they can think about the importance of valuing family and community insights and challenging their own practices accordingly.

Learn about Students’ Cultural Community Wealth and Normalize It in Day-to-Day Curriculum that Builds a Critical Consciousness The previous section provided an important preface to the final element of our framework: the caring classroom as anchored in teachers’ dedication to learning about students’ cultural community wealth and normalizing it in day-to-day curriculum that builds students’ critical consciousness. This speaks directly to Geneva Gay’s (2010) description of culturally responsive teaching as “using cultural knowledge prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them” (p. 31) and Ladson-Billings’ (1995) tenet focusing on building students’ sociopolitical awareness or ability to recognize and respond to injustices. We know that, when teachers use frames of reference to which students can relate, they are more likely to engage in the lesson and work toward greater academic success (Gay, 2013; Karatas & Oral, 2015), and when they know that they have a stake in changing an inequitable status quo, they are more invested in work that is authentic and action-oriented. In the process, students from marginalized groups are able to see their communities and the histories of their People as significant and students from dominant cultural and racial groups can come to value the community cultural wealth (including histories and heritage) of groups that have been marginalized. In the 59

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process, teachers can contribute to creating a new norm in which currently marginalized communities are just as represented as dominant cultural communities and students are able to identify further injustices and speak back to them. One way that Toni helps teachers and pre-service teachers understand the concept of community cultural wealth is to engage them in considering their own communities. She explained: Because I want teachers and teacher candidates to gain a clear understanding of cultural community wealth, I bring a number of bags to class or to my professional development session. Each bag represents a part of me and my life. In addition, each bag has various pockets and zippers that can hold and hide various items (skills and knowledge) that I need as I teach and go about my day. As I carefully pack the contents for each bag of the day, I know specifically what I need to ensure my success. I ask the participants to think about the bags that they carry and what they mean and represent to them. They talk in small groups and acknowledge themselves as being family members, members of sororities and fraternities, counselors, travelers, gardeners, readers, lovers of music, athletes, etc. They also acknowledge their ethnicities. The discussion centers around the importance of knowing our bags are different but they all represent ability, intelligence, knowledge, and history. Susi conducts similar engagements with teachers. Educators share artifacts that help them tell stories from their lives, communities, and people in their communities. Through these stories, participants identify the vast funds of knowledge (Moll, 2000), skill, and insight that exist in every community. They create a web demonstrating that this knowledge includes – but extends far beyond – content addressed or honored in schools. For example, rarely do schools acknowledge the cognitive, social, and linguistic abilities required when People of Color must develop a double consciousness (Du Bois, 1903) to be able to succeed in multiple worlds, or when speakers of more than one language translate linguistically and culturally across the contexts of home and school. Also rare is an appreciation for multiple ways that families support students across cultural and economic contexts; for example, when faith-based communities teach cultural heritage because schools do not (Baines et al., 2018); families teach strategies for succeeding in a racist society (Myers, 2013); and communities teach strength to sustain confidence and the will to succeed in the face of messages of deficit and negative profiling. In some ways, however, while these engagements are helpful, they skim the surface of addressing ideologies that continue to present barriers to normalizing community cultural wealth in classrooms. We often see teachers taking up similar engagements as one-off activities rather than actually altering classroom norms that continue to be Eurocratic or that reflect deficit mindsets about students’ communities. This is why the second half of the subheading to this section is essential. It does little good to bring in a few books that reflect students’ communities and histories or to invite a few community representatives into the classroom if it is not combined with teachers’ and students’ development of a critical consciousness. This means teaching so that a critical stance is foundational every day in every way. It means teaching students and teachers to use a critical eye to examine and discuss historical and contemporary texts of all kinds. This means developing a critical eye as a habit of mind: Who is telling this story? Whose story is valued? Whose is devalued or dismissed? How can we hear and learn from the dismissed perspective? What can we do to change an unjust status quo? Recently Toni wrote about why this critical eye is so important to understanding and learning from community cultural wealth. In her introductory chapter to a book about valuing insights from Black communities, she wrote:

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The stories in this book will ring true for many scholars of Color but they are also essential for White scholars – colleagues and administrators in higher education – who need to recognize and appreciate wealth and brilliance in the lives of their peers of Color prior to the academy. These stories will also inform K–12 teachers and administrators as a way to counter erroneous deficit and damaging assumptions made about students, families, faculty members, communities of Color … As [educators] of Color, we continue to confront issues of discrimination and oppression and yet we thrive, not because of the systems in which we work but because of the communities from which we come, communities that we continue to recreate and nurture. It is not easy. The battle for the wealth of our communities to be recognized is always necessary. But the strength and brilliance of the communities that raised us makes it possible to challenge those deficit views as we work to change the new communities in which we find ourselves. The communities of our youth were/are not deficient. They are rich, vibrant, and full of wisdom and knowledge that stays with us as we persevere, take care of and demand excellence from each other, and refuse to settle for less than success. (Williams, 2018, p. viii)

Conclusion In this chapter, we drew on our work and the work of other educators to put forward a framework for caring in which educational settings normalize who students are and where they come from – their heritages, community knowledges, and ways of being. We reiterated Geneva Gay’s insistence that low expectations and focusing on what students do not bring to the classroom (deficit views) directly counter any promises that teachers and classrooms will demonstrate caring. We offered that learning from the wisdom of families and communities and understanding the depth of knowledge and skill that exists in every community are essential to caring classrooms. Finally, we invited educators to embrace a framework that we hope can contribute to overturning Eurocratic dominance in the interest of constructing a broader norm in terms of what can be. We hope this framework can be used as middle level teachers, teacher educators, pre-service teachers, and administrators assess schools, programs, classrooms, policies, and practices to determine whether or not they actually are grounding in characteristics that demonstrate caring for every student. We offer it as one way to take up the charge to overturn pedagogies that continue to relegate the same children to the school-to-prison pipeline (Alexander, 2012) or, at the very least, to a life of unfulfilled promise. Our students, teachers, families and communities deserve more.

References Alexander, M. (2012). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York, NY: The New Press. Asante, M. K. (2014). Facing south to Africa: Toward an Afrocentric critical orientation. New York, NY: Lexington Books. Asante, M. K. (2017). Revolutionary pedagogy: Primer for teachers of Black children. New York, NY: Universal Write Publications. Baines, J., Tisdale, C., & Long, S. (2018). “We’ve been doing it your way long enough:” Choosing the culturally relevant classroom. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Baldwin, J. (1963). The fire next time. New York, NY: Dial Press. Battiste, M. (2013). Decolonizing education: Nourishing the learning spirit. Saskatoon, Canada: Purich. Bauer, D., & Previts, J. L. (2016). Milestones in caring. Middle School Journal, 47(5), 2. Butler, T. (2017). #Say[ing] her name as critical demand: English education in the age of erasure. English Education, 49(2), 153–178.

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Cage, K. I. (1997). African American othermothering in the urban elementary school. Urban Education, 29(1), 25–39. Codrington, J., & Fairchild, H. H. (2013). Special education and the mis-education of African American children: A call to action. Washington, DC: The Association of Black Psychologists. Cook, D. A. (2010). Disrupted but not destroyed: Fictive-kinship networks among Black educators in post-Katrina New Orleans. Southern Anthropologist, 35(2), 1–25. Delpit, L. D. (1988). The silenced dialogue: Power and pedagogy in educating other people’s children. Harvard Educational Review, 58, 280–298. Delpit, L. (2006). Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York, NY: The New Press. Dillard, C. (2012). Learning to (re)member the things we’ve learned to forget: Endarkened feminisms, spirituality, and the sacred nature of research and teaching. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903). The souls of Black folk. Chicago, IL: A.C. McClurg & Co. Ford, D. (2013). Recruiting and retaining culturally different students in gifted education. Waco, TX: Prufock Press, Inc. Foster, M. (1997). Black teachers on teaching. New York, NY: The New Press. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum. Gay, G. (2010). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice (2nd ed.). New York: Teachers College Press. Gay, G. (2013). Teaching to and through cultural diversity. Curriculum Inquiry, 43(1), 48–70. Gilliam, W., Maupin, A., Reyes, C., Accavitti, M., & Shic, F. (2016). Do implicit biases regarding sex and race relate to behavior expectation and recommendations of preschool expulsions and suspensions? New Haven, CT: Yale University Child Study Center. Gilliam, W., & Shahar, G. (2006). Preschool and child care expulsion and suspension: Rates and predictors in one state. Infants and Young Children, 19(3), 228–245. Johnson, L., & Bryan, N. (2016). Using our voices, losing our bodies: Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and the spirit murders of Black male professors in the academy. Race Ethnicity and Education, 20(2), 163–177. doi:10.1080/13613324.2016.1248831 Karatas, K., & Oral, B. (2015). Teachers’ perceptions on culturally responsiveness in education. Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies, 2(2), 47–57. Kendi, I. X. (2016). Stamped from the beginning: The definitive history of racist ideas in America. New York, NY: Nation Books. King, J., & Swartz, E. (2016). The Afrocentric praxis of teaching for freedom: Connecting culture to learning. New York, NY: Routledge. King, J. E., & Swartz, E. E. (2018). Heritage knowledge in the curriculum: Retrieving an African episteme. London, UK: Routledge. Kleinfeld, J. (1975). Effective teachers of Eskimo and Indian students. School Review, 83, 301–344. Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African American children. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491. Ladson-Billings, G. (2014). Culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: a.k.a. the remix. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 74–84. Love, B. (2016). Anti-Black state violence, classroom edition: The spirit murdering of Black children. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 0(0), 1–3. Milner, H. R. (2012). Start where you are but don’t stay there: Understanding diversity, opportunity gaps and teaching in today’s classrooms. MA: Harvard Education Press. Moll, L. (2000). Inspired by Vygotsky: Ethnographic experiments in education. In C. Lee & P. Smagorinksy (Eds.), Vygotskian perspectives on literary research (pp. 256–268). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Morris, M. W. (2016). Pushout: The criminalization of Black girls in schools. New York, NY: The New Press. Muhammad, G., & Haddix, M. (2016). Centering Black girls’ literacies: A review of literature on multiple ways of knowing of Black girls. English Education, 48(4), 299–336. Myers, M. (2013). Finding common concerns for the children we share: Rural and Black families may support their child’s education in ways that differ from middle class. Phi Delta Kappan, 94(8), 39–44. National Middle School Association. (2010). This we believe: Keys to educating young adolescents. Westerville, OH: Association for Middle Level Education. Nieto, S. (2017, August 23). On reconciling divergent ideas: A life-long quest. Acquired Wisdom Series. In S. Tobias, D. F. Fletcher, & D. Berliner (Eds.), Education Review, 24. http://dx.doi.org/er.v24.2285 Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Noddings, N. (1992). The challenge to care in schools: An alternative approach to education. New York: Teachers College Press. Noddings, N. (1995). Teaching themes of care. Phi Delta Kappan, 76(9), 675. Owusu-Ansah, A., & Kyei-Blankson, L. (2016). Going back to the basics: Demonstrating care, connectedness, and a pedagogy of relationship in education. World Journal of Education, 6(3), 1–9. Paris, D. (2012). Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A needed change in stance, terminology, and practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93–97. Paris, D., & Alim, S. (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for Justice in a changing world. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Powell, A., & Seed, A. H. (2010). Developing a caring ethic for middle school mathematics classrooms. Middle School Journal, 41(4), 44–48. Rodríguez-Castro, M., Salas, S., & Murray, B. (2016). You say, “cariño”; I say, “caring”: Latino newcomer immigrant families in the middle. Middle School Journal, 47(5), 14–20. Roediger. (2007). The wages of whiteness: Race and the making of the working class. Brooklyn, NY: Verso. Salazar, M. (2013). A humanizing pedagogy: Reinventing the principles and practice of education as a journey toward liberation. Review of Research in Education, 37, 121–148. Siddle Walker, V. (1996). Their highest potential: An African American school community in the segregated south. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Thiong’o, N. (1986). Decolonizing the mind: The politics of language in African literature. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Watson, W., Sealey-Ruiz, Y., & Jackson, I. (2016). Daring to care: The role of culturally relevant care in mentoring Black and Latino male high school students. Race Ethnicity and Education, 19(5), 980–1002. doi:10.1080/ 13613324.2014.911169 Williams, D. M. (2012). Research summary: Care in the middle level classroom. Retrieved from www.amle.org /TabId/198/ArtMID/696/ArticleID/303/Research-Summary-Care-in-Middle-Level-Classroom.aspx Williams, T. M. (2018). Do no harm: Strategies for culturally relevant caring in middle level classrooms from the community experiences and life histories of Black middle level teachers. Research in Middle Level Education Online, 41(6), 1–13. doi:10.1080/19404476.2018.1460232 Williams, T. M. (2019). Coming back to the park: Community cultural wealth as a source of strength, knowledge, and sustenance. In C. P. Glover, T. Jenkins, & S. Troutman (Eds.), Culture, community, and educational success: Reimagining the invisible knapsack (pp. vii–xiii). New York, NY: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91.

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6 EXEMPLARY MIDDLE LEVEL EDUCATION IN THREE PACIFIC CONTEXTS Hawai‘i, American Samoa, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands Paul D. Deering, Deborah K. Zuercher, Kezia M. Curry, and Sabrina Suluai-Mahuka

The Pacific Ocean covers nearly half of the Earth’s surface and has more than forty nations and twenty territories bordering it or within its waters (West, 2009). The variation in cultures, races, political systems, economies, and educational practices across the region is as vast as the ocean itself. The three contexts addressed in this chapter—Hawai‘i, American Samoa, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands—are each unique, but all share close ties with each other and with the United States. This chapter offers an overview of each of the three locales in terms of their geography, history, economies, and K–20 education systems. This is followed by examples of excellent practice in middle level education distributed across three themes: nurturing and guiding students; content and processes of curriculum; and connecting with families, culture and community. These themes encompass the essential attributes of education for young adolescents in the Association for Middle Level Education’s (AMLE, formerly National Middle School Association [NMSA]) position statement This We Believe: developmentally responsive, challenging, empowering, and equitable (NMSA, 2010). Our three themes also encompass the characteristics of middle level education in This We Believe. The authors and contributors to this chapter are all current or former educators of young adolescents with up to forty years of experience with the age group. In addition, all are faculty, students and/or graduates of the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa’s [UHM] Master of Education Degree in Curriculum Studies with a Middle Level and Secondary Emphasis program (MSLMED; Deering, Zuercher, & Apisa, 2010). MSLMED, and its recent evolution to PACMED, with a focus on Pacific, culturally-responsive, place-based teaching of science, technology, engineering, arts, math and social sciences (STEAMS), will be described below. The examples offered here are not meant to be a comprehensive review of middle level education across the locales, but instead are intended to highlight a sampling of exemplary work being done in each place.

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Overview of Three Pacific Locales The three locales described in this chapter have much in common. Hawai‘i, American Samoa, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) are all Pacific island chains within the tropical latitudes near the International Date Line, and all are legally affiliated in some way with the United States. Hawai‘i is the fiftieth state, American Samoa is an unincorporated U.S. territory, and RMI is a presidential republic in free association with the United States (US Department of Interior, 2012). Each was colonized by a rotating cast of foreign powers, from both east and west, resulting in losses by the indigenous peoples of land, culture, language, and population. Now, various Christian religions play central roles in all three locales, particularly for persons of Pacific Islander ancestry. These three island chains contain some of the most beautiful scenery, peoples and cultures to be found anywhere in the world. Rich music and dance and linguistic, culinary, sporting, and historical customs characterize each locale. At the same time, all three places are at “ground zero” in facing global climate change. Extreme weather events have become common: American Samoa and Hawai‘i recently suffered substantial damage from Cyclone Gita and severe storm flooding. RMI consists entirely of low-lying atolls and is being gradually inundated by rising sea levels. All three locales’ water supplies are threatened by salinization of their aquifers from seawater encroachment (Fletcher, 2018; Maillet, Carpenter, Vermeesch, & McDonald, 2017). The indigenous peoples of Hawai‘i and American Samoa are of Polynesian ethnicity, while RMI’s are Micronesian—a mix of Polynesian and Malaysian (Winchester, 2015). The total populations are 1.4 million for Hawai‘i, 60,000 for American Samoa, and 53,000 for RMI.

Hawai‘i Hawai‘i is the most diverse U.S. state, comprised of fifteen to twenty-five percent each of persons of Hawaiian, Japanese, Filipino and Caucasian/European ancestry with more than a dozen other groups represented (United States Census Bureau [USCB], 2017). Many languages are spoken in Hawai‘i, with 12.6% of the population considered to speak English “less than very well” (USCB, 2017). Hawai‘i has two official languages: ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi—the indigenous Hawaiian language—and English (Holmes, 2012). The Hawaiian language has been rebounding substantially from near extinction last century, but is commonly spoken only on Ni’ihau, the westernmost of the inhabited islands. For many, Hawaiian Pidgin, the islands’ unique Creole dialect, is the first language, originating on the multilingual plantations (Da Pidgin Coup, 2004). Unifying the state’s myriad cultures is the Hawaiian concept of aloha, meaning love, compassion, friendship (Pukui & Elbert, 1992)—a deeply held value. Just over one million people live on the island of O‘ahu, where the capital city of Honolulu and the UHM main campus are located, with the rest of the population distributed on six “neighbor islands” which are separated by up to 60 miles of open ocean. The economy was once dominated by sugar and pineapple plantations, and is now dominated by tourism, both of which are quite centralized, boom-and-bust industries. At about 9-million visitors per year, tourism drives a staggeringly high cost of living, particularly for housing and food; $93,000 was recently identified as the threshold for a family of four to be considered “middle income” on O‘ahu (Schafers, 2017). Other major economic sectors include UHM, the U.S. military, corporate agriculture, public employment, and small-scale manufacturing and agriculture (Newsmax, 2018). Unemployment is extremely low, but many workers, including teachers, require multiple jobs to make ends meet. Hawai‘i has a poverty rate of 10.8% and substantial problems with homelessness, ill health, property crime, and substance abuse (USCB, 2017). Native Hawaiians, along with more recent arrivals from the Philippines and other Pacific island nations (including American Samoa and RMI), are disproportionately likely to suffer from these ills.

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American Samoa American Samoa consists of five main islands and two coral atolls. Tutuila is the largest, most populous island and site of the capital, Pago Pago (Central Intelligence Agency [CIA], 2018). American Samoa’s total land area is just larger than the District of Columbia. Similar to Hawai‘i, American Samoa’s islands consist of rugged volcanic mountains mostly covered by dense tropical forests. An 1899 treaty gave the United States control of the eastern Samoan islands, dubbed “American Samoa.” The western islands were known as “Western Samoa” until 1997, when they changed their name to the “Independent State of Samoa,” or just “Samoa,” much to the chagrin of their eastern neighbors (United States Department of State [USDS], 2017). American Samoa has been governed by a popularly elected governor and legislature since 1978. The governor appoints the director of the American Samoa Department of Education (ASDOE) who then appoints leaders of divisions such as Teacher Quality; Office of Curriculum, Instruction and Accountability; Career and Technical Education; JROTC; Early Childhood/Elementary/Secondary; and Special Education (ASDOE, 2018a). This appointment process results in education priorities that can shift substantially with elections. American Samoa’s population consists of more than 90% ethnic Samoans, with other Pacific Islanders, Asians, and Westerners comprising the remainder (American Samoa Department of Commerce [ASDOC], 2011, 2018). By Polynesian tradition, more than 90% of American Samoa’s land is communally owned, with its village-based extended families controlling it. Just under one-third of the population is employed, with the public sector (e.g., government, public services, education), a tuna cannery, and the private sector accounting for roughly equal portions. Unemployment is nearly 30%, with the poverty rate estimated to be nearly fifty percent—higher for children and rural/outlying residents (Rural Health Information Hub, 2010). Unlike Hawai‘i, and similar to RMI, tourism is not a major factor in the American Samoa economy. As with Hawai‘i and RMI, American Samoa’s population is struggling with the impact of a more sedentary lifestyle and a high-sugar/high-fat diet that is prevalent in the U.S. mainland. More than 90% of the American Samoa population is overweight or obese, about one-half suffer from type 2 diabetes, and there is only one hospital in the islands (World Health Organization, 2007). Infrastructure for water and sewer is generally good, with electricity and internet connectivity less dependable (CIA, 2018). While Samoan and English are both official languages, the latter is used extensively in schools, though fluency levels are widely varied.

Republic of the Marshall Islands RMI is part of the vast island group of Micronesia and occupies 29 coral atolls and more than 1000 islands spread over a roughly 800-by-800 mile span of ocean (Winchester, 2015). The Marshalls have been inhabited for several thousand years by ethnic Micronesians, while Portugal, Spain, Germany and Japan had colonial control at various points since the 1500s. The United States gradually returned sovereignty after World War II, culminating in independence in 1979. Now RMI, along with several other Pacific island nations, is part of the Compact of Free Association with the United States (COFA)—a military and economic agreement that provides grants for health, education, and infrastructure and allows essentially open travel, residency, and employment in the United States. COFA, due to terminate in 2023, is the United States’ compensation for its military base on Kwajalein and for conducting nuclear weapons testing in the region during the Cold War, a process that spread immense destruction, disease, death, and displacement with repercussions still being felt today (Guardian, 2014; Ministry of Education, Republic of Marshall Islands [MOE-RMI], 2014; Winchester, 2015).

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RMI’s islands and atolls are very low in elevation with a maximum of 10 meters, making them extremely vulnerable to sea level rise caused by climate change (McNamara & Gibson, 2009). Fresh water is in short supply due to limited processing capacity. With few natural resources, RMI runs a substantial trade deficit and has a per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of $3,300. The major economic engines are education, public administration, commerce, and fishing at 15–23% of GDP each, but unemployment is nearly 40% (Index Mundi, 2006; MOERMI, 2014). Tourism is a very limited aspect of the economy. About 30% of residents are in poverty in the two urban centers of Ebeye and Majuro, and double that in rural areas, with hunger and poor nutrition resulting (Fielder, 2017). Health issues are daunting for the Marshallese, with type 2 diabetes rates among the world’s highest (Davis, 2008).

Education in Three Pacific Locales Just as the three locales share geographic and cultural characteristics, they also have common educational strengths, challenges, and practices. Each has a population where the majority speaks a first language other than standard English. All three have high rates of students from impoverished or low-income homes. All three entities have centralized departments of education under the USDOE and that are subject to its regulations, including mandated standardized testing. Such instruments are limited tools at best, and are particularly suspect with populations high in linguistic diversity and poverty, as in these three locales (Furuto, 2014; Meier & Wood, 2004). Not surprisingly, all three locales are stigmatized by low rankings on such measures. One further educational challenge is that each site has difficulty developing and retaining well-prepared teachers, with high costs of living and relatively low pay among the causes (e.g., Essoyan, 2018; Zuercher et al., 2012). Middle level education has received little systemic attention in the manner recommended by AMLE/NMSA (1982, 1995, 2010) and the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development (1989, 1995) in any of the three locales. Nevertheless, much innovation has proceeded in the middle grades, supported first by the Hawai‘i Association of Middle Schools (HAMS), an affiliate of AMLE, which began offering professional development in 1989. The movement took a leap forward in 1996 with the founding of UHM’s MSLMED program (Deering et al., 2010), a two-year, cohorted inservice program for educators of adolescents. The program has graduated just under 300 educators at a greater than 96% completion rate. Since it began operating as a synchronous, online program in 2009, MSLMED has expanded to serve all the Hawaiian Islands, the U.S. mainland, American Samoa, and RMI with a current enrollment of about eighty. MSLMED graduates have been key innovators and leaders, winning numerous awards such as the Hawai‘i Department of Education (HIDOE) Teacher of the Year, HAMS Middle Level Educator of the Year, Fulbright Fellowships, and others. A 2017 innovation in MSLMED, at the request of RMI and AS policymakers, was an expansion of its grade-level focus to K–20, with an emphasis on Pacific, culturallyresponsive, place-based teaching of STEAMS subjects (Department of Curriculum Studies [EDCS], 2018). Under its new acronym of PACMED, the program still includes a substantial focus on the crucial age group of young adolescents, the heart of its expanded age range and a primary interest of the three core faculty—the first three authors of this chapter.

Hawai‘i Just more than 200,000 youths attend school in Hawai‘i, with 80% in the United States’ only statewide education system, the HIDOE, and a national high of 20% attending private schools (Honolulu Star-Advertiser, 2017). The centrality of the HIDOE promotes equity, but its large size and disjointed geography tend to inhibit systemic change. Also, the private school population 67

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draws disproportionately from families higher in wealth, education, and political clout, diverting these assets from the HIDOE. Almost fifty percent of HIDOE students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch and just over 12% are identified for special education services and 8% percent for English language learner (ELL) services though, again, many speak Hawaiian Creole as their first language (HIDOE, 2018). The HIDOE’s Vision reads: “Hawaii’s students are educated, healthy and joyful lifelong learners who contribute positively to our community and global society” (HIDOE, 2018). To these ends, the HIDOE adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) as its curriculum in 2010. The primary standardized achievement test is the locally developed Smarter Balanced Assessment, administered annually in grades 3–8 and 11. Data from years 2015 to 2017 show grades 6 to 8 hovering around the 50% “met proficiency” level in reading and 40% in math (HIDOE, 2017). The National Assessment of Educational Progress ([NAEP]; National Center for Educational Statistics [NCES], 2018) ranked Hawai‘i public schools in the bottom third of U.S. states on reading and math proficiency, with eighth graders notably lower in math rank than their fourth grade counterparts; a recent bright spot was a gain of 4 scaled score points in reading for eighth graders in 2017. Thus, even taken with caution, the NAEP and SBAC data show room for improvement in middle level student achievement in Hawai‘i. The HIDOE’s young adolescents attend schools with myriad configurations, including small K–12 schools; K–5, K–6 or K–8 elementary schools; 6–8 or 7–8 middle/intermediate schools; and 7–12 or 9–12 high schools. Reform in the middle grades has been sporadic, though a notable advance was the adoption of the Middle Level Education Policy in 2001 (HIDOE, 2001 [Policy]), which drew upon recommendations of NMSA (1982, 1995) and CCAD (1989, 1995). Almost simultaneously, however, the misnamed No Child Left Behind Act (USDOE, 2002) ushered in the era of high-stakes testing which dominates to this day (Deering, 2006; Furuto, 2014). Thus, policy directives such as a “rich and challenging standards-based curriculum which addresses the developmental needs of young adolescents” were left to the good will of individual schools and educators instead of being systemic. Leading such decentralized innovation are educators supported by MSLMED/PACMED and HAMS.

American Samoa Public education in American Samoa is administered by the Director of the ASDOE, with the USDOE providing the majority of educational funding (ASDOE, 2014). There were 15,531 students in the ASDOE’s 22 early childhood and elementary schools and six high schools and six private schools in 2015 (ASDOE, 2015). The ASDOE Vision calls for “all our children to achieve success locally and abroad; to understand the Samoan language and culture; and to be proud of their heritage, while appreciating the cultural diversity of American Samoa” (ASDOE, 2018b, p. 5). The ASDOE’s 2012 Strategic School Improvement Plan focuses on: CCSS initiative, school evaluation, teacher evaluation, teacher certification, technology, parent and community, assessment, and college and career readiness (ASDOE, 2015). There are limited opportunities for higher education on site in the territory, including the American Samoa Community College, and Wayland Baptist University, with other institutions offering online or hybrid programs. UHM has run a bachelor of education degree program on site for more than thirty years, a degree that is held by many secondary teachers. In 2015, of the approximately 1,300 ASDOE teachers, 382 held a bachelor’s degree, 301 held an associate’s degree and 113 had less than that (ASDOE, 2015). A bachelor’s degree, ASDOE Teacher Certification Courses, and Praxis I are the requirements for earning a professional teacher certificate. However, Praxis I is a linguistic and cultural challenge for American Samoa teachers. Of 951 Praxis I test takers in American Samoa, only 170 passed (ASDOE, 2015). All teachers are evaluated by their 68

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administrator at least twice a year using the Teacher Performance Evaluation System, which consists of student work samples, teacher professional portfolio, teacher attendance, and classroom observation (ASDOE, 2015). Pedagogy tends to be quite traditional in American Samoa, with teacher-centered instruction common (Zuercher et al., 2012). Class sizes are in the mid-twenties and up in the more central schools, and as low as 10 or fewer in outer districts. Instruction is conducted mostly in English for grades 5–12, per USDOE regulations, but there is increasing encouragement from the ASDOE to use and support the Samoan language (ASDOE, 2015). Graduates of UHM programs are particularly likely to employ more contemporary pedagogy, such as project-based learning, authentic curriculum and assessment, and cooperative/collaborative group learning (Zuercher et al., 2012). There is limited standardized achievement data for American Samoa students. The ASDOE administers the Stanford Achievement Test Series with well more than half of students scoring “below basic” in 2015 (ASDOE, 2015). The most recent NAEP data is from 2002 for reading and 2000 for math, with eighth graders’ means well below basic in both areas (NCES, 2018). American Samoa students—and their teachers—are far more likely to speak English as a second language and to come from low-income homes than Hawai‘i’s, so the low standardized achievement scores are not a surprising challenge noted by the ASDOE (2015). Innovation in the middle grades in American Samoa schools has received a boost from the 34 graduates of the MSLMED program and the 42 current students. They have grown as leaders in their schools and the ASDOE, with four recognized as the American Samoa Territorial Teacher of the Year since 2009, and many winning similar school level awards. Seven of MSLMED’s American Samoa graduates are now lecturers in the program, including author Sabrina, and nine are pursuing their doctoral degrees in UHM’s hybrid Ph.D. in Learning Design and Technology program (LTEC). Thus, the development of locally based capacity in educational leadership is gaining momentum.

Republic of the Marshall Islands Public education in RMI is administered by the MOE-RMI (2014) which is “responsible for the administration of primary and secondary programs in the Republic,” both public and private (p. 4). More than 80% of the MOE’s budget comes from the United States via COFA and other grants. RMI has about 15,000 public and 3,000 private school students in 110 schools of varied grade configurations, with “the sheer number of schools.. a result of both geography (i.e., widely dispersed atolls and islands) and the national policy of providing universal access to schooling” (p. 5). Thirty students is a fairly typical class size in all but the very small schools. Teachers are required to have an associate’s degree in education, or in another field with 16 credits in education, to be considered fully prepared (MOE-RMI, 2014). However, 2012–13 data indicated that a plurality of 40% held associate’s degrees and only about 20% bachelor’s degrees or higher. The shortage of teachers, particularly on outlying islands where enrollment may be as low as 1, has led RMI to accept recruits from the WorldTeach Program, which places college-educated volunteers with no education backgrounds for one-year stints (WorldTeach, 2018). Among the options for post-secondary education in RMI are the College of the Marshall Islands (CMI), University of the South Pacific-Marshall Islands (USP-MI), the RMI National Training Council (NTC), and, more recently, the UHM PACMED. RMI is a signatory to the World Education Forum’s (2000) Education for All which calls for equitable access to free, universal, compulsory education with special emphasis on underserved populations such as the economically disadvantaged, young children, and girls. The document calls for “improving all aspects of the quality of education and ensuring excellence 69

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of all so that recognized and measurable learning outcomes are achieved by all, especially in literacy, numeracy, and essential life skills” (MOE-RMI, 2014, p. 8). Curriculum standards for RMI students are delineated by subject area and grade level and are quite similar to those of CCSS, with expectations/benchmarks, sample performance indicators, and resources (MOERMI, 2009). Instruction in grades K–3 is in the Marshallese language, and then English from grade four upward (MOE-RMI, 2016–2017). Among their notable areas of progress are grades 1–8 school enrollment averages of 90%; however, dropout during that span runs over 30%, and a youngster spending a year or more out of school is not uncommon. School curriculum focuses on English language arts, Marshallese language arts, math, science, and social studies/Marshallese studies. Instruction is typically delivered one subject at a time, with a set time for each, even in selfcontained classrooms. Student achievement of the curriculum standards is measured by the Marshall Islands Standards Assessment Test (MISAT), which is administered to all students in grades 3, 6, 8, 10, and 12. Results from the 2016 MISAT showed sixth graders with proficient percentages of 20% or less in science, math, and English reading and 39% in Marshallese reading. Eighth graders fared markedly better with an all-subjects proficiency mean of 41%, English at 48%, and Marshallese at 64%. The data show large gaps in favor of urban students over their rural/outlying peers in all subjects, and girls ahead of boys in all subjects in elementary grades, but equal in eighth (MOE-RMI, 2014).

Exemplary Middle Level Education in Three Pacific Locales Excellence in middle level education can be found across all three Pacific locales, as will be detailed below. Despite the limited attention at the policy level to middle level education, each of the contributors to this chapter recognizes, embraces, and addresses the unique characteristics and needs of young adolescents (NMSA, 2010). This has resulted in wonderful and diverse practices as described for each locale across the three themes of nurturing and guiding students; content and processes of curriculum; and connecting with families, culture and community. There is considerable overlap or synergy across the themes as would be expected, but hopefully this organization will be helpful for readers.

Nurturing and Guiding Students Good educational practice for any age group addresses the “whole learner” as delineated in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs (e.g., Deering, McAleese, Hannah, & McLean, 2013). A holistic, “whole village” approach is all the more crucial with young adolescents, given their enormous developmental changes. This We Believe (NMSA, 2010; paraphrasing) elaborates on nurturing and guiding, with educators and leaders who value young adolescents and are knowledgeable about the age group; organizational structures that foster meaningful relationships; a school environment that is inviting, safe inclusive, and supportive of all; every student guided by an adult advocate; comprehensive guidance and support services; comprehensive health and wellness; and involvement of families, the community and business partners.

Hawai‘i Many Hawai‘i middle level teachers emphasize the importance of reaching everyone and capitalizing on “small moments” to interact personally with their students, citing research about the importance of caring adults in the students’ lives (e.g., Strahan, L’Esperance, & Van Hoose, 2009). Amy and Kristen have “open door policies” whereby their classrooms are open before and after school, and 70

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during recess and lunch hour, so students can visit to just hang out. Amy noted that she learns about students’ interests and hobbies and can offer guidance on concerns they bring up: “I make it very clear that once a student is in my class, they are forever in my heart as one of my kids.” Kristen makes a point of attending outside events such as science fairs, competitions, sports games, and performances to connect on deeper levels with her students. Both enjoy visits from past students who visit years later, just to talk story—an informal, overlapping conversational structure common in Hawai‘i (Pukui & Elbert, 1979). Many Hawai‘i schools and teachers employ advisory programs to more systematically build teacher-student relationships and to teach crucial pro-social and coping skills (Strahan et al., 2009). They particularly focus on bullying, both electronic and in-person, emphasizing that there is no such thing as “an innocent bystander.” You are either with the victim, or you are with the bully (Hudson, Asikas, D. Lang, C. Lang, & Deering, 2012). Amy capitalizes on her school’s miniscule ten minute advisory to open each day with a “check-in,” when students share what is happening in their lives and unload stresses. Combined with an inspiring Morning Message like, “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” the students charge into the school day with a solid, human grounding. Kristen helps her advisory students to set and monitor monthly SMART Goals—goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound (Toolshero, 2018)—and to create steps to achieve those goals. She and Amy, who employs a similar process, noted that students tell them they feel empowered as they point out progress and adjust strategies. Adolescent health risks are a great concern to akamai (Hawaiian, for “with-it;” Pukui & Elbert, 1992) teachers like Nathan, who focus on the whole child, including physical, social, emotional and cognitive wellness. Especially worrisome is the prevalence of obesity. Therefore, Nathan provides students with healthy snacks including fruits, nuts, and breakfast bars instead of the offerings from local merchants that are laden with high fructose corn syrup, fat, salt, sugar, caffeine, and preservatives. Nathan has subsequently noticed better attitudes and focus with his students, especially when they have to sit for the grueling standardized tests. Maintaining a positive and productive learning environment is mostly about prevention, as reflected in the practices noted above. Kristen further systematizes this via TRIBES Agreements about how the classroom should “look, sound, and feel” (Gibbs, 2001). Since the agreements are constructed by the students, buy-in is natural. Amy and her colleagues participate in Kindness Week each year to cultivate this value throughout the school community, and her students keep Gratitude Journals as a means of noting appreciation for others. Similarly, Rianne and her middle level teammates emphasize emotional intelligence to help students understand and manage their feelings and behavior (Dell’Antonia, 2016), thus reducing the likelihood of anxiety, depression and other challenges. Nathan and some of the other authors noted that they are especially attuned to the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning youth (LGBTQ), as some may leave them out of Hawai‘i’s aloha spirit. As in other locales, they can be at risk for harassment, victimization, sexual risk behaviors, substance abuse, and suicide (Hudson et al., 2012). Nathan addresses gender differences in advisory, and consciously strives to model tolerance and acceptance. Preventative measures, of course, can reduce but not eliminate inappropriate behavior (Strahan et al., 2009). Rianne and her team have some cutting-edge responses to redirect behavior. First, they allow students to take a walk in the team space when they need to just blow off steam. A further option is their Mindful Space—a converted storage room complete with tatami mats, pillows, gyroscope, Newtonʻs cradle, and a white-noise maker where students can meditate or just “chill” as needed. The teachers and students have found this self-directed intervention technique to be far more effective than more punitive options. In sum, akamai Hawai‘i teachers know that everyone wins when they take the time to address important social-emotional needs and to teach and model appropriate, caring behavior. 71

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American Samoa The best of American Samoa’s teachers take good care of young adolescents, helping to guide them to healthy habits and happy living. Sabrina focuses carefully on making students feel welcome in her classroom. She attributed her initial love of students and teaching to being the daughter of a dedicated teacher. Sabrina strives to pass on her mother’s and former teachers’ warmth and enthusiasm to her own students. She finds that small treats for a job well done, accompanied by inspiring messages, are helpful extrinsic incentives for her learners. However, Sabrina knows that enduring motivation must be intrinsic, and a key factor for adolescents in this area is having voice (Van Hoose, Strahan, & L’Esperance, 2001). Sabrina promotes this by having students create bulletin boards on a bi-weekly basis, a task they embrace with gusto. Similarly, Brittany’s students display lots of their work on the classroom walls because the space is owned by all. Promoting positive, productive behavior can be challenging with a roomful of young adolescents, as they generally have more energy than their teachers and outnumber them. Fau noted that “classroom management” should not be a list of teacher dictates, but rather agreements between students and teacher that make learning effective, approachable, and fun. Thus, Fau solicits student input on daily activities, offering choices regarding group or individual work—oral or written—and more. Sabrina’s students keep track of their good behavior on a Star Chart that promotes personal and group accountability for a positive learning environment. A related issue is bullying, an area of concern to many American Samoa educators, as is true in many locales (Juvonen, Graham, & Schuster, 2003). Fau and her teammates address this as part of the core curriculum. They integrate bullying into their study of U.S. history, with connections made to the Thirteenth Amendment. This culminates with an Abolish Bullying Week, with daily events including poetry, banners, T-shirt day, guest speakers, and more. Desmond is also concerned about bullying, and she noted its correlation with suicide, depression, and other maladies (Hudson et al., 2012). She and her colleagues employ role play activities for prevention and counseling for intervention. Brittany found that daily journal writing helps her students to open up about personal issues like bullying and others that they might initially hesitate to talk about. The one-to-one conferences she holds with them allow the students to explore the issues in greater depth and seek solutions. Nurturing and guiding students toward healthy living also includes addressing their physical needs. All the American Samoa PACMED participants have expressed great concern over the obesity epidemic in their homeland (ASDOC, 2018), and they are taking steps to address this. Dora and her colleagues hold a Better Health Fair, which includes speakers from the Department of Health who share information on healthy eating and physical activity. She also addresses negative stereotyping of overweight persons, a form of bigotry that tends to go unchallenged in many contexts (Sheehan, 2010). The book, Eating the Rainbow: Lifelong Nutritional Wellness—Without Lies, Hype, or Calculus (Chong & Kerr, 2012) is geared towards healthy, happy eating in the Pacific islands and is used in various UHM courses. It has become a fixture in American Samoa classrooms, helping students and teachers alike to make reasonable choices about food instead of the deprivation-and-binge cycle of “dieting.” Brittany makes use of Rainbow concepts by setting healthy eating goals with her students and keeping daily food logs to monitor progress. Malo and her students have targeted sugar in all its different forms and products as their food nemesis. Brittany, Malo, and Desmond get physical with their students with regular exercise, including Tae Bo, Zumba, basketball, volleyball, and more. Some of the activities involve the entire school such as the Turkey Run and Zumba. Aware of the unique and intense pressures experienced by adolescent girls (e.g., Mann, 2013), Fau and her colleagues hold a Girls Day Out at their school. Boys stay home on this day while

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girls experience an array of offerings geared to their needs, including career and information booths from the Health Department, Family Planning, banking, education, and other service providers. Another gender-identity issue addressed by progressive American Samoa educators is that of LGBTQ students, particularly fa‘afafine, persons born with male anatomy who identify with both female and male traits, i.e., a third gender identity (Thompson, 2017). This was a common and accepted role in traditional Samoan culture, but has become increasingly stigmatized as outside influences take hold. Fa‘afafine teachers, as well as their male and female colleagues, teach about acceptance of everyone and keep a watchful eye out for the well-being of their fa‘afa students. Dora focuses on another population with unique needs—persons with disabilities. She manages grant-funded programs providing assistive devices, special education services, and school-to-workplace placements for students with the full range of needs identified by the USDOE (2018). Exemplary educators in American Samoa address the intense needs of young adolescents for nurturing and guidance with formal and informal efforts that are as diverse as the learners they serve (Van Hoose, et al., 2001). These educators further support student learning through the integration of cultural values and traditions in daily instruction, such as the concept of fa’aaloalo (respect; Pratt, 2018) in which classroom behavior strategies emphasize respect between students and teachers. In addition, the extended family, or ‘aiga, is a crucial part of nurturing and guiding of Samoan youth, as will be elaborated further below.

Republic of the Marshall Islands Exemplary middle level educators in RMI, like their colleagues in the other two locales, emphasize the importance of caring relationships as the basis of their work. Well aware of their own feelings of loneliness and “differentness” as adolescents, they are especially attuned to such students themselves. Administrators and former teachers Donna, Ricky, and Jelton concurred that a teacher must open her heart to her students and treat them “like your own kid.” They give respect to receive respect. This makes it likelier that a student will come to that educator when the inevitable teen crises arise, consistent with so much scholarship on the age group (e.g., Strahan et al., 2009). Ander described a couple of cases in which students were new to the area and afraid to come to school. He had each of them attend school in his vice-principal office for several weeks until they got over their fears and transitioned to regular classes. Afterward, one such girl called him “Papa.” All RMI contributors described variations of the open-door policy of allowing students to “drop in,” hang out and chat informally as a means to nurture them organically. The close-knit communities throughout RMI are a key asset that educators draw upon. They usually know their students’ families, seeing them in the community and at church. Rather than being a dual, school-home threat regarding misbehavior, Donna and others described this as a basis for empathy. The students know that the teachers are aware of their families’ struggles and successes, making for a strong bond. Each of the RMI authors engage in home visits to better understand students’ family lives. Jelton often has a parent attend school with the child when there are prolonged behavior problems. He even did so himself with his own fourteen-year-old son for an entire week. In this case, as with others, behavior and attitude rapidly improved. A wonderful option for adolescents who do not succeed in the regular classroom environment is the Waan Aelõñ in Majel Program (WAM, 2018). At-promise youth (f.k.a., at-risk; Kitashima, 2017), both boys and girls, learn to build and operate traditional Marshallese sailing canoes while learning teamwork, technical skills, and discipline and advancing toward high school completion. Another strategy advocated by Winnie and her colleagues for redirecting a youngster’s inappropriate behavior is to enlist them as a helper. Then, a child who is accustomed to being 73

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viewed as a “problem” gets to experience being valued and usually makes a turn for the better. A common concern among educators of adolescents is bullying (Hudson et al., 2012), and RMI is no exception. Ricky pointed out that adolescents are trying to find who they are, and some turn to bullying in this identity quest because they experience it at home or in the community. Winnie noted that sometimes educators themselves engage in bullying behaviors by yelling at students or using corporal punishment, despite regulations proscribing such practices; she is quick to intervene as an administrator in such cases. All the RMI contributors note that their schools teach bullying prevention and intervention to students and teachers on a regular basis. A common response to bullying is bringing together bully and victim for counseling, often with parents involved as well. Holistic student health is a major focus of the RMI authors and the MOE-RMI (2014) and PACMED programs (EDCS, 2018). Schools in RMI open each day with a whole-school assembly (or Mondays and Fridays for larger schools) when updates and encouragement are shared and physical activity is often included. Ricky noted that students are more alert in morning classes as a result, and they now look forward to the exercise sessions after complaining originally. This relates to Jelton’s concern that youngsters often lack supervision right into the evening hours and, thus, get insufficient sleep. He is working with parents, the community and police to raise awareness about this issue and to get more consistent enforcement of the curfew. Another health concern of Ricky is that his school of about 300 students has one or more teen pregnancies each year, so their goal is for students to have a well-rounded understanding of human reproduction and sexuality. The conservative culture and religious traditions notwithstanding, they offer sexuality education that emphasizes age-appropriate abstinence and safe practices. Consistent with research that comprehensive sexuality education leads to later onset of sexual activity and to safe practice (Ott & Santinelli, 2007), Ricky noted that they had no teen pregnancies in the past year. Nurturing and guiding students toward healthy living and learning as practiced in RMI, Hawai‘i, and American Samoa is deeply entwined with the other two thematic areas, as will become apparent below.

Content and Processes of Curriculum “Curriculum” carries many definitions—from “the next page in the textbook” or “what’s on the standardized test” (Meier & Wood, 2004)—to the more expansive concept of all that is experienced by students in relation to the learning or school context (e.g., Eisner, 1985; Frazee & Rudnitski, 1995). The experienced curriculum concept is embraced here, as it encompasses This We Believe’s (2010; paraphrasing) characteristics of active, purposeful learning; challenging, exploratory, integrative and relevant experiences; multiple learning and teaching approaches; varied and ongoing assessments; shared vision; every student’s academic and personal development being guided; health and wellness supported; and family, community and business involvement.

Hawai‘i Teachers of young adolescents in Hawai‘i have increasingly embraced active, student-centered curriculum since HAMS began offering professional development in 1989 (Deering, 2002). MSLMED/PACMED thrust the movement into overdrive in 1996, with some middle level schools having a majority of their faculty holding degrees from the program (Deering et al., 2010). A MSLMED 2018 graduate, Nathan had already been engaging in cutting-edge practices 74

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with his humanities students and found that MSLMED gave him added impetus and depth of understanding. He cited the tremendous physical changes of adolescence as requiring frequent opportunities for physical movement and periods of rest. In their Gothic Unit, Nathan’s students work in groups to create human pointed arches and flying buttresses which must support the weight of a student. The youngsters apply complex physics and math concepts while getting their bodies in motion. Nathan noted that this enables them to readily apply these principles to other contexts—impressive assessment and transfer (Martin, 2018). Active curriculum is the norm in Kristen’s classroom as well, and she added that exploration and inquiry are also essential to allow students to broaden their views of the world and themselves (AMLE, 2012). Kristen’s students are constantly involved in hands-on lab investigations, such as Build a Plankton in which they construct the micro-organisms with straws, paper clips, and other common items. Rianne enlists her students in creating active learning experiences, For example, when a team led the class in analyzing conclusions about Civil War leaders; a highlight of this process was their use of a potato as a computer mouse in the Scratch coding program. Li Yu has his Mandarin language students learn, practice, apply, and assess their language in authentic contexts: playing the Chinese national game of ping-pong; bargaining with vendors in Honolulu’s Chinatown using their own, hard-earned money; and asking a classmate out on a date (simulated). Authenticity is a central focus of all the Hawai‘i contributors; in other words, engaging students in real tasks in the real world (Jackson & Davis, 2000; Martin, 2018). Jayne uses authentic, lively learning opportunities for assessment, for example the Cup of Destiny rap battle in which students assume the identity of a historical figure in a beatbox showdown against another such figure—an updated version of the Lincoln-Douglas debate! Rianne’s students work in groups of three to create Team Tales—creative fiction composed in a shared Google document that applies the relevant vocabulary along with story elements, dialogue, and other writing conventions. Just like “real” authors, their work is read, enjoyed and critiqued by interested readers. Nathan brings to life the concept of a “pilgrimage” from medieval studies by having his students plan and conduct an On Campus Pilgrimage where they get to visit classes, offices, workshops and other “exotic destinations” at their school. Amy and her teaching team collaborate on authentic, multidisciplinary curriculum, such as their field study of the Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park. The students work in groups before, during, and after the trip to investigate native and introduced species, to hike safely over challenging and potentially dangerous terrain, and to explore volcanology and the cultural significance of the area. All these examples of active, authentic curriculum involve student collaboration and decisionmaking, both of which support adolescents’ cognitive and social development (Jackson & Davis, 2000). Amy referenced Couros (in Merrill, 2017) on this, noting that a teacher’s job is not to control students, but to unleash their talent. She and her team unleash students’ talents by allowing them to choose how to demonstrate their learning, with collaborations on songs or games among their options. Aware of the vast research base favoring collaborative over individualistic learning (e.g., Loop, 2017; Webb, Nemer, Kersting, Ing, & Forrest, 2004), Rianne applies varied and sophisticated grouping approaches—a combination of teacher- and student-selected groups, which shares power, and also assignment of specific groupings for specific purposes. For example, Rianne cited works such as The Empathic Civilization: Boys Are Key to an Empathic Future (Thompson, 2011) as a rationale for some same-sex grouping to allow both boys and girls a chance to relax and just be themselves. Each Hawai‘i author takes pride in striving to meet the needs of all students. Jayne noted that students with an anxiety and mood disorder (Mann et al., 2011) have great difficulty with oral presentations. She scaffolds their preparation with help in planning, extra time, and lots of encouragement so that some are even able to throw down in the Cup of Destiny. Rianne has found that listening to the audio version while simultaneously reading a book is especially helpful 75

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for students with dyslexia or other processing challenges. Kristen’s open-door policy extends to helping her students with work from any class; she noted that their trust and comfort level means students often come to her for help, regardless of content area. All the curricular innovations created by the Hawai‘i authors and their students are interdisciplinary, transcending the artificial boundaries of separate subjects so young adolescent minds can better make big connections in their learning (Beane, 1993; Jackson & Davis, 2000). Whether examining the history and scientific advances of the Victorian Era of Lewis Carroll and Charles Dickens with Amy’s team, or investigating Pacific islands across environmental, political, artistic and social arenas with Kristen and her team, Hawai‘i adolescents in these schools have opportunities to connect with caring others and with big ideas.

American Samoa Exemplary American Samoa educators are constructing challenging, exploratory, integrative, and relevant curriculum with their young adolescent students (NMSA, 2010). In particular, effective middle level teachers in American Samoa adapt texts and curriculum imported from the U.S. mainland to make them culturally-responsive and place-based so students see relevance in what they are learning. For example, Daniel introduces geometry content with the traditional Samoan art of Siapo, or tapa (decorated tree bark cloth; Schultz, 1949). By examining the Siapo prints, students realize immediately that their ancestors knew how to use complex mathematics for thousands of years, which builds pride and connections. Such cultural applications of math are known as ethnomathematics (Furuto, 2014). Brittany and her colleagues integrate vocational education and English language arts (ELA) content to provide comprehensive, authentic learning experiences for their students. The students create technical documents in the lab while learning about writing components and format in ELA. They further extend the learning with mock job interviews. Fau’s students work collaboratively in groups to create a business that advertises, creates, and sells history t-shirts to the public. The arts are a natural part of everyday life in Samoa (ASDOE, 2014). Music and song are everywhere, including robust singing in harmony at church and school songfests. The American Samoa authors and many of their colleagues translate western concepts in curriculum to the Samoan language and then sing them with their students, making this a culturally congruent process (e.g., Deering, 1996). Malo integrates visual arts with science, teaching art techniques in the context of astronomy so that students can portray the beauty and complexity of the solar system. She found that this greatly enhances motivation, comprehension and retention, such that students now recognize the planets and can describe their characteristics with confidence and enthusiasm. Drama and performance are embraced as means for sparking student excitement and deepening learning. Fau’s students apply legal and historical concepts in arguing Supreme Court cases, with classes paired up as participants and audience. Desmond and Dora similarly engage their students in dramatizing historical events in plays they write themselves. Several of the American Samoa authors involve their students with National History Day, a program in which student teams research and present on a U.S. history theme, then compete against other teams. The American Samoa students and teachers who have journeyed to Washington, D.C. in this program have tremendous inspiration and learning for their own personal histories. The active learning described above, besides being highly motivating for the students, has the benefit of offering excellent means for authentic assessment (Darling-Hammond & Falk, 1997). That is, students clearly demonstrate their understanding and application of complex concepts in their performances and actions, thus advancing learning while also measuring it (NMSA, 2010). Fau and her colleagues have systematized the process by creating a common assessment in history to determine the level of achievement of students on specific criteria at each grade level. 76

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A crucial aspect of all learning for American Samoa preteens is mastery of spoken and written language, both in their native Samoan as well as English. Brittany found that authenticity of curriculum is a good start for building literacy (Martin, 2018). She has her students work in groups to design inventions to make a better future, with their written explanations enriched by the depth of their commitment to the project. Fau has students write journal entries on a regular basis; they reflect on what they have learned and goals, then conference with the teacher. This simultaneously builds skills in both languages, provides an authentic assessment, and deepens the teacher-student relationship. American Samoa teachers embrace technology for building literacy and many other purposes, although access to hardware and internet connectivity remain challenging. Sabrina uses studentmade websites to showcase student learning and encourage the inclusion of individual and cultural identity. With these websites, the students are able to demonstrate their grasp of the content while simultaneously building collaboration and communication skills with their peers. Sabrina also uses Kindles to teach the students about the reading strategy of annotation, which engages them in close reading of informational text, word-attack, and other strategies for enjoyment and success in literacy. Dora has her students share their history projects on web sites they design themselves. Malo noted that the Istation (2018) internet program has greatly helped her students with independent study in reading, spelling, and writing. Her students eagerly look forward to the Tuesdays and Fridays when they get to use school laptops for the program, a far cry from the dread that greets the common drill approach. All the American Samoa authors marvel at the enthusiasm of their “digital native” students (Prensky, 2001) at researching, organizing, and presenting their work electronically, whether via web platforms, social media, or programs such as PowerPoint. Much of the curriculum described involves collaboration, a ubiquitous approach to work, life, and learning in American Samoa (Ho, 2003). Fau notes that Kagan’s structures for cooperative learning are especially helpful at assuring that everyone is involved and productive (Dotson, 2001). Similarly, the educators themselves gather with peers to plan curriculum and common assessments and to examine their own efforts; the kinds of shared vision, courage, collaboration, and ongoing professional development that epitomizes the state of the art (NMSA, 2010).

Republic of the Marshall Islands The RMI contributors to this chapter unanimously agreed that active learning is essential for engaging young adolescents, consistent with a vast body of literature (e.g., AMLE, 2012; NMSA, 1982). Instruction is typically delineated into separate time slots by subject area, even in K–8 elementary schools, and does not explicitly include the arts. However, these educators and many of their colleagues transcend such boundaries with a combination of classroom curriculum, clubs, camps, and special events in order to keep adolescent hands and mouths productively engaged. Teacher-centered instruction is quite common in RMI, which is not surprising given that a majority of educators have little formal education regarding pedagogy (MOE-RMI, 2014); however, this is changing. Ander began using collaborative learning approaches (e.g., Webb et al., 2004) several years ago with his sixth graders, having students work together on word games, math problems, reading aloud, and more. When his principal observed this lively, thenradical pedagogy, he asked Ander to share the techniques with the staff, rather than insisting on a return to a “quiet, orderly” classroom. Ander’s colleagues readily took to the approach, much to the students’ benefit. He now shares group learning approaches, as well as Singapore Math, a highly visual, active math curriculum, throughout the district on multiple islands. Mesin is another avid practitioner of group learning, finding that it helps her reach students with broad 77

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ranges of learning and language needs. She further scaffolds success with varied, active assessments, frequently having students present their findings to their peers. The RMI authors frequently take students outdoors to study their local environments. Several have STEM gardens at their schools where the students learn about composting; open pollination versus hybrid seeds; natural, organic techniques; and appropriate plants for the sandy, alkaline soil. A serendipitous meeting between PACMED faculty and officers of the Pacific Organic and Ethical Trade Community ([POETC]; Secretariat of the Pacific Community, 2008) led to collaboration between that organization and our cohort. Visits with local organic farmers ensued, and the entire PACMED cohort is now planning on beginning or improving their own organic school gardens. Ricky described holding a science fair for the first time in which students investigated osmosis, chemical reactions, local species, water purification, the periodic table, and more. There were excellent projects and overwhelming enthusiasm from participants, along with a huge turnout from the community. Ricky even heard students and parents from private schools expressing regret at not attending his public school. Winnie’s school makes STEAMSL learning (adding language to STEAMS) highly active by taking students outdoors to gather data for science projects and to beautify the school campus, plus engaging them in reading, writing and performing dramas and music. “Idle minds,” as the saying goes, are headed for trouble, as demonstrated in numerous studies of adolescents (e.g., Mertens & Flowers, 2005). Therefore, the RMI contributors have been striving to offer supervised, high-quality, co-curricular activities for their adolescent charges. For example, Jelton created the Spartan Summer Camp for his Kwajalein Atoll students in 2017 and continued with an expanded version in 2018 (Pacific Partnerships in Education, 2018). Adolescent boys and girls spent the month of July learning about their local environment and culture. As will be detailed further in the next section, they were supervised by volunteer and paid staff, stayed in dorms, and had safe, productive summers. Other colleagues ran a similar camp on Majuro that focused on waste processing, coral preservation, solar powered stills, and more with numerous field trips. In both cases, participants reported increased confidence as well as interest in STEAM-oriented careers. Winnie and Ricky’s schools offer numerous clubs, special events, and activities to keep young bodies, minds and hearts, productively engaged, and many of these are student-led including basketball, soccer, baseball, volleyball, clean water and science investigations, singing, and campus beautification. Thus, while the explicit curriculum (Eisner, 1985) in RMI may look somewhat traditional and limited in focus, there are caring, innovative educators who are finding ways to teach the whole child about the wonders of the universe, similar to their colleagues to the north in American Samoa and Hawai‘i.

Connecting with Families, Culture and Community A holistic orientation to young adolescents’ needs requires close attention to the home and community contexts in which the youngsters develop and to the ways that educators and schools can build mutually supportive relationships and systems (NMSA, 2010). Such concepts are embodied in This We Believe’s characteristics (paraphrased) of a shared vision developed by all stakeholders; courage and collaboration; meaningful relationships; school environments that are inviting, safe, inclusive and supportive of all; adult advocates; comprehensive guidance; support for health and wellness; and active involvement of families, the community and businesses.

Hawai‘i Community, or ‘ohana (Hawaiian, for family, community, extended family; Pukui & Elbert, 1992), is an integral part of the educational experience in Hawai‘i, as Gordon and his colleagues noted. Gordon strives to build open conversations from day one between home and school so 78

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that stakeholders in each context know what is going on in a youngster’s life, the better to support their development. Amy and her team use a variety of approaches to build such conversations, including Google Classroom and Parent Square, a web platform that allows for two-way correspondence between school and home regarding assignments, concerns, upcoming events, and more. However, Amy noted that nothing beats the personalization of an actual verbal conversation, whether electronic or in-person. Her teaching team prefers meeting as a group with students and/or ‘ohana so that everyone’s input and insights can be included. They emphasize accomplishments and solutions instead of deficiencies. Amy noted that making such connections early in the school year is essential for laying the foundation of trust and caring before any potential challenges arise. Educators frequently lament “the lack of parent/family involvement” in schools, often defining involvement only in terms of attendance at open house, parent conferences, and similar, formal events (National Education Association, 2008). However, the Hawai‘i authors know that some of the most crucial educational involvement can be “behind the scenes” in the form of families providing an orderly home life, with set times for nutritious meals and bed, monitoring the use of electronics, and space for quiet studying. They share tips like these with both students and families at every opportunity, making them the stuff of curriculum. Kristen shares her course syllabus electronically with families and includes the question, “Is there anything you would like to share about your child?” She compiles the information and shares it with the other members of her team so that all have insights into how to help the student right from the start. Kristen and her team also use the traditional student planner books with the main topic for each class recorded daily by students. Parent signatures are required weekly to assure that the information is shared, and this often leads to rich conversations at home about school learning; parents and the teacher can write notes in the book as well. Electronics and notes are great for ongoing home-school communication; however, there is also enormous benefit to having parents come to the school to see and feel the place where their youngsters spend so many hours (Benson, 2010). Amy and her team incorporate parents whenever possible, including during Shadow Day when parents spend a “day in the life” with their child; at numerous team activity days; and chaperoning field trips. Kristen and her science department colleagues held a Science Night to introduce the Science Fair to their families. They involved attendees in a science experiment on reaction time for left versus right hands, including hypotheses, multiple trials, and conclusions. This “hands-on” approach worked wonders at advancing students and families beyond the papier maché and baking soda volcanoes of yesteryear, resulting in higher quality and completion rates of projects. Another vital aspect of the school-home-community nexus is inclusion of the home cultures of students into the school curriculum (Deering et al., 2005). With Hawai‘i’s tremendous diversity, this literally becomes a banquet. Gordon and his colleagues celebrate an annual tradition in December, with a curriculum-related potluck, and Paul did this with his middle grades students in Ohio as far back as the late 1970s. Gordon and team align the potluck with their curriculum map, so it advances while also celebrating learning. Students prepare a family dish and recipe to share with the class. Social studies is addressed with students learning about their ethnic heritages, often in the family’s natal language; math is involved with applying proportions and conversions in the recipes; nutrition and science are embedded in the analysis of healthy portions and balanced consumption (Chong & Kerr, 2012). Families are invited to be a part of this tradition, and many attend, making it one of the highlights of the seventh grade year. Glendaile celebrates the cultures of her ELL students who mostly come from myriad Pacific lands with a Cultural Expert Presentation. The students conduct research and then share their knowledge of their natal country’s culture, government, leaders, population, products, economy, top attractions, foods, and more. 79

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The Hawaiian language, history, and culture are an explicit part of school curriculum at every grade in the HIDOE, with special focus in grades four and seven. However, the depth and authenticity of such learning experiences can vary wildly (Kaomea, 2000). Nathan cited Walter Kahumoku’s (2005) Kahua Project as the basis for his focus on Hawaiian culture-based education. His Kuleana Civic Action Project involves groups of students taking self-selected action to better their community (kuleana is Hawaiian for responsibility, Pukui & Elbert, 1992). Nathan’s ho’olohe (hook) for beginning the project is sharing work completed by former students so the new ones can appreciate the sense of obligation of their “elders” within their cultural values, knowledge, beliefs, and practices. The wonderful Kuleana projects included bringing the gifts of song and handmade cultural crafts to patients at the local hospital. Rianne brings elements of Hawaiian culture into her sixth grade humanities class, guided by Moenahā, a culture-based instructional model grounded in Hawaiian epistemology (Furchgott, 2011). Thus, as Rianne and her students study U.S. history, they constantly relate insights to Hawai‘i, staying grounded in the place they live. By including families in the inquiry process, the students connect on a deeper level with their own elders as well. Rianne’s team also opens most days with oli (Hawaiian chant), and now that she has completed her MSLMED degree, she hopes to incorporate some of her hula training (Hawai‘i’s unique sign-language-like cultural dance; Pukui & Elbert, 1992) into her teaching. The Writer’s Club at Amy’s school offers her the chance to connect with diverse students, many of them recent immigrants. She often sits outdoors at lunch with them as they work on their writing projects, invariably opening up about their lives in Hawai‘i and their birthplaces. Glendaile helps her ELL students overcome culture shock and language challenges by involving them in service learning. Instead of being viewed as “needy” by themselves and others, they are validated as contributors, a great way to scaffold their adaptation as well as acceptance by others. As there is no more diverse state in the entire United States than Hawai‘i, there is no more rewarding place to embrace, learn about, and celebrate the contributions of diverse individuals, families, and cultures.

American Samoa “Ua vela lana umu i lo tatou nu’u [his work in the village is useful]” is a Samoan proverb that teaches every individual works hard to gain a place in the community (Schultz, 1949, p. 139)—or, as poet Sia Figiel (1999, p. 138) wrote, “‘I’ does not exist” in Samoa. ‘Aiga, community, villages, clans, chief and church are central to life in both Samoas. Many villages have a small, local elementary school, so boundaries between home and school are fluid. The centrality of church in everyday life also offers another connection between adults and youth; for example, several of the American Samoa contributors are very active in their churches, such as through the women’s ministry or Sunday school teaching. This interconnectedness makes for a more seamless “safety net” around American Samoa young adolescents than is common in more urbanized settings. There is tremendous pride in Fa’a Samoa (the Samoan Way; Tagaloa, 1986), among the American Samoa authors, their students, and the population in general. Specific patterns of tattoos and fabrics celebrate particular local legends and values and are worn proudly. Both on their own initiative, and in response to recent ASDOE (2014) directives, the American Samoa contributors highlight the Samoan language and culture throughout their work. Virtually every significant gathering, including school events, is celebrated with prayers and music and with singing in both Samoan and English. The songs are often religious, with everyone enthusiastically joining in with four-part harmony, just the way they do at church or temple. Fau’s dedication to the cultural cause has led to a role as a historian in the American Samoa Humanities Council on Major Grants on Samoan Language/Culture. An example of Samoan pride in the schools is the Territorial History Day 80

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celebrated by Dora and her colleagues, a competition for students in grades 6–12 judged by members of the community. The collaborative efforts of students, teachers, schools, parents, government, and the business community make this an annual highlight. This kind of involvement by eminent citizens in the schools is quite common. The American Samoa contributors have local leaders share their expertise on a regular basis regarding healthy eating, physical activity, emergency preparedness, abuse prevention, and more. Another way in which esteemed citizens (i.e., parents) are involved in American Samoa schools is in parentteacher-student conferences. Dora and colleagues found that careful preparation is key, having students reflect on their areas of noteworthy progress as well as those where they need to improve. She prefers keeping the majority of the focus on the former, noting that all three members of the team invariably find this a highly worthwhile process. All the American Samoa authors use social media to communicate with parents and community; however, they do not presume that everyone has access to such systems, so newsletters and meetings are used as well. Besides bringing the community into their schools, the American Samoa contributors make a point of getting out into the community. For example, Fau and teaching teammates visit all twenty-six villages that send students to their school. They meet with parents and community leaders in a two-way dialogue about the expectations and needs of both contexts. Dora and her team involve their special needs students in worksite visitations and hands-on learning experiences. Just this summer (2018), new AS PACMED students engaged in a variety of STEAMS-oriented service learning projects in shoreline and mountain environments, and they are now planning on building such projects into the teaching. Beaches should soon be cleaner, and invasive species on the decline in the forests as a result. Similarly, Sabrina and her students identify problems in their community of Utulei, then take action such as marine debris cleanups and litter surveys in conjunction with relevant government agencies such as the Department of Marine Wildlife and Resources. The students then report on their efforts in formal research papers. Sabrina has taken students for the past two years to the National Conservation Training Center in West Virginia to participate in the Native Youth Community Adaptation and Leadership Congress (2018). These lucky young environmentalists get to interact with other indigenous students and learn about the importance of culture, land ownership and stewardship. They plan projects and apply for mini grants for community service projects like shoreline and watershed cleanups around the island. One of the great joys for parents is when their youngsters come home with enthusiasm for learning and valuable ideas that can be employed in the home. An example of such a win-win is in students sharing their insights into healthy living. The families of Brittany and Desmond’s students benefit from having their own “personal trainers” who eagerly share their knowledge about portion size, balancing food choices, and fun physical activities. A happier, healthier American Samoa is under construction in these schools.

Republic of the Marshall Islands The RMI Teacher Standards (MOE-RMI, 2014) include the following among their nine expectations: Mantin Majol Culture and Values—help students progress with a clear sense of their own local cultural identity, built on a strong foundation of their own cultures, language, and spiritualities, and with a deep pride in their own values, traditions, and wisdom. (#3) All the RMI authors, PACMED students, and RMI President Hilda Heine, who secured funding for their PACMED studies, are solid proponents of Standard 3. They are proud of their 81

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culture, love their communities and local environment, and seek to nurture them. They also provide ample evidence that their students, parents, and communities are in concert with these principles. The eagerness of the RMI teachers and students to get out of their classrooms and into their communities speaks volumes about their sense of connection to their special place. Their efforts to nurture and heal their local places constitute Freire’s (1970) praxis—reflection and action. Under expert guidance, the youngsters at the summer camps, described earlier, engaged in careful measurement and data collection to protect their life-giving coral reefs. STEAMSL learning meant so much more to the youths when it involved snorkeling, making quadrats for reef population sampling, and analyzing and sharing results in caring for their own environment. In a similar vein, Ricky’s school held a World Oceans Day this past year that involved cleanup of a large beach. The great success of the event has led to expansion of this focus throughout the school year. One of the great benefits of getting students out of school and the community into it, is the chance for cross-generational interactions and cultural transmission (e.g., Geertz, 1973). The summer camps involved elders sharing their cultural knowledge with the youngsters in a variety of areas. Girls learned how to weave traditional mats and baskets from women from the local communities. Both sexes were involved in the reef studies, and also learned from elders to make long, fish-herding “curtains” out of native plants. The WAM school (2018), described earlier, also connects both boys and girls with adult builders-sailors-navigators of traditional outrigger sailing canoes. Winnie and the other RMI authors note how they seize upon opportunities to bring in community members to share their stories, legends, and various skills. Ricky’s school did a project where they studied and collected healing plants, then took them to the hospital for diabetes patients, bringing smiles from all involved. All these interactions support maintenance of the Marshallese language, which is an explicit part of the daily school curriculum in all grades; not surprisingly, it is the subject area with the highest MISAT scores (MOE-RMI, 2014). Another crucial connection for the RMI schools is with students’ families. Several noted how using social media via texts and web sites has been a boon to their communication with parents, though access to such technology is sporadic in many areas and nonexistent on outlying atolls. All the contributors’ schools hold parent conferences, mostly on a quarterly basis; some involve the student as well. They also have the common Parent Teacher Associations with widely varied participation levels. Ricky notes that the key to school-family-community interactions is the educators doing lots of listening, consistent with a long tradition of scholarship (e.g., Cummins, 1986; Deering, 1996). He credits this approach to soaring attendance and enthusiasm from parents who were often unsuccessful at schooling themselves, and apprehensive at interacting with educational authorities. As noted, the close-knit communities in RMI make it highly likely that educators and parents will cross paths at the store, church, or somewhere else. Indeed, the whole village raises each child. This concept is further extended in the common cultural practice of a child being taken in by a relative or neighbor when they are orphaned or when their parents are unable to care for them. Ander pointed out that it is sometimes an educator who identifies such situations and must initiate the action. As noted earlier, each of the RMI authors does not hesitate to involve parents when there are concerns about a student’s learning, behavior, or adjustment. It seems that the preservation of the people and culture of the RMI is in good hands, both for the near and long term, though their physical environment is under grave threat from climate change, as noted (Fletcher, 2018; Maillet et al., 2017). The efforts of these RMI educators and their colleagues to connect with families, culture, and community are excellent applications of their Mantin Majol Culture and Values Standard 3 (MOE-RMI, 2014). 82

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Discussion/Summary The beautiful island locales of Hawai‘i, American Samoa, and the RMI have many similarities in their strengths as well as their challenges, both generally and within the field of education. Each has close ties to the U.S. mainland; has a beautiful natural environment with varied, spectacular terrestrial and marine ecosystems; and is at great risk due to climate change because of more frequent and powerful tropical storms and sea level rise (Fletcher, 2018). The population in each locale has a rich indigenous culture and language more than one thousand years old, but they struggle to maintain them in the face of involvement and immigration by peoples from elsewhere. All three locales have difficulty with assuring that their populations have access to adequate income, housing, infrastructure, food, and healthcare, and each locale has brilliant, dedicated educators and students who are achieving excellence in “Twenty-First Century Learning” (e.g., Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2009) while struggling with limited fiscal and material resources. Exemplary “middle level education” is thriving in Hawai‘i, American Samoa, and RMI, whether or not it is labeled as such, and regardless of the grade configuration of the school (e.g., AMLE, 2012; CCAD, 1989, 1995; Jackson & Davis, 2000; NMSA, 1982, 1995, 2010). Careful, focused, nurturing and guiding of students is embodied in Amy and Kristen’s “open door policies” in Hawai‘i, where students can drop in to “talk story,” a process that builds relationships and often leads to informal counseling. Rianne and her teammates’ Mindful Space offers a gentle, Hawai‘i-style version of the increasingly popular alternative to “time out areas” or suspension for kolohe (mischievous ones; Pukui & Elbert, 1992). A concern that is being addressed by contributors across all three locales is physical health, especially the prevalence of obesity and type-2 diabetes. Brittany, Dora and Malo’s promotion of healthy eating, physical activity and self-acceptance in AS, benefits not only the students, but the educators and the families who gain “personal trainers/ dieticians” as a result. Another common concern across locales is bullying, and Winnie in RMI addresses this in a proactive, positive way with both students and faculty. Donna, Ricky and Jelton’s treating students “like your own kid” is a great nurturing and bullying-prevention approach. While few of the schools in any of the locales have an “advisory program,” all the contributors strive to be the adult advocates that their young adolescent students need (Burns, Jenkins, Kane, 2012; NMSA, 2010). Exemplary content and processes of curriculum can be found in all three locales, both in terms of explicit and experienced curriculum, particularly the latter (Eisner, 1985; Frazee & Rudnitski, 1995). TWB’s (NMSA, 2010) Essential Attributes of developmentally responsive, challenging, empowering and equitable learning opportunities can be found at the explicit level in the Hawai‘i Middle Level Education Policy’s (HIDOE, 2001) “rich and challenging standards-based curriculum which addresses the developmental needs of young adolescents.” More importantly, this is the experienced curriculum for Nathan’s students as they build human flying buttresses while studying cathedrals, and Li Yu’s students playing ping-pong and shopping in Chinatown to apply their Mandarin language skills. Jayne and Rianne address the developmental and special needs of their students by scaffolding their success with adaptations of curriculum and assessment. The ASDOE Vision explicitly calls for “all our children to achieve success locally and abroad”, and this is operationalized as experience for many fortunate middle level students, none more so than those who travel to Washington, DC, to compete in the National History Day (2018). Similar to her Hawai‘i colleagues, Brittany scaffolds literacy learning for her diverse needs students by using assistive technology. Contributors across all three locales embrace peer collaboration as a natural fit with their local cultures and as a way to maximize learning. Mesin notes that such approaches are especially helpful in meeting her diverse RMI learners’ needs. Rich, hands-on learning described by all the RMI contributors, such as organic gardening, clubs, sports, canoe-building, singing and dancing, help direct young adolescent students toward productive, meaningful learning.

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Connecting with families, culture, and community is a prominent focus in all three locales, such that examples abound of This We Believe’s characteristics of a shared vision developed by all stakeholders, meaningful relationships, and schools that actively involve families, the community and business partners (NMSA, 2010). The tremendous diversity of Hawai‘i’s population offers a bounty of cultures to learn about, connect with, and celebrate, as Gordon and his students do with their ethnic potluck project. Glendaile assures that her ELL students build pride in, maintain and share their natal cultures with their cultural expert presentations. Fau and her American Samoa colleagues’ visiting all 26 villages of their students provides a huge gesture of respect, which builds strong relationships with families and communities. Further community outreach can be found in Sabrina and her students conducting beach cleanups, while Dora prepares her special needs students to be contributing members of society with worksite visitations. The level of connection between schools and communities in RMI is truly remarkable, such as with the STEAMS camps run by Jelton and some of the other PACMED participants. The young adolescent campers are provided safe, supervised, productive, fun accommodations, while they provide research and care for their natural environment and learn important cultural skills. Ricky’s students’ investigation of traditional healing plants and sharing them with hospital patients builds enormous respect and good will while providing authentic opportunities for language practice and STEAMSL learning. Exemplary middle level education is being constructed in the middle of the Pacific Ocean—in Hawai‘i, American Samoa, and the RMI. The examples described in this chapter are only the “tip of the coconut in the water” from this region. While each of the three locales faces daunting challenges in terms of climate, economics, health, and more, there is a solid core of akamai—caring educators to keep advancing the cause of exemplary education for young adolescents in the Pacific.

Acknowledgement The authors are grateful for the contributions of the following educators: Amy Var, Glendaile Llamelo, Gordon Kor, Jayne Glynn, Kristen Masunaga, Li Yu Wang, Nathan James, and Rianne Graves-Grantham (Hawai‘i); Brittany Hisatake, Daniel Talaomana, Desmond O'Brien, Dora Ah Sue, Faugagana Fagaava, Malolefoua Laolagi (American Samoa); and Ander Kowe, Donna Lanej, Jelton Anjain, Mesin Juria, Ricky Raymond, and Winnie Benjamin (Republic of the Marshall Islands).

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PART III

Characteristics of Learners in Middle Level Education Communities

7 UNDERSTANDING YOUNG ADOLESCENTS THROUGH THE INTERSECTION OF COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE, PSYCHOLOGY, AND EDUCATIONAL PEDAGOGY Erika Daniels

I began my career as a kindergarten teacher in East Los Angeles, California, where I had 38 students in a classroom originally intended for fourth graders—no rugs, few manipulatives, and fewer picture books. We figured it out together, and the kids learned literacy, math, and interpersonal skills while I learned how to implement the strategies I had learned in my teacher credential program. However, the mother of one of my kindergarteners happened to also be the bilingual coordinator of the junior high “down the hill.” It was the advent of the middle school movement (National Middle School Association, 2010b), and Maria gave me the opportunity to move down the hill and be part of the new sixth grade team. That was the beginning of my journey with middle level education and young adolescents. The first time Gerardo told me that he could only work if he was kneeling across his chair with his belly resting on his chair and his work on the floor on the other side, I was fascinated by the juxtaposition between his child-like behavior and his more adult-like reasoning skills. During science class, we made Oobleck (a mixture of cornstarch and water) to illustrate the properties of liquids and solids. Even though it was chaos, the kids were able to transition into what we called a scientific convention during which we discussed the states of matter and their effects on the world around us. This dichotomy perfectly illustrated the tension that adolescents face on a daily basis—balancing the desire to play and explore with the need to be taken seriously by the adults with whom they work. What I did not know as a beginning teacher but have learned in the intervening decades is that the dual-sidedness that my students showed every day in the classroom is grounded in the developmental reality facing young adolescents. There is nothing “wrong” with middle school students; instead, they are undergoing profound developmental changes and need teachers, parents, guardians, and mentors who can help them navigate through this tumultuous time. When middle level educators approach their work—and discussions with the students themselves—through a lens of the intersection among psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and educational pedagogy, they create productive and effective learning environments. While there is some 91

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agreement that middle grades students need specialized support and deserve educators who understand their unique needs (e. g. Ochanji et al., 2016), too much research and too many efforts exist in silos. Cognitive neuroscientists primarily study the brain structure itself while psychologists explore the choices that young adolescents make and the internal and external influences on those choices. Teachers, meanwhile, balance the need to teach academic content with the daily social and emotional successes and challenges that enter the classroom with their students. This chapter explores the ways in which three disciplines—psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and pedagogy—influence varied understandings of developmentally appropriate practices in middle level education using the voices of young adolescents to illustrate how the concepts build upon and support each other. Their voices are essential to include as a substantive part of the conversation because, as Cook-Sather (2002) explained, “there is something fundamentally amiss about building and rebuilding an entire system without consulting at any point those it is ostensibly designed to serve” (p. 3). As each of the disciplines described above recognizes the way that knowledge from the others can and should impact collective understandings of young adolescents, collaborative/interdisciplinary efforts might inform research, policy, and practice. Figure 7.1 shows how this chapter integrates essential understandings from each field and explores the ways in which this intersection might inform educators’ work with young adolescents.

Cognitive Neuroscience Because changes in the brain contribute to increased complexity in the ways that youth navigate adolescence, it is necessary for educators to develop a deep understanding of the way this organ works. While “brain-based learning” is tremendously popular (a simple Google search returns 245,000,000 results), it is more than a pithy term that might be used to frame professional development sessions. Misconceptions that arise from a misreading or misinterpretation of brain research are called “neuromyths” and highlight the need for critical analysis of the ways in which educators implement findings from cognitive neuroscience into their practice (Dundar & Gunduz, 2016). Educators who want to integrate an understanding of cognitive neuroscience into their practice must understand what happens in the adolescent brain as it moves from childhood into adulthood and combine efforts with experts in a variety of fields. It is important to move popular discussions of brain-based learning into a more robust analysis that integrates findings from the field into educational pedagogy (Middle Level Education Research Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association, 2016). The brain is composed of billions of neurons that send and receive signals about everything both involuntary and conscious—from blinking our eyes or breathing to wearing rain boots when the skies look stormy to deciding which of two suitors is the best life partner. These neural connections are composed of axons that send signals, dendrites that receive signals, and synapses, which are the gaps between neurons along which the messages travel. The more often the brain

Cognitive Neuroscience

Psychology

Supportive Contexts Effective Pedagogy

Student Voice

Figure 7.1 Influences on supportive middle level contexts.

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sends signals, the stronger these synapses become. Conversely the less often signals are sent, the more likely synapses are to be pruned away to make space for others the brain deems more important. This is where the term “use it or lose it” comes from as brains truly do “lose” synapses that are not frequently used. If information is retrieved often enough or activities are engaged in regularly, brains understand that the information or activity is valued or important and the neural synapses become strengthened (Jensen, 2015). These blooming and pruning processes are nature’s way of helping humans adapt to changing environments and circumstances, and they allow the brain to develop in complexity and become better equipped to handle specific needs and experiences. The ability to adapt to changing environmental cues and to make sense of novel experiences is a defining characteristic of all human brains. Nowhere is this more evident than in adolescence, which is “exquisitely forged by the forces of evolution to have different features compared with children or adults” (Giedd, 2012, p. 101). As the brain adds and strengthens neural connections when learning a new skill and/or academic content and eliminates connections that are unnecessary or used sparingly, it is able to adapt to changing circumstances and demands (Lourenco & Casey, 2013). This is why it is possible to end up at home without remembering the drive from work but feel anxious if a detour pops up on the way to a new location. The adolescent brain is especially malleable because it must prepare for greater independence as well as the challenges and opportunities of adulthood, and it does so by “recruiting” various aspects of the brain to sustain focused attention and increase the complexity of its cognitive control (Luna, Padmanabhan, & O’Hearn, 2010). Adolescents must learn to critically use the vast amounts of information with which they are constantly bombarded, and there are three primary developments as they learn to do this. There is a change in the way they weigh risks and rewards, an increased desire for excitement and sensation, and a move away from parents and peers (Giedd, 2012). These changes occur because adolescents must to learn to survive independently, to reproduce, and to create innovative solutions to challenging situations in order for civilizations to thrive. While the first two changes are not desirable in modern-day society, adolescence is the time when these skills are honed and when failure often comes with a safety net. In fact, a chief predictor of adolescent behavior is the anticipation of a reward despite the risk (Jensen, 2015). It is not that adolescents ignore or do not anticipate possible risks; it is that their prefrontal cortices are not always able to effectively regulate the reward areas of their brains (Lourenco & Casey, 2013). Plasticity refers to the brain’s ability to change its structure based on environmental cues, and this allows adolescents to recruit neural networks in support of complex cognition and to adapt behavior to changing circumstances and expectations (Lourenco & Casey, 2013). After puberty, the brain stops growing in size, but it becomes more refined, which accounts for the increasing complexity of young adolescents’ thought processes (Zatorre, Fields, & Johansen-Berg, 2013). Much of this development depends on the environment, which is why some middle grades students are able to navigate more successfully than others between and among peer and adult interactions. Additionally, because the prefrontal cortex does not fully mature until a person is in his/ her 20s, the amygdala, which is the seat of the emotions, often “hijacks” an adolescent’s ability to make thoughtful choices in times of anxiety or excitement (Steinberg, 2014). Through maturation, the frontal lobe learns to override extreme reactions to stress and fear (Jensen, 2015), and people learn to better match behavioral decisions to implied and stated goals. While brain plasticity exists across a lifespan, scans show that it is especially robust during adolescence, which increases the effectiveness of formal and informal learning opportunities and leads to a longer-lasting impact (Zatorre et al., 2013). The caution for anyone who works with young adolescents is that these impacts can be both positive and negative depending of the nature of the experience. The brain’s plasticity and the reorganization of neural pathways combine to make 93

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young adolescents primed for deep immersion in learning experiences, but the contexts in which they learn have a significant impact on whether and how they take advantage of this unique period in their cognitive development. Although humans collect experiences and then make associations between and among those experiences, there is often a gap between noticing environmental changes and taking action to actually change behavior according to those cues. This process occurs throughout the second and third decades of life and is one of the reasons that adolescence can be so frustrating. One middle grades student (Gemma) explained, “I wish adults would remember that we don’t get all the details all the time. I don’t hear and know everything they want me to know so they need to be less frustrated with me.” As research into the connections between how the brain functions and its impact on adolescents’ social and behavioral choices continues to evolve (Morris, Squeglia, Jacobus, & Silk, 2018), policy and practice in the middle grades can deepen from popular discussions about “brain-based learning” to a more sophisticated integration of cognitive neuroscience and educational pedagogy.

Psychology The term motivation comes from the Latin word meaning to move. Parents, teachers, administrators—people who work with middle grades students—know that getting their adolescents to want to move in terms of their academic work can be challenging. Psychologists and educators have long explored both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation through empirical research, and practitioners recognize that their students must be engaged in the learning process if they are to exert the effort necessary for academic success. It is also important to recognize that there is often a distinction between motivation and engagement. Motivation generally refers to the desire that an individual has to undertake an action or to make a decision. Whether the reasons are intrinsic (i.e., come from an internal, personal desire) or extrinsic (i.e., compelled by outside factors), motivation is grounded in an individual’s inner life. Engagement, on the other hand, is a physical construct in the sense that it describes what it looks like when students are doing what their teachers have asked them to do. Educators hope that they are physically engaged by taking notes, asking questions, making eye contact, but they also hope that students are cognitively engaged and thinking deeply about the topic at hand and taking the mental steps necessary to construct understanding (Marks, 2000). Physical engagement is often the outward indication that students are cognitively engaged. Decades of research and practical experience show that motivation is internally generated but is influenced by external factors (Anderman & Anderman, 2014). This is good news for teachers who want to create motivating learning environments. Federal laws and state mandates may dictate what the larger professional world looks and sounds like, but teachers still have control over their own classrooms. Although they cannot make students care about school, they can create contexts that encourage students to engage with a minimum of rewards and punishments. While motivation is internally generated, it is also heavily influenced by the contexts in which individuals function (Daniels, 2010; Deci, Vallerand, Pelletier, & Ryan, 1991). Julia, one of my former ninth-grade students at an alternative school, showed me the interplay between internal drive and external influences. When the school year began, she was an insightful student who worked diligently and contributed positively to the class. Even when she got off track, she was respectful and charming and easy enough to redirect. When school returned from a break, however, Julia’s grades and attitude began deteriorating. All of her teachers were concerned but unable to get her to open up, but eventually we learned that her beloved grandmother had died over the break. This loss of emotional support overshadowed Julia’s academic aspirations, which left her both unmotivated and depressed. It is important to note that Julia’s behaviors did not stem from an inability to complete school tasks but from the lack of desire to engage in what school had to offer. While we could not change the external circumstances of 94

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Julia’s life, knowing what had happened in her life allowed her teachers to respond to her behaviors more productively. The importance of the relationships we had built with her over the year cannot be overstated, and decades of research in psychology help explain why. The two theories that provide the most useful ways for middle level educators to think about their work with adolescents are self-determination theory (SDT) (Ryan & Deci, 2000) and flow theory (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). SDT posits that humans have three psychological needs—autonomy, competence, and relatedness—that are innate and universal. Striving consciously or unconsciously to meet these needs consumes much of a person’s physical time and cognitive energy. As Csikszentmihalyi observed, “happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended by each person” (1990, p. 2). Middle level educators can use Csikszentmihalyi’s work to help young adolescents learn that they have control over their thoughts and feelings, or autonomy. While students cannot control what their teachers do or what they experience at home, they can learn to respond productively to difficult circumstances and to cultivate positive feelings even in the face of challenge. Teachers can then build on this understanding and teach students that autonomy does not necessarily mean having choices in what to read or what assignment to complete; rather it means that they are in control of their choices and actions. In this way, educators teach students to take ownership over their thoughts and responses. Competence means individuals feel that their skill sets and knowledge base are appropriately matched to the challenges at hand. If their skills are too much greater than is required by the challenge, they grow bored. If their skills are insufficient for completing the task successfully, they become frustrated. Finally, relatedness means that individuals feel connected to others in their environment and that their presence has value for others. Even when pushing people away, young adolescents mostly want the adults in their spheres to help them engage socially and emotionally (Faircloth & Hamm, 2005).

Relationships Of the three psychological needs that Ryan and Deci (2000) identified as being essential to cultivate, relatedness may be the one most within a middle level educator’s control. Through countless conversations with adolescents as well as hours upon hours spent in middle grades classrooms, I am continually struck by the fact that what matters most to students is that someone in their lives understands who they are and cares about what they do. As Izzy said, “I get excited to learn when my teachers know what is going on.” The importance of building and developing relationships is repeated in academic research, popular culture, and professional development workshops, but the young adolescents’ voices bring a new urgency to the concept. They make it clear that the building of relationships is not secondary to teaching academic content; rather, it is the entry point into a productive learning environment. Adolescents respect teachers who demonstrate their commitment to student learning while also learning about their lives outside of the classroom (Ozer, Price, & Kong, 2008). Sharmika told me “I have amazing teachers this year. They are really nice and cool, and they know how to teach. They are more experienced and they just get to know you more so they can understand your schedule more.” Feeling connected to others is a basic psychological need, and adolescents express this repeatedly. As Josh explained, Ms. M is really good because if there is ever a time you need help or something, you can email her. She’ll help us out with our homework. She is always in class; she isn’t breathing down your neck, but she is here to help. Even though they can be surly and frustrating at times and push against the adults in their lives, young adolescents need us more than ever as they navigate the shoals of adolescence, and they do recognize that the vast majority of teachers are deeply invested in their success. As Rachel observed, 95

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“I love that my teachers want to teach your grade. They tell you that they really like to teach you. It makes everything more fun because they are putting a lot of effort into what they do in class.” Research using SDT as a lens illustrates reasons that certain teacher practices are identified by youth as being “particularly powerful” (McHugh, Horner, Colditz, & Wallace, 2012, p. 11). As adolescent brains undergo the significant reorganization described above, their academic and social lives are often in upheaval as they struggle to appropriately balance risky behaviors with safe choices and to decide which friends can be leaned upon and trusted. Educators and caregivers need to give adolescents the freedom to push boundaries and to test the waters but also be clear about where the boundaries are and provide a soft place to land when they make mistakes. This is partly explained by one finding that adolescents’ levels of self-determination have a tremendous impact on their decisions about whether and how to engage in school (Alivernini & Lucidi, 2011). Acknowledging when students need help and providing a genuinely caring environment are both ways that teachers actively construct relationships with students, which in turn, encourages students to engage in school and achieve academically (McHugh et al., 2012). When his students are acting up, one effective teacher tells them: “I support you 100%, but I do not support what you are doing right now.” While young adolescents may act otherwise, they both want and need boundaries and structure. They want to feel, as Carlos explained, as if adults in their lives “all want to help us excel.” Although it is difficult for caring teachers, parents, and mentors to stand by and watch students make mistakes, adolescents must be allowed the freedom to be right as well as the freedom to be wrong. This is not to say that adults should ignore or condone decisions that might cause physical or emotional harm, but it does mean that learning to make decisions and experience the positive or negative consequences is exactly what the developing cerebral cortex needs. Adolescents’ rapidly increasing cognitive and emotional complexity means that they can handle more challenging academic tasks but also want the opportunity to feel connected to their teachers. Bourgeois and Boberg (2016) found that middle grades students were more positive about their math class than their language arts class because of the way they felt about each teacher—these feelings were not tied to their enjoyment of or ability to access the content. In my own work, Evan told me he was happy about the transition to a middle level school because: I love all my teachers. They all have different personalities, but they give good instructions on how they want the assignments done. I’m not scared to talk to my teachers because they make themselves so approachable so we aren’t scared to talk to them. Students will often demonstrate that they can make good decisions if given the opportunity long as they do so under the guidance of trusted adults. Loki had a more difficult time adjusting to middle school but he still “love[d] how nice the teachers are, and they always help me when I ask them for help. When I am struggling, they come over and help even if I don’t ask. They always greet me in a nice way.”

Stress Management When adolescents face tremendous amounts of stress without a commensurate increase in support, they suffer. They are unable to achieve flow, and they feel disconnected and unsuccessful— emotions that are detrimental to academic, social, or emotional success. JJ told me: I forget my homework a lot because I wake up at 5:00 in the morning and get my little sister breakfast and make everyone lunches. I love doing my homework, but when I get home, I have to pick up my little sister, make her a snack, and help her with her homework. Then I can work on my homework. 96

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Because motivation is influenced by external contexts (Anderman & Anderman, 2014) and the amygdala—the seat of emotions in the brain—can often override a still developing cerebral cortex, considering students’ social and emotional needs cannot be ignored even as educators teach academic content. Because, as Courtney noted, “in middle school there aren’t as many rules as there were in elementary school. You do a lot more on your own,” teachers and administrators must model for students how to make productive decisions about managing competing requirements and navigating changing peer relationships. When students perceive that they have their teachers’ support, they report reduced feelings of anxiety, which has a positive impact on academic achievement (Ahmed, Minnaert, van der Werf, & Kuyper, 2010). When done right, the middle grades are a time when young adolescents can flourish as they embrace their newfound independence and learn to make good choices as well as experience the consequences of poor ones. Jessica loved the middle grades because she was able to: make more of my own choices. Instead of my parents talking to my teachers, I do it. I like it because sometimes I don’t know what is going on in my classes, and I can find out by checking my grade on my phone. She learned how to do this through teachers taking the time in class to model how to write homework down in a planner, decide which of four competing homework assignments to tackle first, and what to do when the stress became overwhelming. While not all students have home lives where these behaviors are modeled, all students can and should attend middle schools where they can experience this support. As Joaquin said: Now in middle school things branch out, and you have to be more organized. I like that I get to learn new things. I used to have this big thick binder, and I would just shove stuff in there. It would be a total mess. Recently I have switched everything into folders, and it has helped to keep me more organized because I have one folder for each subject. I came up with the idea because my friends started doing it. Effective middle grades teachers are honest about the demands of real life. They invite students into their lives and explain what coping skills they use while also modeling how to balance competing priorities by managing time effectively. By doing this, they reduce the pressure on students to project an image of perfection (e.g., by avoiding mistakes or choosing only easy tasks) or apathy (e.g., by not trying so that failure is inevitable or acting out in myriad ways). They build feelings of competence by teaching students what to do and how successful people navigate challenge. Milner and Tenore (2010) found that teachers who grant students entry into their worlds while also understanding the power differential that naturally exists create effective classroom learning environments. Most students know when their behavior crosses a line and crave correction instead of punishment. JJ knew when he had made a mistake but said, “I would rather she gave us a strict conversation during our class and help us understand why we shouldn’t do [those behaviors].” When teachers feel comfortable sharing minor or significant examples of their own stressors, they help to break down feelings of isolation that are so common in adolescence. Teachers who support adolescents’ autonomy meet their psychological needs, which has been found to increase school engagement and decrease feelings of anxiety (Yu, Li, Wang, Xhang, 2016). Frank commented: I wish the teachers would get to know us better in our learning way. What we like, what we don’t like, what we are good at. I don’t like Math a lot because it’s harder for me. If teachers could show me what 4th grade Math is inside the 7th grade Math, then it would be easier. 97

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By offering specific coping strategies, teachers place control back in their students’ hands and foster feelings of autonomy.

Pedagogy Regardless of the grade level being taught, being a classroom teacher entails balancing academic and logistical demands. Teachers must unpack content standards, design instructional activities to teach those standards, manage the social and emotional needs of students who may or may not want to behave, and navigate site requirements such as adjunct duties, grading, and home/school communication. Effective teachers analyze the standards to determine what content should be taught in what order, which is usually mandated by district-adopted curriculum, and organize their instruction to help their students access that curriculum. Best practices in educational pedagogy remind teachers that a balance between direct instruction and projects or activities is the most effective way to help students achieve academic success. Too much direct instruction or lecturing can result in bored, disengaged students. Experiential learning that is not grounded in clear expectations and knowledge about the topic can result in wild behavior and minimal learning. In balancing between the two, teachers ensure that their students work within their Zones of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, 1978). The goal for teachers is to create learning experiences that are neither too far beyond students’ current capacities nor so simple that they do not pose a challenge at all. Striking this balance is critical as revealed by discoveries in the fields of psychology and cognitive neuroscience. While busy classroom teachers often focus their professional learning on practice-based recommendations, professional knowledge is deepened by the integration of theory and research into their daily practice.

Active Learning One of the tenets of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform Schools-toWatch program is challenging students in developmentally appropriate ways and helping them think deeply about critical concepts (National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform, n. d.). Similarly, the Association of Middle Level Education identified challenge and high expectations as essential attributes of successful middle schools (National Middle School Association, 2010b). These organizations and others recognize the importance of balancing engaging learning activities with opportunities for students to develop citizenship skills, use their voices, and find purpose in their learning. Both neuroscience and psychology offer insights into why students learn better in active classrooms than in those dominated by direct instruction. Immordino-Yang (2016) found that students engage better when they recognize that their teacher’s actions are goal-directed. Without this perception, “the teacher’s actions will appear random rather than meaningful and memorable” (p. 151). If a lesson feels random, students will not see the purpose of exerting the effort necessary for success. Humans’ natural inclination is to seek out the path with least resistance or the easiest (Willingham, 2009), and letting a teacher do all the work of learning is certainly easier than directing significant cognitive resources toward a task. By creating opportunities for students to interact with content in multiple ways, teachers work in concert with the deep-seated needs of their students. As Jason said, “I don’t like when the kids can’t get interactive. Sometimes it’s not hands on; the teachers just keep talking about stuff and then never go over it but expect you to just remember it.” It can be explained by the significant changes that occur in the brain during adolescence. As the cerebral cortex matures during adolescence, students need to “hear everyone’s ideas and build a project off of them” as 98

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Javier said. Just as the body needs consistent exercise to remain strong and healthy, the frontal lobe of the brain must be engaged on a regular basis in order to learn to make productive decisions. By creating active learning experiences in the classroom, teachers provide opportunities for such practice. Action requires conscious thought about information, which leads to more intentional decision-making. “Exploration typically implies an element of goal-directed search, wherein the active learner makes decisions about where to look or how to navigate a space” (Markant, Ruggeri, Gurecki, Xu, 2016, p. 144). After six to eight years of experiencing school, many adolescents have developed a deep appreciation for and an ability to describe what effective pedagogy looks and sounds like. Bridget said: I get a lot out of learning if someone is doing interactive stuff that is still educational. I take drama for an elective. When we were learning stage combat, we watched a video and then got to practice on our friends. Jose articulated the thoughts of many of his peers when he said: I like it when teachers have new lessons and involve technology in the lessons. It allows you to do something more than just taking notes so that your mind can pay attention better. A good teacher also has more of a variety in lessons. There isn’t just one thing; there are multiple parts of the lesson.

Teaching Strategies Middle level educators have access to effective teaching strategies in books (e. g. Mitchell, 2019), empirical research (e. g. National Middle School Association, 2010a), and national conferences (e. g. annual meeting of the Association for Middle Level Education). When they select teaching strategies as a result of these professional learning experiences and ground their choices in an understanding of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, their lesson planning becomes more powerful. Effective middle grades educators allow for student choice in what they read or how they approach a task, use graphic organizers to help students learn to manage new information, and provide prompt, specific feedback on what was done well and what changes need to be made (Paris, 2016). Each of these strategies helps students learn to self-regulate and organize their thinking as they master academic content and manage the emotional and social turmoil that often exists in middle grades environments. When teachers are taught that developing feelings of competence, autonomy, and belongingness can increase student engagement, they have been found to be more willing to experiment with various strategies (Turner, Christensen, Kackar-Cam, Trucano, & Fulmer, 2014). Beyond those more general instructional approaches, teachers can also frontload content by exposing students to big ideas and/or key vocabulary words before digging into the details of a unit. They should allow movement around the classroom, encourage conversations with peers, and make connections to pop culture or personal interests to create engaging learning environments that help students access difficult content (Spencer, 2013). These strategies have the added benefit of being aligned with findings from psychology and cognitive neuroscience. In short, young adolescents need opportunities to talk about experiences and to focus attention in an intentional, productive manner so that they learn to think more critically (Gee, 2017). When educators remember that the young adolescents who inhabit their middle level classrooms usually want to learn and want to be successful, they employ effective teaching strategies to help their students achieve academic, social, and emotional success. “Children use whatever capacities they have to learn the most important skills in their lives” (Immordino-Yang, 2016, p. 84). By understanding how the structure of the brain influences the thoughts and actions of 99

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young adolescents, teachers can build upon the capacities that their learners bring to the classroom and create effective learning environments.

Recommendations for Researchers If they recognize the intersections among cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and pedagogy, middle level educators can view students’ ability to make productive academic, social, and emotional choices as a skill—not a character trait. This, in turn, encourages them to truly hear what students have to say as they implement developmentally appropriate practices in classrooms and across schools. Scientists sometimes study and explore in a reductionist way by necessity because they are tasked with delving deeply into specific topic areas to learn as much as possible. Educators are responsible for knitting together findings from scientists and researchers to meet the needs of the whole child. It is not a matter of “translating” from one language to another but rather of stitching together many different perspectives (Immordino-Yang, 2018). As the world’s education systems move into their next iterations, researchers should continue to reach across silos and explore the interdisciplinary connections in their work. This will reduce misconceptions about brainbased learning and will ensure that findings from cognitive neuroscience inform mainstream educational practice (Dundar & Gunduz, 2016). Academic researchers should consider the ways in which combined efforts in cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and education influence the creation of middle school learning environments. Taking this idea a step further, policy researchers should explore the ways in which these combined efforts could lead to more developmentally appropriate state and federal education policies. Building on the MLER SIG research agenda, middle level educators should try to identify which practices have the greatest impact on young adolescent development and then explore why. Many middle grades students across the globe do not live in homes where all of their social, emotional, cognitive, and physical needs are being met, so it is also critical to explore how educators might fill in those gaps and improve educational experiences for all young adolescents. There are many questions middle level researchers, educators, and policy makers can ask as they reach across their disciplines and explore the ideas discussed above. They might include: • • • • •

In what ways does brain development impact people during early adolescence (MLER SIG, 2016)? What are the experiences of marginalized youth in today’s middle grades schools and classrooms (MLER SIG, 2016)? How do the classroom experiences of adolescents with positive and negative academic outcomes differ? What cognitive, social, and emotional factors influence those outcomes? How do young adolescents perceive their teachers’ attitudes toward themselves, in particular, and school, in general? What is the impact of current state and federal policies on young adolescents’ social, emotional, and academic self-efficacy?

Final Thoughts Academic achievement is directly dependent upon the amount of effort a student exerts. Educators can plan phenomenal lessons, spend hours before and after school mentoring students, and attempt to create strong home/school relationships. None of this matters, however, if the students themselves do not care about their academic success. If they do not want to exert the effort

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that learning requires, no amount of incentives or punishments will make a significant difference. If they do not care about failing grades, they will not do their homework, study for tests, or prepare for presentations. Motivation comes from within each individual but is still influenced by the forces in a person’s environment. Looking at middle level education through the intersection of cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and pedagogical best practices takes more work initially. As educators are required to do more for their students with fewer and fewer resources, the challenge becomes even greater. If the goal is long-lasting academic achievement and social/emotional health, however, it is worth everyone’s effort.

References Ahmed, W., Minnaert, A., & van der Werf, K. (2010). Perceived social support and early adolescents’ achievement: The meditational roles of motivational beliefs and emotions. Journal of Youth Adolescence, 39, 36–46. Alivernini, F., & Lucidi, F. (2011). Reltionship between social context, self-efficacy, motivation, academic achievement, and intention to drop out of high school: A longitudinal study. The Journal of Educational Research, 104, 241–252. Anderman, E. M., & Anderman, L. H. (2014). Classroom motivation (2nd ed. ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson. Bourgeois, S., & Boberg, J. E. (2016). High-achieving, cognitively disengaged middle level mathematics students: A self-determination theory perspective. Research in Middle Level Education, 39(9), 1–18. Online: 10.1080/ 19404476.2016.1236230. Cook-Sather, A. (2002). Authorizing students’ perspectives: Toward trust, dialogue, and change in education. Educational Researcher, 31(4), 3–14. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York, NY: Harper Perennial. Daniels, E. (2010). Creating motivating learning environments. English Journal, 100(1), 25–29. Deci, E., Vallerand, R., Pelletier, L., & Ryan, R. (1991). Motivation and education: The self-determination perspective. Educational Psychologist, 26(3), 325–346. Dundar, S., & Gunduz, N. (2016). Misconceptions regarding the brain: The neuromyths of preservice teachers. Mind, Brain, and Education, 10(4), 212–232. Faircloth, B., & Hamm, J. (2005). Sense of belonging among high school students representing four ethnic groups. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 34(4), 293–309. Gee, J. P. (2017). Teaching, learning, and literacy in our high-risk high-tech world: A framework for becoming human. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Giedd, J. (2012). The digital revolution and adolescent brain evolution. Journal of Adolescent Health, 51(2), 101–105. Immordino-Yang, M. H. (2016). Emotions, learning, and the brain: Exploring the educational implications of affective neuroscience. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company. Immordino-Yang, M. H. (2018). Keynote remarks. Bi-annual meeting of the International Mind, Brain, and Education Society. Los Angeles, CA. Jensen, F. (2015). The teenage brain: A neuroscientist’s survival guide to raising adolescents and young adults. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers. Lourenco, F., & Casey, B. J. (2013). Adjusting behavior to changing environmental demands with development. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 37, 2233–2242. Luna, B., Padmanabhan, A., & O’Hearn, K. (2010). What has fMRI told us about the development of cognitive control through adolescence? Brain and Cognition, 72(1), 101–113. Markant, D., Ruggeri, A., Gureckis, T., & Xu, F. (2016). Enhanced memory as a common effect of active learning. Mind, Brain, and Education, 10(3), 142–152. Marks, H. (2000). Student engagement in instructional activity: Patterns in the elementary, middle, and high school years. American Educational Research Journal, 37(1), 153–184. McHugh, R., Horner, C., Colditz, J., & Wallace, T. (2012). Bridges and barriers: Adolescent perceptions of student-teacher relationships. Urban Education, 48(1), 9–43. Middle Level Education Research Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. (2016) Retrieved from http://mlersig.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/MLER-SIG-Research-AgendaNov-2016-REV.pdf Milner, H. R., & Tenore, F. B. (2010). Classroom management in diverse classrooms. Urban Education, 45(5), 560–603.

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Mitchell, K. L. (2019). Experience inquiry: Five powerful strategies, 50 practice experiences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. Morris, A., Squeglia, L., Jacobus, J., & Silk, J. (2018). Adolescent brain development: Implications for understanding risk and reslience processes through neuroimaging research. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 28(1), 4-9. National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform. (n.d.). Retrieved October 15, 2018 from https://docs. wixstatic.com/ugd/0b6eef_ae9c99135f0547c8bdcd50c56d442b1f.pdf National Middle School Association. (2010a). Research and resources in support of this we believe. Westerville, OH: Author. National Middle School Association. (2010b). This we believe: Keys to educating young adolescents. Westerville, OH: Author. Ochanji, M., Chen, R., Daniels, E., Deringer, M., McDaniel, J., Stowell, L. P., & Adamson, C. (2016). A different kind of kid, A different kind of teacher education: Middle grades teachers reflect on their preparation to teach young adolescents. Middle Grades Review, 2(1), Article 5. http://scholarworks.uvm.edu/mgre view/vol2/iss1/5/ Ozer, E., Price, J., & Kong, C. (2008). Sources of perceived school connection among ethnically-diverse urban adolescents. Journal of Adolescent Research, 23(4), 438–470. Paris, N. (2016). Cognitive development. In S. Mertens, M. Caskey, & N. Flowers (Eds.), The encyclopedia of middle grades education (2nd ed., pp. 89–92). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Ryan, R., & Deci, E. (2000). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation: Classic definitions and new directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25, 54–67. Spencer, J. (2013). Ten differentiation strategies for building Common Core literacy. Westerville, OH: Association for Middle Level Education. Steinberg, L. (2014). Age of opportunity: Lessons from the new science of adolescence. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin. Turner, J. C., Christensen, A., Kackar-Cam, H., Trucano, M., & Fulmer, S. (2014). Enhancing student engagement: Report of a three-year intervention with middle school teachers. American Educational Research Journal, 51(6), 1195–1226. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Willingham, D. (2009). Why don’t students like school: A cognitive scientist answers questions about the mind and what it means for the classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Yu, C., Li, X., Wang, S., & Zhang, W. (2016). Teacher autonomy support reduces adolescent anxiety and depression: An 18-month longitudinal study. Journal of Adolescence, 49, 115–123. doi:10.1016/j. adolescence.2016.03.001 Zatorre, R. J., Fields, R. D., & Johansen-Berg, H. (2013). Plasticity in gray and white: Neuroimaging changes in brain structure during learning. Natural Neuroscience, 15(4), 528–536.

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8 USING A COGNITIVE APPRENTICESHIP APPROACH TO PREPARE MIDDLE GRADES STUDENTS FOR THE COGNITIVE DEMANDS OF THE 21ST CENTURY Victoria Cardullo

Reading comprehension is a complex process that requires the coordination, navigation, and negotiation of multiple text features and/or device features. These interactions are often seamless and fluid. Cartwright (2008) stated skilled readers simultaneously consider flexible representations of numerous elements as they process information within the text. Pressley and colleagues (2009) called this concept cognitive juggling. The nature of literacy today has positioned the Internet as a 21st century text and made online reading a problem-based experience. To become self-directed learners, students must learn to monitor and adjust their strategic approaches to learning, cognitively juggling multiple elements of text and device. Strategic readers engage in a variety of metacognitive processes to monitor and control their understanding of a range of text. Text complexity varies with language conventionality and clarity, knowledge demands of text complexity, vocabulary, structure, and delivery platforms. Students often approach a task and evaluate their strategic processes by monitoring their strengths and weaknesses as they plan their cognitive approaches. These metacognitive processes inertly determine the success levels of the learner. Kalia (2015) found adolescents have high levels of metacognition, but average to low emotional intelligence and low levels of achievement motivation. The study found that emotional intelligence and achievement motivation were strong indicators for enhanced metacognitive behaviors for adolescent learners. The study highlighted the need for developmental skills comprehension, and more importantly, the evaluation of one’s thinking. These experiences help to solidify insight into the cognitive processes adolescents use when learning. To enhance these cognitive processes, teachers and peers (experts) model their thinking processes so students can see and hear what experts do during the cognitive process. Learning through guided experiences such as cognitive apprenticeship helps students develop strong cognitive and metacognitive skills and processes. Cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1987, 1988) requires the deliberate and intentional task of bringing one’s thinking to the

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surface, thus making thinking visible to guide learning. Cognitive apprenticeship provides opportunities for learners to progress from a relatively simple task to a more complex task. Increasing complexity using cognitive apprenticeship refers to the construction of a sequence of the task through purposeful demonstration of skills coupled with assistance and coaching, all leading to the conceptual understanding of a complex skill. This process supports novice learners in the development of their reasoning abilities. Baker and Brown (1984) situated metacognition into two interrelated clusters of information: knowledge of cognition and regulation of cognition. Knowledge of cognition is stable and automatic, whereas regulation of cognition is the regulatory process used to deploy a remedy that encompasses “checking the outcome of [strategy use,] planning one’s next move, monitoring the effectiveness of any attempted action, and test, revising, and evaluating one’s strategies for learning” (p. 354). Researchers have found when teachers explicitly demonstrate and explain specific skills and strategies, students have a better understanding of how to approach a complex task (Palincsar & Brown, 1984; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1985). Teachers who make a variety of strategies visible for students help their student build their repertoire of skills. A cognitive apprenticeship is an instructional approach that supports the teaching of complex skills and reasoning through authentic learning tasks. Students must see a real purpose for learning, but more importantly, they must have opportunities to interact with the experts (teachers and peers). Educators should ask, “How can I make visible to my students how I and other experts think when we perform these skills and work with these concepts?” (Palincsar & Brown, 1984, p. 149).

Metacognition Metacognitive Skills and Strategies Metacognition is the knowledge of thinking processes, occurring here and now as well as in long-term (Pressley, 2002). For example, metacognition occurs as students identify that they are struggling; students monitor the effectiveness of the current strategies being used, attempt to revise and add additional fix-up strategies, and evaluate the regulatory process being used for learning. This process in conjunction with text complexity, device, device features, prior knowledge of both text and device adds to the pluralization of the task. Metacognition is the mental process of seamlessly applying strategies for the internalization of comprehension. It is the knowledge that good readers use strategies consciously and strategically. Metacognition requires conscious access to representations; it involves knowledge about cognition and the cognitive process (Baker, 2002; Flavell, 1979). Skilled readers interact on both the macro- and the micro-processing levels as they construct meaning and activate prior knowledge and developmental pictures of the text (Van den Broek & Kremer, 2000). At both levels, the reader must connect the information in the text, the device, and device features with their background knowledge. Print-based reading requires many strategies that support learning (i.e., rereading, summarizing, previewing, contextualizing, questioning). As students interact with the text, they continually evaluate their understanding and continuously make decisions that impinge their comprehension. The active decision to reread a sentence, paragraph, or page; the ability to identify when and what type of inference should be made to support understanding; the ability to retain specific information and disregard other pieces while reading; and the ability to adjust the rate at which one reads are all strategic decision made by the reader. Each of these decisions requires cognitive processing, which is stable and consistent. 104

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Identification of Metacognitive Strategies Digital reading often uses several of the same strategies (i.e., rereading, summarizing, previewing, contextualizing, questioning) that support print-based reading, but the complexity of device and affordances often place additional cognitive demands on the reader (Cardullo, Wilson, ZygourisCoe, & Wang, 2018; Cardullo, Zygouris-Coe, & Wilson, 2017). Many educational settings have ditched the clunky textbooks and rely heavily on reading material online (e.g., digital textbooks, digitized PDFs, online resources). Schools around the nation are providing 1:1 device(s) (e.g., iPads, Chromebooks, tablets, laptops) for student learning to stay current with the demands of the 21st century. Therefore, identification of metacognitive skills for digital reading is essential to the development of constructively responsive readers. Tools for the identification of digital metacognitive skills can be useful for teachers to identify students’ strengths and weaknesses. In a recent study, 869 students from a southern state were surveyed using the i-MARSI to determine students’ awareness of digital metacognitive behaviors that led to successful learning (Cardullo, Wilson, Zygouris-Coe, & Wang, 2018). The participants were in the seventh and eighth grades and many qualified for free and reduced lunch (45%). The i-MARSI measures two subcategories for strategy usage: devicesupported metacognitive strategies (DSMS) and self-monitoring metacognitive strategies (SMMS). Overall, both male and female scored within medium range for DSMS with a mean average of 3.1 and 3.2, respectively, with females using more strategies such as pay close attention to hyperlinks or text features when text gets difficult, try to visualize what I am reading, or reread when text becomes difficult. Scores on the SMMS indicated a lower usage of strategies. Male eighth grade mean average was identified as low 2.3 and male seventh grade mean was identified as medium 2.6. The female averages were lower; eighth grade mean was 2.5 and seventh grade mean 2.5. The overall total composite for the school indicated a 2.7 mean average for strategy usage. Although these were average scores, they were on the lower end of the scale (medium score 2.5–3.4). After a line item analysis, it was noted that several items’ mean score averaged between a 2.0 and 2.4. Of the items, several are of importance to readers as they navigate and negotiate electronic text for academic reading using the iPad (e.g., taking notes electronically, using features of the iPad, and navigation throughout the text). Therefore, findings from the i-MARSI underscore the importance of helping students develop metacognitive awareness of specific reading strategies when using digital devices for academic learning. They also position the need for self-identification and teacher-identification of strengths and weaknesses. Teaching students to navigate in an online environment as they are reading text is an essential skill of the 21st century. These are literacy practices that require strategic metacognitive behaviors.

Preparing Students to Succeed in Technology Literacy in the digital age requires a complex examination of what it means to learn. Neuman and Gambrell (2015) proposed that disruptive innovations, such as online reading comprehension, e-books, and the use of mobile devices can change the face of education. In 2009 the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) developed Interactive Computer Task (ICTs) to measure student performance. These interactive activities reflect the complexity of learning and demonstrate that to gain knowledge in the digital age students are required to engage in multiple literacy tasks. Preparing students to succeed in a technologically advanced world is an issue of national priority as evidenced by new educational standards and federal initiatives that call for innovative uses of technology that transforms learning in schools.

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As Pressley and Afflerbach (2012) contended, teachers could play a significant role in enhancing a student’s awareness of such strategies to develop a constructively responsive reader. Teaching students to become constructively responsive can promote and improve academic success. The results enable the reader to create a sense of awareness of their strategies and allow the reader to evaluate, monitor, and adjust the cognitive processes while reading digital texts. Flavell (1979) described this cognitive process as actions and interactions of metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive experiences, goals or task related to the process, and actions or strategies used to complete the process. Metacognition has been an essential skill for students in traditional reading settings. “Metacognitive students are strategic in their learning, asking focused questions, sharing how they solved problems, and engaging with each other” (Wilson, Zygouris-Coe, Cardullo, & Fong, 2013, p 10). What was once essential for student learning in traditional reading settings is no longer the norm, classrooms are no longer representing traditional settings. Therefore, it is imperative to identify how students navigate and negotiate digital text, apply strategies used to support the acquisition of understanding, and scaffold new or underused strategies to support comprehension on digital devices. At the heart of being digitally literate is the problem-solving needed to navigate and negotiate multimodal texts, interactive texts, websites, and learning management systems. In the age of digital learning it is critical for teachers to be metacognitive and acknowledge that teaching for digital literacy requires more than the use of technology, but also the integration of knowledge about students, pedagogy, content, and technology (Wilson et al., 2013).

Strategic Reading Strategic readers are well-known for their ability to match appropriate reading strategies to the reading task (Paris, Lipson, & Wixson, 1983). Paris and colleagues postulated an action becomes strategic when selected from a toolbox of resources that students activate to attain an intended goal. The use of strategies is intentional, deliberate, and mindful. Students have a diverse set of strategies in both print-based reading and digital-based learning. They often have strengths within specific subcategories and often rely on these strategies to develop fix-up processes for reading. Dole, Brown, and Trathen (1996) proposed higher achieving readers comprehend more because they use their preferred strategies. Therefore, lower level learners could benefit from learning specific strategies. Identification of strategies using tools such as the i-MARSI could benefit and support the strategic use of strategies as students match appropriate reading strategies to the task at hand (Cardullo, Wilson, & Zygouris-Coe, 2018).

Cognition Cognition refers to the “mental process skilled readers use, including their repertoire of specific comprehension and problem-solving strategies such as rereading, questioning, paraphrasing, and summarizing” (Jordan, Jensen, & Greenleaf, 2001, p. 18). These mental processes may look different in an online environment using various text formats. Online learning involves cognitive processing such as attending to relevant incoming information and mentally organizing material that is often nonlinear while interacting with the features of the device and the affordances of the tools the device offers. Most content area reading instruction focuses on the cognitive dimension. Cognitive dimension is the ability to set a purpose, use problem-solving, adjust one’s reading process, monitor comprehension, and develop the bigger picture through text deconstruction. Text deconstruction may look different on different platforms (e.g., print, iBook, Internet, Google doc). For example, a textbook is often a static text in which students interact in a linear progression. Now position 106

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this textbook online and it becomes an e-textbook in which reading takes place in a non-linear progression. Students interact with the text features and device features. They often click on bold words, hyperlinks, scroll up or down, use the find feature, view videos, listen to audio recordings, and other features embedded within the text. Cognitive resources will look different for each learning platform. Students must learn to control and regulate their metacognitive strategies to prevent cognitive overload. Ongoing research postulates that students require new comprehension strategies and skills to effectively read and learn in a digital environment (Biancarosa & Snow, 2004; Cardullo et al., 2017; Coiro, 2003; Sutherland-Smith, 2002). Reading in a digital environment is a complex process that often places additional demands on higher levels of cognitive behaviors to comprehend and monitor learning. The internalization of strategies involves long-term practice, including opportunities to reflect upon the experiences needed by the individual to regulate their learning environment to achieve a specific goal (Nestor-Baker & Hoy, 2001). This is often called the tacit process or tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge cannot be obtained through a textbook or classroom lecture; it can only be developed through mentoring and experience. Tacit knowledge functions as the background knowledge that assists in accomplishing a given task, and this knowledge varies from situation to situation and device or platform. This process develops schema and allows students to draw connections between interactive digital reading and print-based reading strategies allowing cognition to move from implicit to explicit.

Schema Schema is an organized cognitive pattern that guides behavior. Students compare files of information (schemata) to activate schema of events that commonly occur when they interact within specific situations. The schema provides the scaffolding that enables students to create meaningful connections to new learning. This cognitive process influences the attention allocation needed to accomplish a new task. Let’s say for example students are active on social media, online shopping, or texting and the teachers use digital tools within their classroom to support learning. The schema that students may recall may provide some misconceptions about the use of a digital device since they may be drawing their schema from an inaccurate file. Teacher modeling and expertise metacognitive thinking aloud allow students to draw parallel connections while creating a new schema. This process will enable learners to stimulate new schema that will help develop problem-solving strategies. Cognition is the knowledge students have about their reading skills and the cognitive resources they have readily available to accomplish the task of reading and comprehension. Paris et al. (1983) described this process as the “that,” the “how,” the “when,” and the “why” of the metacognitive process. For example, the reader evaluates the reading and determines “that” activation of prior knowledge is needed to understand the text. As the reader is previewing the text, they decide “how” to use pre-reading strategies to help guide their learning. Finally, readers determine “when” they should adjust their reading rate and “why” it is important to adjust the rate of reading. Cognition is the knowledge students bring to learning to develop as a constructively responsive reader. Let’s situate learning with a digital textbook; readers still evaluate the reading and determine what prior knowledge is needed. This may look different in a digital textbook as there are nonlinear steps a reader takes to develop understanding. A student may choose to watch a video, listen to an audio recording, or even leave the digital textbook to search for additional information only to return to the textbook to use the function of “find” to locate a key term, post a digital annotation, or continue reading. As readers interact with the text via device or print, knowledge of text and device is essential. The additional features of the device add a layer of skill needed to process information when reading digitally. The reader must 107

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decide how, why, and what strategies to use, apply, or even modify when reading a digital textbook as a constructively responsive reader.

Cognitive Flexibility Cognitive flexibility is an aspect of the executive control which involves the ability to control, coordinate, and access strategies flexibly as students interact with complex text (Cartwright, 2009). Cognitive development work has focused on the complex text and the number of factors that must be considered as students engage with the complex cognitive task. Cognitive flexibility refers to the number of mental structures individuals use as they construct meaning. The constructively responsive reader must be flexible, they must be able to handle and process information from multiple sources. They must do this mentally. Reading, writing, and content-specific literacy requires the individuals to process many elements of information in tandem (e.g., ability to process the meaning of a text, monitor or adjust one’s understanding, adjust the level of attention to match the complexity of the task). The ability to flexibly monitor and adjust one’s metacognitive behaviors plays an essential role in the development of skilled readers (Pressley & Afflerbach, 2012). A vital indicator of a strong reader is the notion of flexibility as one interacts with text and device for understanding.

Cognitive Apprenticeship Cognitive apprenticeship (Collins et al., 1987, 1988) requires a person to intentionally bring one’s thinking to the surface, thus making thinking visible. Teachers must be cognizant of these processes when teaching with digital tools and or devices so they can make their thinking as an expert visible so students can become aware of metacognitive strategies used to problem solve in academic programs and content areas in middle grades. Problem-solving ability is critical to student development and their adaptation to the learning environment. Sternberg (1988) postulated problem-solving ability should focus on six elements: the identification of the problem; identification of the steps required to solve the problem; strategic identification of strategies needed to problem solve; identification of the appropriate information; allocation of proper resources; and monitoring of the problem-solving process. Sternberg identified these six elements long before the inception of digital technology in the classroom. Reflecting upon these six elements, there is a strong correlation between present-day digital problem-solving and past print-based problem-solving. The need for problem-solving with devices is critical because of the multifaceted nature of reading on a device and the multiple affordances that support student learning. As students interact with the device, they require strategies that will help them troubleshot issues as they arise. Often these strategies need to be modeled and explained by experts. Using the six significant steps, experts can guide readers through the apprentice model. This process identifies six major steps to provide novice readers the practical experiences to observe how experts solve complex problems.

Modeling Experts demonstrate and explain the metacognitive thinking processes that are taking place, so students can observe and understand the cognitive construction of these processes. For example, teachers or experts could model and explain how to use an application like Notability to annotate text being read on a digital device. During this process of annotation teachers retrospectively discuss the steps they are taking to problem solve as they annotate the text using Notability. 108

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Coaching Learners practice the construction of the cognitive process while the expert observes, advises, and corrects behaviors. Using the same application, Notability, students would apply the application of annotation while the teacher scaffolds and supports learning providing coaching advice for specific strategies they could use to problem solves as they annotate text.

Scaffolding As the complexity of the cognitive process increases or decreases, the level of assistance will adjust accordingly to the learners’ progress until the task can be completed independently. Scaffolding takes place on various levels. During the reading process as students are annotating using Notability, the cognitive apprenticeship model is fluid allowing the coach to adjust and modify scaffolding as needed allowing the student to identify the appropriate information required during the learning process.

Articulation During this stage, the learners are given opportunities to articulate and clarify their metacognitive behaviors. Because the process is reciprocal, dialogic discourse is reciprocal as well. Using the cognitive apprenticeship, the coach models and articulates the language and metacognitive behaviors used. As scaffolding decreases, the apprentice is encouraged to begin articulating the metacognitive behaviors they are now applying to allocate the proper resources they need to complete the task.

Reflection Learners and experts compare their thoughts and reflect on learning as they monitor the problem-solving process. As the learners and experts reflect, they often clarify and process the metacognitive behaviors that lead to success. This process again is reciprocal in which the discourse encourages a give and take discussion in which the learner grows and adapts their behaviors.

Exploration The learner manipulates and explores the metacognitive behaviors and skills learned to promote new learning and make connections during the identification of problem-solving. During this final stage, the learner is encouraged to explore and manipulate metacognitive behaviors to scaffold their learning. Academic programs must situate learning to challenge students to take ownership of the task and effectively problem-solve to enhance learning. This process of learning is motivational as the process becomes more visible to the learner. Problem-solving allows students to understand the relationship between the metacognitive strategies and the cognitive process of learning as they reflect on and monitor their problem-solving process. This process must be reciprocal to guide and model so students learn to make their thinking visible bringing to the surface the abundant resources adolescents can access from their toolboxes. Doing so will bring the tacit process into the open for students to observe, enact, problem solves, and practice, while guided by experts (both teachers and peers). Often a task arises in the real world and learning is situational causing students to identify areas of confusion, practice a repertoire of strategies, and problem-solve in a safe and nurturing

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environment under the direction of an expert (e.g., learning to ride a bike, cook eggs, change a tire). Learning processes are not isolated learning experiences, but rather are embedded, authentic content reading experiences that are supported by metacognitive discourse. To deepen students’ ability to engage in rich metacognitive discourse, teachers the academic experts or students the situational experts begin to activate prior knowledge about the topic, the content, the device to provide cognitive mentorship. These experiences come from lived experiences and readings in which students draw connections or build new schema.

Designing Instruction Instructional Strategies Talking to the Text Talking to the text is a critical instructional strategy that allows students to stimulate both cognition and metacognitive behaviors through discourse. Modeling the teacher voice as you read and annotate gives students resources and language to capture their voice on paper or screen. An instructional strategy would be to assign different text to students digitally so they can annotate using applications such as Notability. This process allows the reader to interact with the text often deconstructing it as they search for information. Students are asked to jot reflective notes, focused on the reading process. This instructional strategy guides students through the reading process gradually allowing students to see where their reading is breaking down or what is distracting them. As this strategy progresses, additional elements are added to produce evidence of learning (e.g., jotting questions, predictions, connections). When students know where they are getting confused, they learn to employ problem-solving strategies introduced and modeled by expert readers using the metacognitive process.

Developing a Reading Apprenticeship Stance The reading apprenticeship approach is an instructional strategy that is often embedded in the process of teaching a subject area or content-specific curriculum. Reading apprenticeship enables students to become more engaged with the reading process as they are often observing experts in the field monitoring and adjusting their learning based on a reflective process. Helping students gain insight into their metacognitive processes develops student control over their learning. Guiding students through the apprenticeship process allows them to develop a repertoire of problemsolving strategies to deepen their comprehension of complex content-specific text. To develop this instructional strategy, classroom teachers re-conceptualize subject area learning as an apprentice in discipline-based practices of thinking, talking, reading, and writing. The following four dimensions are often woven into subject area metacognitive discourse investigation by both the teacher (expert) and the student (novice) (Schoenbach, Braunger, Greenleaf, & Litman, 2003).

The Social Dimension: Building a Reading Inquiry Community The social dimension involves creating a sense of safety in the community. Through ongoing conversations and critical discourse students and teachers interact with each other, the text, the device, and different perspective to share confusions, questions, and interests related to the process and the text itself. As students share confusion and difficulties of a text, they realize the confusion is a starting point for making meaning of the text. This process helps students build content knowledge and metacognitive strategies to tackle difficult text. 110

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The Personal Dimension: Creating a Sense of Agency Personal dimension involves addressing student’s interest to explore a new aspect of their own identity. Teachers guide students through the apprenticeship model how to develop and execute skills to become more strategic both in and out of school. Responding to metacognitive prompts before, during, and after reading helps the student reflect on strategies used and instances in which meaning breaks down and the problem-solving strategies are used to self-correct learning.

The Cognitive Dimension: Developing a Comprehension Toolkit Cognitive dimension involves student development of cognitive tools to support comprehension and problem -solving in manageable chunks. Using metacognitive routines to make thinking visible with tools such as think aloud and talking to the text helps the student to monitor and problem solve as issues occur. New learning of metacognitive learning strategies is added to the comprehension toolkit as students begin to master and use regular items. This development of a repertoire of specific metacognitive behaviors and problem-solving skills helps to develop tools for students as they navigate the difficult text.

The Knowledge-Building Dimension: Tapping and Extending Knowledge of Content, Text, and Discourse Knowledge building encompasses the identification and expansion of the knowledge students bring to the text, including knowledge of structure, discourse patterns, word structure, meaning and discourse, patterns and signals of the text and awareness of content knowledge.

Developing Technology Enhanced Literacy Lessons Text Annotation and the Inner Voice When applying the cognitive apprenticeship model (Collins et al., 1987, 1988), strategies need to be modeled and explained by experts. Using the six major steps, experts can guide readers through the apprentice model and text annotation, which is an evidence-based literacy strategy that helps students understand and navigate the complex text.

Step 1: Modeling Students can work collaboratively on the same text or file to annotate the complex text. The expert peer works with a struggling reader to demonstrate and explain the metacognitive thinking processes that are taking place, so students can observe and understand the cognitive construction of the process during annotation.

Step 2: Coaching Students and teachers can share annotations so the learner can practice the construction of the cognitive process while the expert provides written feedback.

Step 3: Scaffolding Teachers can annotate, often scaffolding the learning process and capturing formative assessment and growth. As the complexity of the cognitive process increases or decreases, the level of 111

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assistance will adjust accordingly to the learners’ progress until the task can be completed independently.

Step 4: Articulation During this stage, the learners are given opportunities to articulate and clarify their metacognitive behaviors. The student is asked to share their annotation with others for feedback and clarification. Because the process is reciprocal, written discourse is reciprocal as well. The coach models and articulates the language and metacognitive behaviors used. As scaffolding decreases, the apprentice is encouraged to begin annotating and articulating the metacognitive behaviors they are now applying.

Step 5: Reflection Learners and experts compare their annotations and metacognitive behaviors. As the learners and experts reflect, they often clarify and process the metacognitive behaviors that lead to success. This process again is reciprocal because the discourse encourages a give and take discussion in which the learner grows and adapts their behaviors. The expert can record comments verbally so students can “hear” the metacognitive inner voice of the expert.

Step 6: Exploration During this final stage, the learner is encouraged to explore and manipulate metacognitive behaviors to scaffold their learning.

Making the Invisible Visible for Struggling Readers The rapid pace of technology growth in education has created both opportunities and challenges for schools. Students have greater access to rich multimedia content and personalized learning. The cognitive demands have created additional challenges for already struggling students. The reading apprenticeship model situated within Vygotsky’s (1978) socially mediated learning is a highly collaborative model in which peers interact with equal expertise. Participating in classroom learning activities with the help of an expert (teacher or peer) provides strategic opportunities through mentoring, modeling, and scaffolding. Effective reading strategies can and should be taught during these opportunities. Therefore, talking to the text is an essential aspect of the middle grades curriculum. Talking to the text is used to develop both cognition and metacognition. Talking to the text gets students in the habit of using and applying metacognitive strategies to interact with the text and the device. Support for reading improvement comes from explicit modeling and mentoring as well as ample opportunities for guided practice leading to independent practice. Drawing upon student’s strengths to help them develop knowledge, strategies, motivation, and confidence is critical. Tools such as the i-MARSI (Cardullo, Wilson, Zygouris-Coe, & Wang, 2018) can help teachers and students identify knowledge of strategies used when learning and interacting with a digital device to become cognitively responsive readers. In early 1970 research identified a range of metacognitive strategies used by good readers (Pressley & Afflerbach, 2012). These strategies have continued to develop, modify, and support readers. Teachers must encourage readers through the use of text talk to support effective reading strategies. Learning and practicing are not isolated task but rather embedded in authentic learning and context by ongoing authentic metacognitive discourse. 112

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Additional Strategies: Thinking about My Thinking Tent Cards for Student Desk

is CRYSTAL CLEAR !

¥ Learning is a bit HAZY!

Tent cards on the desk

¥ Learning

Tent cards on the desk

Tent cards on the desk

As students monitor their cognitive processing, an easy visual for classroom teachers is to use paint samples that range in color from darker to lighter. On each sample, students write a) Learning is crystal clear! b) Learning is a bit HAZY! and c) I am in a fog! This process helps students

¥ I am in a FOG!

Figure 8.1 Thinking tent cards. This figure illustrates a tool for students to monitor their metacognitive behaviors.

C Circle and DEFINE words you do not know.

A Acknowledge confusion.

T Talk to the text.

C Capture the main idea, theme, or claim.

H Highlight important information.

Use hyperlinks or the Internet to look up the meaning of the word. Does the word seem positive or negative? Is there any part of the word that you already know? Does it look like any words that you may know in another language? Use Context Clues. How is the word used in the sentence? It’s okay not to understand what the text is saying. You will have to struggle with the text and ask questions about the text before you can understand the text. Everyone struggles to understand difficult texts! Make a prediction. What do you think will happen based on what you already know? Ask questions. What don’t you understand? What do you need to know? Make comments. What’s your opinion? Do you agree or disagree with the author? React. How does the text make you feel? What does the text make you think? Make connections between the text and things that you know about yourself, the world, and other texts that you’ve read. Write the main idea of each paragraph, half-page, or page in the margins. Main idea sentence starters: This text/part of the text is mostly about … The author is trying to tell me that … If she or he had to choose, the one thing the author would want me to know is that … If I had to sum up this part of the text in 25 words or less, I would write … The author wants to prove that … Highlighting should be the last thing you do. Highlight only the essential words or phrases that reveal the main idea or key details.

Figure 8.2 CATCH. This figure shows how the acronym CATCH can be used to annotate text.

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self-identify that meaning is breaking down, and they need to apply problem-solving strategies to repair meaning. On the inside of the text card, students notate their favorite fix-up strategies (see Figure 8.1). Figure 8.2 demonstrates how the acronym CATCH can be used to annotate complex text (Westrup, n.d.).

Conclusion The cognitive apprenticeship model has the potential to help students acquire both cognitive and metacognitive skills and promote higher order thinking resulting in sustained participation in communities (Collins et al., 1988). This model provides opportunities for novice learners to observe how experts (peers or teachers) solve complex problems. The adolescent mind is wired to learn by doing—experiential learning. During this time frame, adolescents are undergoing radical changes in their brain’s neurological pathways; the apprenticeship model of learning supports the development of autonomy in learning for adolescents. Skills and strategies are resources adolescents access from their schema. Drawing on students’ strengths and helping them develop knowledge, strategies, motivation, and confidence to become a more strategic reader needs to be intentional by both the teacher and the student. Rich metacognitive discourse both internally and externally support the reader in four dimensions: social (creation of a safe environment); personal (development of reader identity); cognitive (problem solver/adjuster of strategies); knowledge (development of discipline and discourse specific knowledge) (Jordan et al., 2001). While classroom learning is often abstract and disconnected from real-world application, cognitive apprenticeship is a method of teaching that encourages students to learn alongside experts to handle complex learning. This process requires the expert to make thinking visible so a student can learn alongside the expert voice. When students identify where they are getting confused and have resources readily available to repair comprehension, they are better equipped for the cognitive demands of the 21st century. As classroom teachers begin to develop a more complex environment using the cognitive apprenticeship model, there are things teachers of adolescent students can do to support learning: for example, making learning as connected to a realistic task as possible, conducting a scientific experiment to solve real-world problems, writing a short story for the newspaper, writing letters to Congress. To produce work, develop a collaborative learning environment in which students work alongside “experts” to develop and challenge ideas. Motivate students by developing learning that supports an audience from the outside the community. Conducting a poll for social or environmental issues, developing a performance, or creating a community garden all allow students to see real-world value in their learning while working alongside the experts.

References Baker, L. (2002). Metacognition in comprehension instruction. Comprehension Instruction: Research-Based Best Practices, 77–95. Baker, L., & Brown, A. L. (1984). Metacognitive skills and reading. In P. D. Pearson, R. Barr, M. L. Kamil, & P. Mosenthal (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (pp. 353–394). New York, NY: Longman. Biancarosa, G., & Snow, C. E. (2004). Reading next: A vision for action and research in middle and high school literacy: A report from Carnegie Corporation of New York. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education. Cardullo, V., Wilson, N., Zygouris-Coe, V., & Wang, C. H. (2018, March). i-MARSI iPad metacognitive awareness of reading strategies inventory: Using an inventory to survey student’s cognitive monitoring of strategies. In Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 1347–1356). Chesapeake, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Cardullo, V., Zygouris-Coe, V. V. I., & Wilson, N. S. (2017). Reading nonfiction text on an iPad in a secondary classroom. Journal of Research in Reading, 40(S1), S190-S208.

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Using a Cognitive Apprenticeship Approach Cartwright, K.B. (2008). Cognitive flexibility and reading comprehension. Comprehension Instruction: ResearchBased Best Practices, 50–64. Cartwright, K. B. (2009). The role of cognitive flexibility in reading comprehension: Past, present, and future. In S. E. Israel (Ed.), Handbook of research on reading comprehension (pp. 115–139). New York, NY: Routledge. Coiro, J. (2003). Reading comprehension on the Internet: Expanding our understanding of reading comprehension to encompass new literacies. (Exploring Literacy on the Internet). The Reading Teacher, 56(5), 458– 465. Retrieved from www.readingonline.org/electronic/elec_index.asp?HREF=/electronic/rt/ 2-03_Column Collins, A., Brown, J. S., & Newman, S. E. (1987). Cognitive apprenticeship: Teaching the craft of reading, writing, and mathematics (Technical Report No. 403). BBN Laboratories, Cambridge, MA. Centre for the Study of Reading, University of Illinois. Collins, A., Brown, J. S., & Newman, S. E. (1988). Cognitive apprenticeship. Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 8(1), 2–10. Dole, J. A., Brown, K. J., & Trathen, W. (1996). The effects of strategy instruction on the comprehension performance of at-risk students. Reading Research Quarterly, 31(1), 62–88. Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive–Developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34(10), 906. Jordan, M., Jensen, R., & Greenleaf, C. (2001). Amidst familial gatherings: Reading apprenticeship in a middle school classroom. Voices from the Middle, 8(4), 15–24. Kalia, P. (2015). Emotional intelligence and achievement motivation as determinants of metacognition among adolescents (Master of Science Thesis). Retrieved form Punjab Agricultural University, Conclusion Ludhiana, India. Nestor-Baker, N. S., & Hoy, W. K. (2001). Tacit knowledge of school superintendents: Its nature, meaning, and content. Educational Administration Quarterly, 37(1), 86–129. Neuman, S. B., & Gambrell, L. B. (2015). Disruptive innovations in reading research and practice. Reading Research Quarterly, 50(1), 7–12. Palincsar, A., & Brown, A. (1984). Reciprocal teaching of comprehension-fostering and comprehension-monitoring activities. Cognition and Instruction, 1, 117–175. Paris, S. G., Lipson, M. Y., & Wixson, K. K. (1983). Becoming a strategic reader. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 8(3), 293–316. Pressley, M. (2002). Reading instruction that works: The case for balanced teaching. New York, NY: Guilford Press. Pressley, M., & Afflerbach, P. (2012). Verbal protocols of reading: The nature of constructively responsive reading. New York, NY: Routledge. Pressley, M., Duke, N. K., Gaskins, I. W., Fingeret, L., Halladay, J., & Hilden, K. (2009). Working with struggling readers: Why we must get beyond the simple view of reading and visions of how it might be done. In T. Gutkin & C. R. Reynolds (Eds.), Handbook of School Psychology (4th ed., pp. 522–546). New York, NY: Wiley. Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (1985). Fostering the development of self-regulation in children’s knowledge processing. In S. F. Chipman, J. W. Segal, & R. Glaser (Eds.), Thinking and learning skills: Volume 2 Research and open questions (pp. 563–577). Hillside, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Schoenbach, R., Braunger, J., Greenleaf, C., & Litman, C. (2003). Apprenticing adolescents to reading in subject-area classrooms. Phi Delta Kappan, 85(2), 133–138. Sternberg, R. J. (1988). The Nature of creativity: Contemporary psychological perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sutherland-Smith, W. (2002). Weaving the literacy web: Changes in reading from page to screen. The Reading Teacher, 55(7), 662–229. Van den Broek, P., & Kremer, K. E. (2000). The Mind in Action: What It Means to Comprehend During Reading. In B. M. (Ed.), Reading for Meaning: Fostering Comprehension in the Middle Grades (pp. 1–31). Newark, DE: International Reading Association and Teachers College Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilson, N., Zygouris-Coe, V., Cardullo, V., & Fong, J. (2013). Pedagogical frameworks of e-reader technologies in education. In S. Keengwe (Ed.), Pedagogical applications and social effects of mobile technology integration (pp. 1–24). Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference. doi:10.4018/978-1-4666-2985-1.ch001

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9 THE EFFECTS OF CONTEMPORARY TECHNOLOGY ON YOUNG ADOLESCENTS’ SOCIOEMOTIONAL BEHAVIORS AND LEARNING Priya M. Poehner and Dave F. Brown

[Granville Stanley] Hall said optimistically of adolescence that it was “the birthday of the imagination,” but he also knew this age of exhilaration has dangers, including impulsivity, risk-taking, mood swings, lack of insight, and poor judgment. What he couldn’t possibly have anticipated back then is the breathtaking range of dangers teens would be exposed to today through social media and the Internet. (Jensen, 2015, p. 6) Successful interactions with middle level students require knowledge of the unique developmental characteristics of 10- to 15-year-olds—commonly referred to as young adolescents (Brown & Knowles, 2014; Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1989; Lipsitz, 1977; National Middle School Association [NMSA], 2010). Educators and caregivers across the globe have a responsibility to respond to these unique developmental needs, at school and home. The influence of technological changes over the past 20 years has particularly exacerbated growth experiences for adolescents (Gazzaley & Rosen, 2016; Jensen, 2015; Kardaras, 2016; Twenge, 2017b). Twenge (2017b) labeled and identified those born from 1995 to 2012 as iGen due to their access to iPhones and the Internet prior to entering high school. Twenge noted the following: The i in these devices stands for Internet, and the Internet was commercialized in 1995. They are the first generation for whom Internet access has been constantly available, right there in their hands. The first iGen’ers graduated from high school in 2012 and the last will in 2030. (Twenge, 2017b, pp. 2, 6) iGen’ers’ experiences are unique and different from those of their predecessors due to their exposure to such innovative electronic devices and the ways in which these devices have the capacity to alter their social, emotional, and cognitive states.

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Technology companies that design and produce computers promote them as essential to facilitating learning. The United States Federal Department of Education provides funding for the advancement of technology use in classrooms as part of the Every Student Succeeds Act (U.S. Department of Education, 2015). The U.S. Office of Educational Technology authors stated, “The conversation has shifted from whether technology should be used in learning, to how it can improve learning to ensure that all students have access to highquality educational experiences” (U.S. Department of Education, 2017, p. 11). Those perspectives coincided in the U.S. with Google’s attempts to market and sell software and, eventually, hardware to public schools across the country. Singer (2017) reported that by mid-2017, Google had a paid audience of about 15 million students with its Chromebooks, apps, and Google Classroom purchased by many U.S. schools. Students now can conduct research, complete homework, email their assignments to their teachers, and download content both at school and home with their Chromebooks. They can also surf the Internet, play games, and email fellow students on their Chromebooks—all which may have no educational value. Technological advancements have the potential to improve people’s lives; but their negative effects are generally discounted unless they are commonly identified as somehow dangerous to many on a large scale. The prevailing perspective among educators, caregivers, and legislators appears to be that technology in schools and in students’ hands creates positive opportunities for all. Recent trends in adolescent behavior may contradict the optimistic beliefs associated with more technology use—even among adults. It is our intent to provide an overview of young adolescents’ unique cognitive and socioemotional behaviors. We will also describe how adolescents are cognitively and socioemotionally affected by technology, noting how the almost instant market saturation of devices, particularly cell phones, is altering adolescent behavior globally in unpredictable ways. Recent statistics indicate that almost five billion people worldwide (about 64% of the population) use mobile devices; evidence that newer technology affects a large proportion of adolescents worldwide (Statista, 2016).

Young Adolescents’ Developmental Traits Young adolescents’ unique developmental processes can place them in precarious dilemmas on a day-to-day basis—some relatively harmless; others with more serious effects. These challenges may not have previously affected them due to the changes that occur in their growth between the ages of 10 to 15. The fact that numerous developmental changes are occurring simultaneously affects adolescents’ abilities to respond to their environments in a psychologically mature manner. Access to infinite information closely at hand via electronic devices and the Internet can exacerbate traditional face-to-face social and emotional challenges affecting adolescents’ daily lives. The unique developmental changes that they experience enhance the possibility for negative responses to these easily accessible technological advances.

Socioemotional Changes Among Young Adolescents The physical, social, emotional, and cognitive changes that occur between the ages of 10 and 15 have significant impacts on young adolescents’ behavior. They may frequently become emotionally distraught, indecisive, socially inept, easily influenced, and demonstrate poor decision-making in their interactions with others. Adolescent hormonal changes can partially explain behavioral changes; but cognitive and resultant socioemotional changes are just as influential in affecting young adolescent behavior. These changes in adolescence are considerably affected by the underdevelopment of the last portion of the brain to fully mature: the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Humans’ brains develop from birth from the lower back portion—the cerebellum—to the upper 117

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front—the PFC. Connections among parts of the brain are few at birth; but as children age, greater connections occur to and from each part of the brain (Jensen, 2015). Young adolescents’ prefrontal cortexes are the last part of the brain to develop; and despite their developing capacity for learning more abstract principles, their executive functioning strategies develop more slowly (Lenroot & Giedd, 2006). As Jensen (2015) explained, “Because the frontal lobes are still only loosely connected to other parts of the teen brain, adolescents have a harder time exerting cognitive control over potentially dangerous situations” (p. 106). The underdeveloped PFC affects social and emotional behaviors because this front section of the brain is responsible for several executive functioning activities: • • • • • •

planning ahead, predicting consequences of behaviors, controlling impulses, organizational behaviors, delaying gratification, and resisting temptation.

Due to their underdeveloped PFCs and fewer connections to it, many of young adolescents’ experiences are routed through the amygdala located under the temporal lobe of the brain. The amygdala is the emotional and fear center of the brain. Experiences processed through the amygdala instead of the PFC often contribute to increased emotional and explosive responses, rather than reactions that are moderated by reasoning. Adolescents’ frequent infusion of sex hormones also affects the emotional center of the brain and has an impact on their need for emotionally-laden experiences—often causing them to seek more exciting actions or even creating them to satisfy their needs for an emotional surge (Jensen, 2015). It is not difficult to imagine the intensity of excitement that hand-held cell phones can provide to emotionally-starved adolescents. Bypassing the PFC also affects decision-making—particularly the speed with which adolescents respond to a potential crisis (Jensen, 2015). Another adolescent cognitive challenge is how they process negative information. Researchers in London noted that adolescents have more areas of the brain that process positive information than negative—primarily because negative information is centered in the PFC—that underdeveloped aspect of the adolescent brain (Moutsiana et al., 2013). Jensen (2015) explained, “Adolescents have less ability to process negative information than adults do, and so they are less inclined not to do something risky, and less likely to learn from the ensuing mistake or misadventure, than adults are” (p. 84).

Self-esteem Self-esteem is the evaluative thoughts and feelings one has about himself/herself as related to selfperceptions (Brinthaupt, 2013). Due to the immense cognitive and socioemotional changes that occur during early adolescence, a person’s self-evaluations are frequently unpredictable during this stage. Brinthaupt, Boyer-Pennington, and Lipka (2016) reported, “Middle level students are prone to engaging in all-or-none thinking, inaccurate overgeneralizations, and instability and conflict regarding their self-perceptions and self-evaluations” (p. 344). Most young adolescents experience a lower level of self-esteem than previously felt between the ages of 10 to 15 (Brinthaupt et al., 2016). Evidence of the effects of lower self-esteem on young adolescents is in these descriptions of their socioemotional behaviors provided by the Association for Middle Level Education (AMLE, formerly NMSA). Young adolescents: 118

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• • • • •

Tend to be self-conscious and highly sensitive to personal criticism. Are psychologically vulnerable, because at no other stage in development are they more likely to encounter and be aware of so many differences between themselves and others. Have a strong need for approval and may be easily discouraged. Are increasingly concerned about peer acceptance. Experience mood swings often with peaks of intensity and unpredictability (NMSA, 2010, pp. 60–61).

Adolescents with lower self-esteem are likely to seek experiences through fellow students that are more positive in nature and lead to better personal feelings. Internet content, online gaming experiences, and any type of social media are potential opportunities for increasing self-esteem, though these experiences may also produce the opposite effects and damage one’s self-esteem.

Anxiety, Depression, and Stress Many events in adolescents’ lives create stress: meeting greater academic expectations, attempting to become a part of a peer group, or taking on greater responsibilities (Brown & Knowles, 2014). Young adolescents generally react more negatively to stress than adults due to specific physiological development. Shen and colleagues (2007) reported that a specific hormone, tetrahydropregnanolone (THP), is released into the bloodstream to control anxiety as a response to stress once one reaches puberty. This hormone helps calm adults; but in adolescents, THP is ineffective in helping them to relax and instead creates more anxiety. Brown (2013) surveyed 40 eighth graders inquiring about their lives; all 40, without suggestion or prompt, voluntarily used the word “stress” to describe certain aspects of their lives. Other significant hormones released during young adolescence also contribute to stress and anxiety. Smith (2012) discovered that adolescent females are particularly affected by increased cortisol levels that may increase negative emotions such as stress, worry, anxiety, and anger. Female teenagers are more likely to suffer anxiety and mood disorders than males and interpersonal relationships often contribute to females’ anxiety. Jensen (2015) added, “So, too, has loneliness [been affected by increased levels of cortisol]; and this is why in adolescents being alone is also associated with increased anxiety and stress” (p. 173). Twenge (2017b) reported that teenagers using cell phones are spending less time meeting face-to-face, which may create loneliness for many. Twenge (2017b) described iGen’ers as experiencing more mental health challenges than adolescents have for several decades, noting a rise in teen suicide rates and depression in the United States since 2008. The teenage suicide rate surpassed the homicide rate of teens in the U.S. for the first time ever in 2011. The U.S. National Center for Health Statistics (2016) reported that the suicide rate for 10- to 14-year-olds doubled from 2007 to 2014. Young adolescents experience immense psychosocial and emotional developmental changes. These socioemotional processes do not occur in a vacuum; they are particularly influenced by social interactions—many of which occur via social media. Constant access to the Internet is another factor that affects adolescents’ socioemotional beliefs and feelings—from gaming to Snapchat to Instagram—and any other social media platform available to cell phone users.

Cognitive Growth Processes Young adolescents experience unparalleled physiological brain growth (Lenroot & Giedd, 2011). An overproduction of dendrites, or hyper-growth of the branches at the end of brain cells— called blossoming or arborization occurs, creating for students much greater intellectual 119

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capabilities than they possessed before the ages of 10 to 15. This growth of synapses makes adolescents “sensation-seeking learning machines” (Jensen, 2015, p. 83). Simultaneously, pruning is occurring—that is, many branches that are used infrequently wither and disappear, leading to more efficient cognitive processing. The coating of axons of neurons, also known as myelination, acts as insulation (Jensen, 2015). Faster processing and improved short-term memory via insulated neurons lead to better reasoning (Lenroot & Giedd, 2011). Despite these intellectual gains for adolescents, poor connections between other brain components and their underdeveloped PFCs create more susceptibility for erroneous thinking, poor decision-making, and emotional rather than reasoned judgments.

Reward and Addiction Children naturally value rewards; but brain development during early adolescence leads to a more focused attention on the possibility of receiving rewards. Increases in the hormone dopamine in adolescents’ brains provide the impetus for them to prioritize any activity that may lead to a reward. The thought of the possibility of receiving a reward is more significant than receiving a reward itself (Kuhnen & Knutson, 2005; Somerville, Hare, & Casey, 2011). The result of these physiological changes is that adolescents are controlled more by “immediacy and emotion” when they are faced with a decision to take a risk—thinking that it may lead to a reward—than they are with reason (Jensen, 2015, p. 111). This prioritizing leads to them being less likely to delay gratification, despite safety or health concerns. As long as adolescents participate in risky behavior, and do not experience negative consequences for it, they will continue to repeat those behaviors.

Sleep Needs Adolescents experience hormonal changes that affect their sleep patterns. Carskadon (1999) identified that the typical release time of the hormone melatonin, which causes sleepiness, is delayed during the onset of puberty. This delayed release keeps adolescents awake longer at night than their experiences prior to puberty—which is particularly significant if school start times are before 9:00 a.m. (Carskadon, 1999). Crowley and Carskadon (2010) recognized through their studies that adolescents need at least nine hours and fifteen minutes of sleep each night to ensure effective functioning each day. Contemporary technology, particularly since the opportunity for ubiquitous text messaging via smartphones, leads to many more occurrences of adolescents staying awake longer at night than before these multi-ability devices were available. Jensen (2015) described several advantages for adolescents who sleep the required nine hours a night: improves pruning processes of dendrites, enhances memory and learning, and leads to healthier eating habits (p. 89). Restful sleep also contributes to better overall physical and mental health. Appropriate hours of sleep for adolescents aids in the release of hormones necessary for growth and sexual maturation (Wolfe, 2005). In contrast, researchers described the following behavioral and physical health difficulties as a result of poor sleep habits: a greater likelihood of juvenile delinquency, cardiovascular disease, depression, high blood pressure, and obesity (Clinkinbeard, Simi, Evans, & Anderson, 2011). Oshima and colleagues (2012) found in research with Japanese adolescents that those who were awake longer into the night using cell phones were more likely to be at risk for mental health issues—including greater possibilities of attempting suicide and engaging in self-harm. Jensen (2015, p. 98) summarized a host of other possible effects of poor sleep, both emotional and cognitive. 120

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Emotional

Cognitive

Aggressive Impatient Impulsive and inappropriate Prone to low self-esteem Liable to mood swings

Impairment of the ability to learn Inhibition of creativity Slowing of problem solving skills Increasing forgetfulness

Figure 9.1 Emotional and cognitive effects of poor sleep. Adapted from Jensen (2015, p.98).

Available Technology The speed with which new technological devices infiltrate the lives of global citizens is perhaps best described as incalculable. Market saturation occurs so quickly that once a device is invented, it becomes globally available within a few months (Gazzaley & Rosen, 2016). Adolescents are exposed to many devices that connect to the Internet: Chromebooks, iPads, wristwatches, tablets, readers, smart TVs, game consoles, Ebook readers, digital cameras, automobiles, home appliances (smart home platforms), security systems, smart eyeglasses, and their smartphones—as of this date. Most adolescents are likely highly disappointed when they are anywhere that Internet connections are unavailable. They have full 24/7 access to the Internet, and all that it provides—an unlimited source of information and social media—and they have used that access since they were old enough to view content on a screen. Social media sites have proliferated as adolescents connect to others via Tumblr, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, Kik, Tagged, WhatsApp, as well as their frequent texting. Twenge (2017b) noted that adolescents respond to or initiate activities on their phones more than an average 80 times a day. This generation of young adolescents has had access to hand-held devices with Internet access their entire lives, and many received their first smartphone by the age of 10 (Twenge). They likely were introduced to gaming devices as early as the age of three; and continue to play games on their hand-held cell phones or other tablets. Electronic devices are not merely available at home, but also at school. U.S. schools have received numerous monetary grants, both private and public monies, to infuse technology into their daily lessons. The United States spent approximately $5 billion in 2015 in K–12 education for technology-related devices (McCandless, 2015). Many other countries, as well, have devoted government funds to technology for schools. Data collected through the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) evaluations of 15-year-old students, coordinated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an international conglomerate of 35 nations, revealed that 96% of students reported having access to a computer in their homes; and 72% noted that they used computers at school in 2012. In that same OECD (2015) study, the authors noted: In 40 countries and economies, at least 99% of students in the top quarter of socioeconomic status have access to the Internet at home. By contrast, in 15 countries and economies, fewer than one in two students in the bottom quarter of socio-economic status has access to the Internet at home. (OECD, 2015, p. 129) The authors of this OECD report noted distinct advantages of students having access to computers and the Internet at school; but as well, they provided data indicating no discernable increases in student PISA scores as a result of technology use in school. 121

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Effects of Technology on Young Adolescents Neurologically, human beings haven’t caught up with today’s over-stimulating environment, which is why many neuroscientists and psychologists theorize that we are seeing an explosion of developmental and psychiatric disorders. (Gurian, 2005, as cited in Kardaras, 2016, p. 26) Young adolescents seem to be primed socioemotionally and cognitively for possible addiction to smartphones, social media, and computer gaming. The multitude of adolescents’ physiological changes provides a platform for new technology, as if they are official guinea pigs for tech companies. Technology companies may not have originally designed hardware and software specifically for adolescents, or to affect them in ways that they have; yet recent products/apps have captured young adolescents’ minds in unimaginable ways (Gazzaley & Rosen, 2016; Jensen, 2015; Kardaras, 2016; Rosen, 2012; Twenge, 2017b). Many new technologies may have been designed for more productive intellectual processing; but recent research reveals that more or better learning is not a by-product of contemporary technology as used in current situations (Jensen, 2015; Kardaras, 2016; Rosen, 2012).

Cognitive Challenges Created by Contemporary Technology Not only is tech exposure linked to clinical disorders and dulled sensory acuity, but groundbreaking research … further confirmed that kids living in more technological advanced societies not only had duller senses, but apparently they were lousier students than their so-called “primitive” counterparts. (Mikulak, 1991, as cited in Kardaras, 2016, p. 33) Although many may believe that access to technology leads to greater cognitive growth and intellectual acuity, current data do not support that perspective (Gazzaley & Rosen, 2016; Kardaras, 2016; Rosen, 2012). An adolescent’s propensity for reward may be the most dangerous Achilles’ heel related to technology’s impacts; and those impacts most severely affect students’ cognitive and socioemotional lives.

Dopamine and Rewards Young adolescents’ developing brains affect their desires for rewards. Physiologically, their brains’ pleasure centers are stimulated, increasing levels of dopamine, by glowing screens—from smartphones to iPads (Kardaras, 2016). Computers, smartphones, the Internet, and video games provide outlets for young adolescents’ growing, sensation-seeking brains. Each of these devices is a dopamineenhancing stimulant, possibly creating additional addictions for which adolescents are already primed (Kardaras, 2016). Technology companies could not have chosen better consumers than adolescents based on their physiological growth patterns. Kardaras (2016) reported that adolescents and young adults receive and send many more text messages daily than those over the age of 24. Kardaras explained, “According to Dr. Whybrow, ‘Our brains are wired for finding immediate reward. With technology, novelty is the reward. You essentially become addicted to novelty’ as those new dopamine-tickling texts and social media updates feed into our ancient pleasure pathway” (p. 88). Lister-Landman, Domoff, and Dubow (2017) discovered in a study with eighth and eleventh graders that those who compulsively texted had lower grades, more challenges in their social relationships, and more negative perceptions of their academic competence. These researchers also revealed that the negative effects held for females, but not male excessive texters. Similarities were also noted between the behaviors of excessive texters and compulsive gamblers, including loss of sleep, difficulty controlling their texting, and a likelihood of lying about the amount of time engaged in texting (Lister-Landman et al., 2017).

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Effects of Multitasking on Cognition Smartphones have caused concern among educators due to their potential for distracting students as they engage in learning activities. The cognitive executive functions that are necessary for successful learning include “evaluation, decision making, organization, and planning” (Gazzaley & Rosen, 2016, p. 9); but young adolescents’ underdeveloped PFCs prevent them from exercising appropriate control of these functions. As Gazzaley and Rosen noted, even among adults, “Our cognitive control is really quite limited: we have a restricted ability to distribute, divide, and sustain attention; actively hold detailed information in mind, and concurrently manage or even rapidly switch between competing goals” (p. 9). As much as adolescents may believe that they are fully capable of multitasking, its effects on meaningful learning are devastating. The brain works like a microprocessor—a linear device—so it is incapable of performing two separate tasks simultaneously when one of those activities is conceptual learning (Abate, 2008). In multitasking, the brain has to continually reorient itself during the stop-and-go processes between tasks. Brains acquire learning in two diverse ways. Declarative learning—also called conceptual or higher-level learning—involves the hippocampus region at the center of the brain (Abate, 2008). Learning in this way, stored in this area, leads to information that can be easily recalled and applied to new situations. This is meaningful and significant learning. Habitual learning (also called procedural) takes place in the striatum at the outside rim of the brain and becomes automatic, almost subconscious; but it is limited in its applicability to new situations (Abate, 2008). When someone is distracted—that is, moving back and forth between tasks— habitual learning takes over from declarative learning, leading to less learning. If we want students to analyze, synthesize, and apply what they learn to new situations, their multitasking prevents this type of meaningful processing from occurring. Multitasking during cognitive activities negatively affects learning during both encoding of information (i.e., learning it for the first time) and in recall of information (e.g., responding to questions about the content studied) (Jensen, 2015). Another factor affecting multitasking is that humans are “information-seeking creatures” (Gazzaley & Rosen, 2016, p. 13). This natural inquiry provides meaningful rewards to humans. The same dopamine rush that emanates from sex or eating is also associated with learning new information—information not necessarily associated with academic content. It may instead originate from such apps as YouTube, Snapchat, Facebook, or any other source available via smartphones. The combination of adolescent brain development and a constant need for information creates significant challenges for teens faced with choosing to attend to academic tasks or the many distractions provided by electronic devices. The effects of multitasking go further than negative impacts on learning; scientists have also discovered that it can cause the “release of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline” (Jensen, 2015, p. 218). High levels of these hormones lead to increased aggression, more impulsivity, and potential effects on short-term memory. Some scientists “have found a correlation between multitasking and symptoms of depression and anxiety” (Jensen, p. 219). Researchers observing middle grades, high school, and university students while they were studying found that most students were unable to remain focused on their studies “for more than three to five minutes” (Rosen, Carrier, & Cheever, 2013, as cited by Gazzaley & Rosen, 2016, p. 124). Rosen and colleagues (2013) noted: The predictors of a lower GPA from extensive data collected … were: percentage of time on-task, studying strategies, total media time during a typical day, and preference for task-switching rather than working on a task until it was completed. (as cited by Gazzaley & Rosen, 2016, p. 124)

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Within class disruptions also impact students’ academic performance. Students with access to multimedia devices during class were likely to email, text, and utilize social media sites. These activities led to poorer classroom performance as compared to students without access to technological devices (Gazzaley & Rosen, 2016).

Technology and Reading Some schools are substituting computers and the Internet for traditional textbooks. Whether the intent is to create advantages for students or to save money on texts, data indicate that the replacement of books may not be academically beneficial. Researchers discovered that students’ abilities to process information from screen reading are not as academically effective as they are when they read paper texts (Nielsen, 2006). Scientists studying eye tracking notice that reading from a screen produces a different pattern of eye movements than that used when reading from traditional texts. These varied eye movements prevent accurate recall or comprehension as Mangen, Walgermo, and Brønnick (2013) noticed in their research. Students reading information from computer screens performed more poorly on comprehension assessments than those that read the same text from paper sources. The physical act and components of reading—from holding texts to identifying the edges, pages, and returning easily to previously read pages—seem to be significant in comprehending texts—activities that are non-existent in reading from screens.

Effects of Technology on Attention Span and Learning Information that is readily available and quickly and easily accessed via the Internet drives people’s perspectives and expectations on wait time. Fast Internet connections are the norm in many communities across the globe, influencing perceptions of boredom and reward. iGen’ers have lived with these expected speedy connections throughout their lives. Shorter wait times impact adolescents’ perceptions of engagement caused by the speed, number of, and the rewarding effect of the entertainment that results from these technological advances. Learning from reading, classroom conversations, completing written assignments, struggling cognitively with challenging content, or extensive time spent writing papers is not nearly as enticing as the allure of text messages, YouTube, other apps, Facebook, and team electronic gaming. The rewards associated with these activities are particularly attractive and almost unavoidable for many adolescents. The effects of these constantly changing stimuli on adolescents’ abilities to focus more intently during slower moving cognitive activities create innumerable challenges for them. Video games are fast-paced, visually attractive, and often provide external rewards every few seconds. Cell phones provide sounds, video, Internet access, social media apps, and constant opportunities for reward and engagement. Compared to traditional classroom learning or completing assignments, school can be perceived as slow-paced, disengaged torture; creating an entirely new level of boredom. The effect of this new perception of boredom is the inability to sustain the mental attention needed to perform basic cognitive tasks, thereby preventing the focused attention necessary to learn from educational activities. As Gazzaley and Rosen (2016) described: “This [constant multitasking and accessing electronic devices] leaves little time for reflection, deep thinking, or even just simply sitting back and letting our random thoughts drive us places we might not have gone while immersed in directed thinking” (p. 170). This constant need for excessive stimulation causes greater anxiety. As Waldhauser, Johansson, Bäckström, and Mecklinger (2011) explained, “such anxiety disrupts cognitive control, 124

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particularly diminishing working memory and disrupting attention and goal management” (cited in Gazzaley & Rosen, 2016, p. 156). These cognitive activities—reflection, metacognitive processing, focused and sustained attention, goal management, and interpersonal interactions during classroom discussions—are essential to the development of intellectual growth. Takeuchi and colleagues (2015) reported that the constant stimulation of computer screens, video gaming, and smartphones affects adolescents’ neurobiology. These researchers found that extensive video game playing is “associated with delayed development of the microstructure in extensive brain regions and verbal intelligence” (p. 1) and added that excessive video gaming negatively influenced students’ attention, learning, and sleep. In June of 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO, 2018) identified “gaming disorder” as a health challenge in its 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases, noting that it may cause a significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, or occupational lives or other important areas of functioning. These descriptions of technology’s effects on adolescents’ cognitive behaviors, intellectual growth, and general learning demonstrate a need for educators globally to assess these data and evaluate them as they pertain to their own use of technology with students. What may appear to be intuitive—the use of as much advanced technology as is available for classrooms—needs to be examined, studied, and accurately evaluated in an effort to determine its full effects on developing cognitive growth.

Socioemotional Effects of Contemporary Technology The mere novelty and intensity of electronic devices and the Internet greatly affect adolescents socially and emotionally. Adolescents’ constant searches for identity, fragile self-esteems, constant need for acceptance, and inability to control their underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes are all exacerbated by the constant ever-present connections to their smartphones and the Internet. Technology’s socioemotional effects are a primary component of young adolescent developmental processes and social lives.

Effects of Technology on Communication Technology has exacerbated the emotional rollercoaster by providing adolescents with greater online rather than face-to-face presence through social media apps or texting. Twenge (2017b) asserted “screen activities are linked to more loneliness and non screen activities to less loneliness” (p. 80). In addition, researchers suggested that lonely teens gravitate to greater electronic device use (Kardaras, 2016; Twenge, 2017a). Twenge (2017b) revealed the following anecdote from an adolescent: When you get on social media, you post a status or you post a picture and all of a sudden you get all of those likes, you get all those affirmations from people, and it can be addictive because you have the constant pats on the back that, like, “You’re smart, you’re funny, you’re attractive …”; but he acknowledges, “I feel like it’s also kind of hollow.” (pp. 56–57) Adolescents use social media as a tool to gain recognition and affirmation from their peers rather than their families. However, sometimes they lack the ability to regulate their emotional responses to what they read or see. Stamoulis (2009) studied the online behavior of adolescents and found that they engaged in risky behaviors such as posting photographs or providing other personal information online. 125

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Males and older adolescents were more likely to take these risks than females or younger adolescents. Stamoulis also discovered that “social isolation for girls and a lack of extracurricular activities for boys increase [online] risk-taking behavior” (as cited in Jensen, 2015, p. 113). Less participation in extracurricular activities and fewer socializing opportunities may promote a greater need for online contact and possibly increase the risk-taking that may accompany online interactions. Lonely adolescents are also most likely to be bullied through texting, social media, or in chat rooms and are twice as likely to consider suicide (Twenge, 2017b). Researchers from the Cyberbullying Research Center (Patchin & Hinduja, 2004–2016, as cited by Twenge) reported that 34% of the teens surveyed in 2016 were bullied; a significant increase from 19% in 2007. Some other startling numbers from this report show that the teen suicide rate was 30% higher than the teen homicide rate in 2015. Emotional concerns sent via texts, news events broadcast frequently on cell phones, and shared pictures on social media are all fodder for a potential crisis—especially for young adolescents who may have been protected from these type of instant communications prior to receiving their first cell phones. Electronic communication does not alleviate loneliness despite the plethora of social media apps that claim to bring people together. Numerous researchers (Jensen, 2015; Kardaras, 2016; Twenge, 2017b) reported negative emotions such as anxiety, loneliness, depression, and fear that result from online interactions; electronic devices heighten the stress responses faced by iGen’ers. Facebook does not lead to happier people—instead it has led to “Facebook depression whereby the more ‘friends’ one has on Facebook, the higher likelihood of depression” (Kardaras, 2016, p. 94). The term hypernetworking describes those who spend more than three hours a day on social networking sites. Those “who met the criteria for hypernetworkers were linked to higher rates of depression, substance abuse, poor sleep, stress, poor academics and suicide” (Kardaras, 2016, p. 94). Adolescents have unique socioemotional developmental needs that are best fulfilled by social interaction; but iGen’ers are not receiving the personal face-to-face interactions that define healthy social growth (Twenge, 2017a). Young adolescents’ needs for positive social acceptance from someone other than family members make social media sites appealing. Insecure, socially developing young adolescents may find considerable safety in hiding behind a screen while sending a text or email.

Effects of Technology on Adolescent Stress Teenagers are driven by emotion and often are unable to regulate their emotions due to an immature prefrontal cortex. Emotions such as anger, anxiety, and loneliness can create stress triggered both internally as well as externally through the environment. Medical doctors have identified electronic screen syndrome (ESS) described as a disorder of dysregulation—“the inability in children to modulate their moods, attention or level of arousal in an appropriate or healthy manner” (Kardaras, 2016, p.116). In other words, Kardaras (2016) emphasized: Interacting with screens overstimulates the child and shifts the nervous system into flight-or-fight mode, which then leads to dysregulation and disorganization of the various biological and hormonal systems. These disrupted systems can then create—or exacerbate—disorders such as ADHD, depression, oppositional defiant disorder and anxiety. (p. 116) These stress responses, in addition, negatively impact learning and memory. When students are stressed by internal emotions, their reactions to daily external, environmental activities are 126

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also impacted. Students find themselves too stressed to participate in classroom activities because of the previous night’s social media altercations. Adolescents need to be provided with opportunities to engage with their peers face-to-face rather than merely in online environments. As Kardaras (2016) noted: From past research on social interaction, we know that early childhood experiences are crucial in developing those parts of the brain that are dedicated to social interaction, empathy, and other interpersonal skills. If we deprive a child of interaction and touch early on because they mostly socially interact via screens, those areas won’t fully develop. (p. 93) While stress is an inherent part of a teenager’s life, it doesn’t have to be a debilitating part of it. It is important for young adolescents to have an adult confidante who can listen to their emotional concerns and needs and guide them in ways that reduce their stress.

Technology and Addiction The term “addiction” can mean different things to different people, but the health community understands that genetics, the environment, psychology, and neurobiology contribute to the intensity and severity of the problem. Technology adds yet another dilemma to challenges of addiction. Videogames and heavy Internet use can have an addictive effect on adolescents (Kardaras, 2016). Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is released in the brain at the end of a feel-good moment, and that pathway is strengthened with each subsequent similarly positive reaction. An adolescent who spends hours on a video game or interacting on social media stimulates the reward centers in the brain, creating a dopamine release in much the same way as someone addicted to a drug. The gaming industry employs behavioral psychologists to help design certain dopamine “hooks” built into games to purposely make games addicting for children at young ages (Kardaras, 2016, p. xviii). Kardaras (2016) further noted, Researchers found that ‘video-game playing directly or indirectly disrupts the development of preferable neural systems … related to the development of verbal intelligence’ and that there was an association between increased video game playing and the delayed development of microstructures in extensive brain regions and verbal intelligence. (p. 18) Internet addiction is now being treated as a mental health disorder (World Health Organization, 2018). Jensen (2015) reported that compulsive gamers’ brain scans show abnormalities in their brains’ memory centers linking it to problems with decision-making, memory storage, and retrieval. These behavioral addictions seem similar to those of drug or alcohol addicts that target the same brain centers. Kardaras (2016) described these international challenges: China has identified Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) as its number-one health crisis, with more than 20 million Internet addicted teens, and South Korea has opened 400 tech addiction rehab facilities and given every student, teacher and parent a handbook warning them of potential dangers of screens and technology. (p. 4) In addition to addiction, excessive electronic use leads to greater impulsivity and inattention to other tasks. 127

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Effects of Technology on Sleep The last decade has seen in a rise in sleep research in an attempt to respond to the 2005 American Academy of Pediatrics’ report on excessive sleepiness in adolescents which in turn leads to negative outcomes such as increased risk of car crashes, delinquent behaviors, depression, and psychological stress (Owens, Adolescent Sleep Working Group, and Committee on Adolescence, 2014). The greatest factor impacting adolescent sleep is the use of electronic devices before bedtime. Owens and colleagues (2014) documented that of 100 adolescents surveyed, 90% of them had a cell phone in their bedroom. These adolescents reported that they engaged in four separate, simultaneous electronic activities after 9:00 p.m. Teenagers have noted greater difficulty falling asleep and more night awakenings, leading to increased daytime sleepiness. The 2018 Pew Research Center for Internet and Technology (Anderson & Jiang) reported that 95% of teens have access to smartphones, and 45% admit to being online almost constantly. Teens describe texting as a primary activity on their smartphones. In 2012, 63% of teens exchanged texts with family and friends; females engaged in 100 texts a day versus males’ 50 texts per day. Texting is one of the most frequently reported reasons for night wakings, and females mention that they are most likely to text after going to bed. Males, on the other hand, mention staying awake to play games on their phones. An increased level of scrutiny by scientists and medical experts indicate the significant challenge that social media presents to young adolescents’ sleep habits and lives.

Conclusion “I think when people come to write the history of this period in education … this investment in classroom technology is going to be seen as a huge fraud” (Vallance, 2016, as cited in Kardaras, 2016, p. 216). The unique developmental processes that occur in students between the ages of 10 and 15 create social, emotional, physical, and cognitive changes that significantly impact their lives. The challenges created by young adolescents’ underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes, social insecurities, frequent stress, and significant hormonal changes are not alleviated by contemporary technology. In fact, their constant access to the Internet and dopamine-induced smartphones, social media, apps, and electronic gaming devices add unnecessary stress. Technology’s influence challenges and stretches many young adolescents’ social and emotional capabilities and thus, healthy physical and mental states. Researchers’ analyses of the effects of contemporary technology on adolescents’ socioemotional lives reveal troubling trends among this new generation of iGen’ers (Jensen, 2015; Kardaras, 2016; Rosen, 2012; Twenge, 2017b). As Twenge (2017b) and Kardaras (2016) so aptly described, this generation is experiencing a multitude of negative emotions, stressors, social dilemmas, and health challenges never previously encountered by the caring adults in their lives. Teachers and administrators may have good intentions while experimenting with greater technology integration for students at all levels. The results of access to screen devices and the Internet at school, however, fail to improve the conditions for learning, are not essential to humans’ intellectual growth, and run counter to traditional teaching processes that have defined successful and continuous brain development (Gazzaley & Rosen, 2016). We recommend that educators, caregivers, government officials, researchers, and the medical community continue to comprehensively study, evaluate, and disseminate findings on the effects of technology on young adolescents’ socioemotional behaviors and cognitive growth; simultaneously providing recommendations for healthier use of current and future technology.

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References Abate, C. J. (2008). You say multitasking like it’s a good thing. Thought & Action, 24, 7–13. Anderson, M., & Jiang, J. (2018, May). Teens, social media and technology 2018. Pew Center Research: Internet and Technology. www.pewinternet.org/2018/05/31/teens-social-media-technology-2018/ Brinthaupt, T. M. (2013). Should schools be in the business of enhancing student self perceptions? In K. Roney & R. P. Lipka (Eds.), Middle grades curriculum: Voices and visions of the self-enhancing school (pp. 1–16). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Brinthaupt, T. M., Boyer-Pennington, M. E., & Lipka, R. P. (2016). Self-concept/Self-esteem. In S. B. Mertens, M. M. Caskey, & N. Flowers (Eds.), The encyclopedia of middle grades education (2nd ed., pp. 343–346). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Brown, D. F. (2013). [Advice for middle level teachers from students]. Unpublished raw data. Brown, D. F., & Knowles, T. (2014). What every middle school teacher should know (3rd ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development. (1989). Turning points: Preparing American youth for the 21st century. New York, NY: Carnegie Corporation of New York. Carskadon, M. A. (1999). When worlds collide: Adolescent need for sleep versus social demands. In K. Walstrom (Ed.), Adolescent sleep needs and school starting times (pp. 11–27). Bloomington, In Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation. Clinkinbeard, S. S., Simi, P., Evans, M. K., & Anderson, A. L. (2011). Sleep and delinquency: Does the amount of sleep matter? Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 40(7), 916–930. Crowley, S. J., & Carskadon, M. A. (2010). Modifications to weekend recovery sleep delay circadian phase in older adolescents. Chronobiology International, 27(7), 1469–1492. Gazzaley, A., & Rosen, L. D. (2016). The distracted mind: Ancient brains in a high tech world. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Gurian, M. (with Stevens, A.). (2005). The minds of boys: Saving our sons from falling behind in school and life. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Jensen, F. E. (with Ellis Nutt, A.). (2015). The teenage brain: A neuroscientist’s survival guide to raising adolescents and young adults. New York, NY: Harper. Kardaras, N. (2016). Glow kids: How screen addiction is hijacking our kids—And how to break the trance. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffin. Kuhnen, C. M., & Knutson, B. (2005). The neural basis of financial risk-taking. Neuron, 47(5), 763–770. Lenroot, R. K., & Giedd, J. N. (2006). Brain development in children and adolescents: Insights from anatomical magnetic resonance imaging. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 30(6), 718–729. Lenroot, R. K., & Giedd, J. N. (2011). Annual research review: Developmental considerations of gene by environment interactions. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 52(4), 429–441. Lipsitz, J. (1977). Growing up forgotten: A review of research and programs concerning early adolescence. Lexington, MA: D C Heath. Lister-Landman, K. M., Domoff, S. E., & Dubow, E. F. (2017). The role of compulsive texting in adolescents’ academic functioning. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 6(4), 311–325. Mangen, A., Walgermo, B. R., & Brønnick, K. (2013). Reading linear texts on paper versus computer screen: Effects on comprehension. International Journal of Educational Research, 58, 61–68. McCandless, J. (2015, May). U.S. education institutions spend 6 billion on IT in 2015. Center for Digital Education. Retrieved from www.govtech.com/education/../US-Education-Institutions-Spend-66-Billion-on-IT-in Mikulak, M. (1991). The children of a Bambara village. Unpublished manuscript. Moutsiana, C., Garrett, N., Clarke, R. C., Beau Lotto, R., Blakemore, S. J., & Sharot, T. (2013, October 8). Human development of the ability to learn from bad news. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110 (41), 16396–16401. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1305631110. National Center for Health Statistics. (2016, June). Suicide rates in the United States continue to increase. National Center for Health Statistics Data Brief No. 309. Retrieved from cdc.gov National Middle School Association/Association for Middle Level Education. (2010). This we believe: Keys to educating young adolescents. Westerville, OH: Author. Nielsen, J. (2006, April 17). F-Shaped pattern for reading web content. Retrieved from www.nngroup.com/art icles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-web-content. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. (2015). Students, computers, and learning: Making the connections. PISA OECD Publishing. doi: 10.1787/9789264239555-en Oshima, N., Nishida, A., Shimodera, S., Tochigi, M., Ando, S., Yamasaki, S., … Sasaki, T. (2012). The suicidal feelings, self-injury, and mobile phone use after lights out in adolescents. Journal of Pediatric Psychiatry, 37(9), 1023–1030.

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Owens, J., Adolescent Sleep Working Group, & Committee on Adolescence. (2014). Insufficient sleep in adolescents and young adults: An update on causes and consequences. American Academy of Pediatrics. doi:www. pediatrics.org/cgi/doi/10.1542/peds.2014-1696doi:10.1542/peds.2014-1696 Patchin, J., & Hinduja, S. (2004-2016). One set of studies. Cyberbullying Research Center, Retrieved from https://cyberbullying.org/ Rosen, L. D. (with Cheever, N. A. & Carrier, L. M.). (2012). iDisorder: Understanding our obsession with technology and overcoming its hold on us. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffin. Rosen, L. D., Carrier, L. M., & Cheever, N. A. (2013). Facebook and texting made me do it: Media-induced task switching while studying. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(3), 948–958. Shen, H., Gong, Q. H., Aoki, C., Yuan, M., Ruderman, Y., Datillo, M., … Smith, S. (2007). Reversal of neurosteroid effects at α4β2δ GABAA receptors triggers anxiety at puberty. Nature Neuroscience, 10, 469–477. doi:10.1038/nn68 Singer, N. (2017, May 13). Education disrupted: How Google took over the classroom. The New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/../google-education-chromebooks-schools.html. Smith, S. S. (2012, September). The influence of stress at puberty on mood and learning: Role of the α4βδ GABAA receptor. Neuroscience, 249, 192–213. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroscience.2012.09.065 Somerville, L. H., Hare, T., & Casey, B. J. (2011). Frontostriatal maturation predicts cognitive control failure to appetitive cues in adolescents. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23(9), 2123–2134. Stamoulis, K. E. (2009). An exploration into adolescent online risk-taking. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. Statista. (2016, November). Number of mobile phone users worldwide from 2013–2019 (in billions). Retrieved from www.statista.com/statistics/274774/forecast-of-mobile-phone-users-worldwide/ Takeuchi, H., Taki, Y., Hashizume, H., Asano, K., Asano, M., Sassa, Y., … Kawashima, R. (2015). Impact of videogame play on the brain’s microstructural properties: Cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses. Molecular Psychiatry, 21, 1781–1789. Twenge, J. M. (2017a, September). Have smart phones destroyed a generation? The Atlantic, September 2017 issue, 58–65. Twenge, J. M. (2017b). iGen: Why today’s super-connected kids are growing up less rebellious, more tolerant, less happy— And completely unprepared for adulthood* And what that means for the rest of us. New York, NY: Atria. United States Department of Education. (2015, July 27). Every Student Succeeds Act. S. 1177 114th Congress. Retrieved from www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/114/s1177 United States Department of Education. (2017, January). Reimagining the role of technology in education: 2017 National education technology plan update. Retrieved from http://tech.ed.gov Waldhauser, G. T., Johansson, M., Bäckström, M., & Mecklinger, A. (2011). Trait anxiety: Working memory capacity, and the effectiveness of memory suppression. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 52(1), 21–27. Wolfe, P. (2005). Advice for the sleep-deprived. Educational Leadership, 62(7), 39–40. World Health Organization. (2018, June 18). WHO classifies ‘gaming disorder’ as mental health condition. Retrieved from www.cnn.com/2018/06/18/health/video-game-disorder-who/index.html

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10 ENGAGING AND SUPPORTING BOYS THROUGH THE MIDDLE YEARS A Perspective from Australia Craig M. McFarlane

This chapter investigates the best ways of supporting and engaging boys through the middle years of schooling. Many boys struggle to navigate their way through this unique time in their lives, and I investigate what the literature says about the best ways to support them to be successful. Boys can be easily misunderstood in an educational setting and, therefore, poorly supported. Specifically in the middle years—when they are going through massive physical, emotional, and social change— they can often manifest their confusion and lack of clarity as poor behavior and this is not always recognized. In turn, boys’ behavior may easily be dealt with poorly by the adults around them as well as their peers. This chapter begins by providing some background material regarding the history of boys in schools, followed by what the literature says about the disengagement of boys in schooling. At that point, I look at what students are saying about school engagement and write about what the literature says about the building of effective relationships between teachers and their male students. The importance of both adult men and women in boys’ lives follows, before I outline some of the educational programs and the learning styles of boys. Finally, I highlight some recommendations for practice.

History of Boys in Schools Historically, as Biddulph (2018) said, teachers did not smile until Christmas—or Easter in the case of the southern hemisphere. It was widely regarded to be watchful to keep the students in check, and to never show any warmth or emotion towards them as it may be seen as a sign of weakness. By establishing a warm and inviting environment early, it was thought to be too hard to get them back where you needed them when they became overly friendly and non-task orientated. In the early years of schooling, and for a very long time thereafter, schools were built for and catered to boys. According to Gillard (2018), St. Augustine established the first schools in England in the 6th century—grammar schools to teach the priests Latin and song schools to prepare the boys to sing in the church choirs. St. Augustine encouraged a rounded curriculum, including the arts, science, arithmetic, logic, and astronomy; however, the purpose of the school was always maintained and strictly for boys only.

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Not until the 15th century is there consistent information regarding the formal education of girls, so for a long time education was squarely targeted for boys. Indeed, it is not really until the 1800s that there is any mention in the literature of the formal education of girls in the European world (Brown, 2011).

Disengagement of Boys in Schooling Educators have spent large amounts of time and energy investigating who their students are and how best to support them; however, boys continue to be difficult to engage (Taie & Goldring, 2017). The disengagement of boys has led to underachievement, and it has been happening for a very long time. Cohen said that over her period of research, which dates back as far as the late 17th century, boys have always underachieved, and this underachievement has never been seriously addressed (cited in Epstein, Elwood, Hey, & Maw, 1998, p.20). According to Irwin (2009), over time schools have morphed from being male-centric to female-centric, creating an uneven playing field weighted towards girls. He suggested that the order, conformity, and emphasis—especially in the early years of schooling—on neatness and presentation really did not support boys to be successful junior primary students. He cited issues such as a lack of role models for boys, fewer employment opportunities in “trade” areas, and a reduction in the amount of sport time at school as reasons boys are being disengaged (Irwin, 2009, pp. 31–33). Hoyt (2015) identified issues regarding boys falling behind girls at school, noting that boys make up more than 75% of school discipline referrals, close to 80% of students on Ritalin are boys, and boys receive nearly 70% of all unsatisfactory grades on school report cards. Irwin (2009) highlighted a disturbing statistic regarding the early leaving of students from schools. He suggested that, by the end of Year 10 in New Zealand, that nearly 50% more boys have left school compared to girls. He suggested that a large factor in this statistic was that the boys were disengaged by a school system that did not cater to them, especially compared to the girls. As part of his work in New Zealand, Irwin (2009) interviewed young adolescent boys and asked them for their thoughts on education for boys and girls. They felt that girls took school more seriously, were more focused, knew what they wanted to do post-school and had longer attention spans. They commented that boys were more relaxed than girls and more active but they also felt that boys misbehaved more than girls. The two most compelling comments were that boys needed to see the relevance in their learning, and that boys believed that the education system was more suited to girls than themselves (Irwin, 2009, pp. 26–27). The increased use of mobile technologies by adolescents reportedly causes student disengagement, perhaps because students’ classroom experience with technology is in direct contrast to their lives outside of school. Mackay and Strickland (2018) noted that 13- to 18-year-olds have reported daily screen time use of 6.7 hours, with more than 40% of that time spent on their phones. This has been in stark contrast to a report that noted that 70% of all content and work at school was done on paper rather than digitally (Harold, 2018). (Editor’s note: Also see Poehner and Brown in this volume.) Social pressures for boys to conform to standards and stereotypes of masculinity also seem to affect boys’ engagement in school. Irvine, Livingstone, and Flood (2018) explained that “there are social pressures and messages embedded throughout society that tell men how to behave—in essence, how to be a ‘real man’” (p. 14). Heilman and Barker (2018) also discussed the macho aspect of boyhood and the importance of social power in society. They highlighted that “the process of withholding the social status of ‘being a man’ is held in place by the continual policing of men and boys’ performance of gender” (Heilman and Barker, 2018, p. 9). 132

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Hoyt (2015) supported this idea and believed the education system placed social power on the academic ability to access post-compulsory schooling. However, masculinity had its own social power that is not always aligned with the education systems social power. He suggested that the issues will not be solved overnight, and that for the past two decades the education system has become obsessed with a narrowly defined kind of academic success. Therefore, those boys who could or did not obtain entry to the types of social power valued in schools would pursue ways of showing their social power by demonstrating their masculinity. This was most often shown in acts of violence or through sporting pursuits. With both of these areas being either “outlawed” or greatly diminished in the modern schooling system, these boys are becoming socially powerless and totally disengaging with schools and schooling. Biddulph raised the issue of the importance of relationships to the success boys will have at school. He re-told a story about a headmaster who always greeted boys at the gate in the mornings at his large all boys school. On one particular morning a small boy who was new to the school came through the gate. He had been at the school for only a few months but his confidence was beginning to grow. He saw the headmaster and, although a little nervous, said “Morning sir.” The headmaster looked down at him and replied, “You are supposed to raise your cap!” and walked on (Biddulph, 2018, p. 132). Biddulph highlighted how different that conversation could have been if only the headmaster had engaged the boy by greeting him too. A simple “good morning” back and “what is your name,” or perhaps some dialogue about “who is your teacher,” and “how is school going” could have begun a terrific relationship and given the boy a strong message that the headmaster is someone who you can approach with confidence and rely on in any time of need. If there was a school rule that stated that the headmaster needed to be greeted with the tipping of a hat, he could quietly have reminded the boy of that at the end of their conversation. This story led Biddulph to share one of his most noted phrases: “Boys learn teachers and not subjects” (2018, p.64). He described adolescent boys as role model missiles. They will lock on to many targets, recording, and downloading aspects of their behaviors, actions, and ideals to help shape their own. Irwin (2009) highlighted a focus on celebrating success in all subject areas as being a way of validating a boy’s school success, and he pointed out arts subjects in particular as a place where boys often feel fear to be themselves and express themselves appropriately. He discussed the negative impact the media has had with their continued portrayal of males as irresponsible, destructive, silly, heroic and stoic, and sporty. The two areas Irwin discussed—the arts and the media—appear linked. We engage boys in the arts and introduce them to the world of theatre, movies, and TV. However, when they begin to immerse themselves in this world, outside of the school arts program, previously held stereotypes are put back in their thinking in ways that disengage them. How we influence media sources is another question for another paper, but it is certainly a factor for adolescent boys to be addressed somehow.

Students’ Perspectives on School Engagement Smyth and McInerney (2007) published a study based in South Australia in which they interviewed many boys, and they have published some of those interviews. In this section, I relate the stories of James and Johnny, which resonate with the work of Levin and Mee (2018) who looked at an eighth grader’s view of his school day and experiences.

James James is a boy who was interviewed by Smyth and McInerney (2007); he was an adolescent student who spoke very articulately about his middle years’ experience. He had clearly been 133

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a nonconformist, but he came across as intelligent and positive about wanting a good future. James had attended two high schools after having progressed well through a purposefully built and structured middle level school. James began by stating that the biggest problem with high schools was a lack of an individual approach. He said, “If they’ve got a middle ground and you don’t fit into that, then the high school is going to fail you” (Smith and McInerney, 2007, p. 40). He talked about the faster kids being bored and resorting to mucking around to stay interested in something, and the less able just simply being left behind. He suggested that teachers’ criteria for being seen as successful was being able to sit still, copy notes, and do what you are told. Levin and Mee (2018) supported this notion when they wrote about a science teacher who had a creative activity but made the connection to the concepts for his class. The boys’ consequently lost interest and chose to squirt each other with fluid bottles because the intellectual rigor had been taken out of the activity. James shared a story of an interaction he once had with his home group teacher. He had discovered a boy had been locked in a garden shed by another student, so he left class to let him out. The teacher discovered he had left class and began dealing with him negatively. James asked the teacher why he did not simply ask what he was doing outside. James suggested that that line of questioning could have led to a conversation about the poor boy locked in a shed and who may have done it, which subsequently may have led to an investigation to support this student and deal with the culprit. The teacher’s response was telling for James. “Oh well, I interact with 300 students’ blah blah and all their lies and if I was to do that, that would take a lot of time because it would be individual” (Smyth & McInerney, 2007, p.40). Importantly, James articulated that it was a lack of his teacher being willing to give time that caused the interaction to become an altercation and allowed another student, who needed help, not to be supported. Furthermore, a third student had been allowed to engage in the bullying of another student and had probably received the message that his actions were acceptable because no one had brought him to account for them. The final issue that James raised was one of feeling disempowered and subsequently disenchanted with a lack of student involvement in decisions and programs. He talked passionately about a peer mediation program that the school ran for Year 10 students. James believed that he studied a similar program as a Year 6 and that he and his peers would benefit greatly from being included in the program. He sensed, though, that as the younger students in the high school they were seen as less able than they were as middle years students in his previous school.

Johnny Another student, Johnny, raised the issue of being involved in non-male stereotypical subject areas and hobbies. Johnny loved to dance, sing, and act. He confirmed the work others have done that outlined concerning machoism and the negative impact it can have on male adolescents (Blum, Mmari, & Moreau, 2017; Irwin, 2009; Skelton, 2001). Johnny was constantly teased and bullied for having different interests. He was told by his peers that only homosexuals dance and sing and engage in activities that are not football related. He had mixed thoughts about how his teachers addressed the issue, stating that some teachers were very supportive and helped him deal with the students making those comments, but others brushed it off. A third cohort of teachers openly told him that they have better things to do. Again, like James, Johnny talked about the positive and negative impact teachers can have on a student’s sense of well-being and of feeling supported. Johnny was also cognizant of boys’ need to be seen as cool, and their natural mode of achieving this often involves the verbal put-down of others. He believed that the usual subject of these verbals was something physical. Whether it was a student’s need to wear glasses, their weight, 134

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a brand of clothing, or even a hair style or color, it was these easy to see issues that were often the brunt of the put-downs. Finally, Johnny alluded to the impact culture can have on a school and, in turn, on the students within the school. He talked about a lack of recognition of academic achievement at school assemblies. His school regularly recognized students for being nice to each other and for sporting achievements, and he saw that these areas were being valued by his peers. He thought that recognition of academic success could help that become valued too and alleviate the harassment currently endured for achieving high academic results at his school.

Improving Support for Boys in the Middle Years Flannery and Wester (2004) noted that academic failure is a high risk in adolescents, and cited studies that suggest as many as 40% of these students are at risk. They advocated for system wide changes in what they described as “a comprehensive, multidimensional approach” (Flannery and Wester, 2004, p.22). Across the literature four main areas have been identified regarding how to deal with the issues and work towards better engagement and support of adolescent boys at school. They are: • • • •

Building effective relationships between teachers and their male students. The importance of adult men and women in boys’ lives. Educational programs and the learning styles of boys. Addressing boys’ needs to gain social power and be “macho.”

Building Effective Relationships between Teachers and Their Male Students Lillico (2017) outlined 52 recommendations about how to ensure the effective education of boys, particularly adolescent boys. Many of his recommendations pertain to the engagement and support of boys in schools, and he strongly asserts that relationships with teachers and other adults that are a key to the success of boys. Similarly, Biddulph (2018) explained that the building of effective relationships with boys is a crucial part of assisting them to engage in their learning and feel supported at school. Smyth and McInerney (2007) also argued that building strong relationships is key for boys, especially during their adolescent years. Citing Meier (2002), they noted that the real issue is the “distrustful distance that the young experience towards the adult world” (Smyth and McInerney, 2007, p.64). Smyth and McInerney also noted that Meier attributed the distance to the standardized and bureaucratic nature of high schools and their complexity, including the fast-paced nature of the timetable and how it impedes teachers and students from developing deep, effective relationships. They highlight those teachers who take a real interest in adolescents as people who can have a significant positive impact on supporting adolescents through the teen years. However, the challenge is for them to provide a school structure that provides the opportunity for these types of relationships between adolescents and adults to develop. They went on to outline the importance of the school environment and the need to create places where students want to belong and argued that it is surely a forerunner to student engagement. To illustrate, Smyth and McInerney (2007) discussed a boy called Simon who moved schools from a place that did not, by structure, support the development of relationships to a school that had good pastoral care programs, counselling options, and a home group set up that provided the opportunity for personal relationships to develop. Simon reported a sense of belonging and

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a feeling of having been identified in a learning community. Furthermore, they argued that the focus on his social and emotional development enhanced Simon’s academic learning. Weller (1999) discussed how having the class-based teachers also involved in the students’ extra- and co-curricular pursuits can support developing teacher/student relationships. Many middle level schools use a diverse extra- and co-curricular program, and they believe that providing a large variety of sporting, musical, and other opportunities—with expert coaching from within the school’s teaching staff—is a crucial part in deepening the teacher-student relationship. The research clearly shows that academic results are often enhanced by this deeper bond, and these programs also provide authentic opportunities for students to develop socially, emotionally, and physically.

The Importance of Adult Men and Women in Boys’ Lives Lillico (2017), Biddulph (2018), and (Nagel, 2006) all advocated for more men in schools while also affirming the importance of women in schools, particularly in positions of authority. Conversely, they agreed men need to be cast in the role of nurturer more often. Rimm (2013) identified a direct relationship between male role models and better learning outcomes for boys. She stated: A clear message to boys about hard work in school from important male adults in their lives goes a long way in giving boys the confidence and humility to learn from their teachers. Praising effort rather than ability encourages hard work. (Rimm, 2013, para. 1) She went on to lament the female-rich start boys get at schools with the absence of male kindergarten or junior primary teachers in most schools, and she explained the importance of the men in the boy’s lives to speak highly of these women, in front of the boy, and for them to be actively involved in their son’s learning. Indeed, the absence of male teachers in the early years of education has led many schools to actively pursue male teachers for these crucial year levels and work hard to balance the gender of teachers across all year levels within schools. Nagel (2006) summarized: “While there will be boys who maneuver positively through life amidst the absence of a male figure, growing numbers of research studies across many disciplines have identified that boys need male role models to help them along the way” (p. 98). Bleach (2000) cited the staggering statistic that in 2000 only 12% of teachers were male, many of them heads. He argued that eleven years is a long time for boys to be denied a male role model. This is further impacted when the boy is living in a split family situation and spending the majority of his time with his mother, which can often be the case. How does the boy begin to form the concepts related to what he would like to be and do when he is older? He isn’t going to be a mother, and men are not teachers either, so Bleach suggested that these boys fall back to the media to find their “role models.” Bleach therefore advocated for schools to use other males at their disposal to work and mentor the boys. Older students, parents of other students, or sports stars can all be invited to speak with the boys on the importance of education and to share their knowledge about particular career paths. Biddulph (2018) discussed the importance for all boys through adolescence to have a male role model/mentor. He explained that it is highly likely that this person will not be the boy’s father, but another significant male. This is the person who the boy can approach to discuss difficult issues; issues that he fears his father will be too emotional to hear. It is also the person who he learns about how to be a male adult and what values and morals are important. 136

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A co-educational primary school in Adelaide looked hard at this research as they grappled with how to better cater for their Year 7 students within a traditional primary school setting. These students had begun to exhibit behaviors that suggested they were outgrowing the one teacher structure, as well as many of the school based primary school traditions that five and six year olds found engaging but that these students were increasingly finding childish and irrelevant. The school decided to engage some middle level school structures, one of which was to have two significant teachers sharing the school day with these students. This provided an opportunity to ensure every student—every boy as well as girl—had a male teacher with whom to spend significant time. Anecdotal surveys of parents and students has been very encouraging, and the school has also seen a greater engagement in school activities while seeing a greater level of maturity and calmness from the boys (C. McFarlane, personal communication, 2013).

Educational Programs and the Learning Styles of Boys Physical Activity Boys tend to convert their feelings to movement, and when faced with emotions they often open those emotions up during some form of physical activity. Physical activity gives boys time to de-stress and enhances their ability to articulate their emotional status (Lillico, 2017; Nagel, 2006). Moreover, physical activity promotes a healthy lifestyle and helps boys deal with the cocktail of hormones surging through their bodies, and it promotes a positive view of an adolescent’s physical appearance and self-concept (Weller, 1999). Nagel (2006) suggested that boys need movement and, therefore, larger classrooms or, conversely, smaller class sizes than girls. One boys’ school in Brisbane has looked at this research and re-designed all of their classrooms to better address this need for movement. They removed the old, square or rectangle desks and chairs and replaced them with movable high back lounges and other softer, irregularly shaped furniture. They either painted the walls with whiteboard paint or installed many whiteboards all around the room, on the walls. Finally, they installed large numbers of big plasma screens in each room, complete with cabling to allow laptops and iPads to be plugged in to facilitate collaboration. The boys love it, and they are free to walk around the room and stand up while they converse and collaborate on the walls and screens (I. MacPherson, personal communication, 2012)

Pedagogy and Curricula Academic and extra- or co-curricular programs can target multiple areas of needs that the research has identified for middle grades students including a morals- and values-based educational program; opportunities to develop relationships with one or two key adults/mentors; a challenging, rigorous, and integrated curriculum; real world experiences that include connections to family and community; and opportunities to develop servant leadership skills and culture. All of these areas can be positively impacted by a diverse and rich extra- and co-curricular program that is facilitated by the students’ teachers. According to Lillico (2017), boys need less teaching and more facilitating. This supports the building work that has been done in classrooms to provide not only movement, but also a more collaborative, group-orientated pedagogy. Lillico said that boys must be challenged to do a lot more work at school and have a lesser reliance on homework. One recent initiative that is growing in popularity is the idea of the flipped classroom. The University of Queensland (2018) explained that the flipped classroom is a process whereby the 137

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students access the content required for a lesson prior to the lesson, at home, usually via YouTube, or some form of video presentation. This provides a shift within the class time from a passive approach in which the content is being taught to a more active one. This becomes possible because the content has already been taught, so class time becomes about putting that new knowledge into practice and applying it. There is a greater focus on concept exploration, meaning making, and demonstration or application of knowledge in the face-to-face setting of the classroom. The work done at home is also less static as it is not requiring boys to do lots of book-based work; rather, they watch videos to gain important content knowledge, ready to actively engage in the deeper learning of that content the next day. Lillico (2017) also advocated experiential learning for boys, calling for reflective, open-ended tasks for boys after they successfully engage in shorter, closed experiential work in order to develop the required skills. He said that boys need relevance. They must be able to see that a task has meaning to and for them. Teachers are asked to seek relevance in the topic they are planning before they introduce it to the boys, and if they find no relevance in it, do not teach it. Furthermore, Woolfolk Hoy, Demerath, and Pape (2002) suggested that students are more successful at school when they feel strongly connected to their families, communities, and peers. They discussed legitimizing students’ real-life experiences by making them part of the official curriculum. In 2010 the Queensland government released a document called The Flying Start. It stated: “Adolescents will have a better chance of benefitting … if they have access to the specialist teachers and facilities … in secondary school” (Queensland Government, 2010, p. 16). However, Bahr and Crosswell (2011) argued that while it is true that specialist teachers and facilities make an incredible difference in outcomes for students, for middle years aged students specialization is a different thing to disciplinary expertise. They contended that the research suggests that, for middle years students, the disciplinary foundations must work alongside interdisciplinary connections, therefore advocating for an integrated curriculum that provides clear relevance to the students. Accordingly, Van Bergen and colleagues (2009) argued that disciplinary and interdisciplinary have a place. They highlight the student’s metacognitive change towards abstract thinking and the generational tendency seeing disciplines forming and reforming at an incredible rate as reasons why learning without an interdisciplinary aspect is limiting. They did, however, concede that there should be a slight leaning towards expertise and specialization but that the attributes of the individual learner must always remain central to any planning at all times. Nagel (2006) advocated for debating, problem solving, and philosophical conundrums as pedagogical approaches that work for boys. He also noted that tasks, particularly writing, must be relevant and purposeful and that teachers should look to developing language skills through developing communication skills rather than creative writing assignments. Furthermore, Lillico (2017) advocated for boys to engage in conversation and planning before writing tasks, which is supporting the notion of developing communication skills through writing. He said that when boys do this that their writing fluency and volume increase dramatically. He also suggested that task engagement will also be increased if teachers provide writing scaffolds for the boys.

Behavior Management Lillico (2017) explored the pastoral care of boys and discussed the need for schools to engage in restorative behavior management practices. He contended that boys need to be given time to reflect on their behavior and be given a chance to make amends before any punishment is dealt out. Once punishment has been given, boys move on and “clear the ledger.” Lillico added that bullying must be eradicated and tackled head on. Students must feel safe in schools and be fully aware of the avenues available to them to deal with any incidents, if they occur. Biddulph (2018) discussed ways to work with bullies, rather than bully the bully, so the issue becomes a shared concern. He also 138

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advocated for a school wide program to unpack bullying—the whys, how’s, and what’s—so students understand why it occurs, how it occurs, and what to do if it happens. He recommended a strong positive approach with boys in terms of verbal communication, arguing that boys respond well to positive reinforcement and praise and that rewarding boys for good deeds is appropriate.

Service and Leadership As Richardson (2011) said, students in the middle years focus the vast majority of their attention on themselves, with a little left for their friends. Therefore, it is very important to provide boys with opportunities to focus more outwardly, on others. Servant leadership provides that focus. Spending time working for the betterment of others, rather than oneself, has been a recent focus at many schools. For example, a Catholic boys’ school in Melbourne stated: By asking our students to engage in service we are striving to break down barriers of fear and prejudice, reduce the impact of stereotypical images and bring a human face to those in our community who might not normally be seen. The end result of which, are students with an increased awareness of justice in the world who will actively work to be agents for change. (Xavier College, n.d.) The school focused their middle school aged students on engaging in experiences that are “for others,” before progressing with the senior students to having a focus of being “with others.” This is clearly an age appropriate structure too with the students not being asked to engage directly with parts of our community until they are seventeen plus years old, but it is also age appropriate for the adolescent students to be being challenged to think about others before themselves. Many schools engage students in morals and values education, including deep investigations of such issues as the rights of the child; conflicts of the world and the impact they have on people; refugees; and other well-being issues such as cyber bullying and personal well-being. These schools have identified the importance of a morals and values-based approach and built it into their existing curriculum frameworks.

Addressing Boys’ Needs to Gain Social Power and Be “Macho” Irwin (2009) noted the lack of physical activity for boys in schools today and that boys need more sport at school, more time to be active, and opportunities to demonstrate their masculinity and gain social power. Watson, Kehler, and Martino (2010) used the example of an outstanding adolescent boy athlete who was shy and not achieving well academically. However, he was given the opportunity to compete in athletic pursuits and was very successful. This success gave him confidence, and he was seen by his peers as successful. He then took these feelings back into the classroom and put his new levels of confidence and standing—along with the qualities of hard work and perseverance that he had learnt from focusing on his sport—and improved his engagement in his academic learning. Irwin (2009) noted that masculine bravado is an important trait for many boys as they aspire to gain social power. Sport and masculine bravado are linked, so boys may gain social power through their achievements in athletics. The challenge for educators is to get academic achievement onto the social power list so boys see the attainment of good marks and academic success, in general, as ways of increasing social power. Irwin suggested that if schools can tap into what is important to boys and what is on the social power/macho list, then effective strategies can be developed. According to Irwin (2009), the list which he called the Boys’ Code includes: 139

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• • • • • • • • • • •

Never cry, never show emotion. Don’t show weakness. Don’t care. Don’t do anything “girly” or “nerdy.” Be tough. Respect power and strength. “It’s cool to be a fool.” Talk as little as possible. “Stand on your own two feet.” Have “good mates” that will stand by you. Enjoy sports. (pp. 32–35)

He argued that the code must be challenged so boys can express and reveal their true selves. He advocated for an emphasis on celebrating success across all areas of the curriculum as being important for boys, with a particular emphasis on the arts due to the creative and expressive nature of the subject.

Conclusion and Recommendations Clearly there are strategies schools employ to work with the major issues affecting the support and engagement of boys in the adolescent years of school. For teachers, the focus on building effective relationships with boys has been highlighted, and for schools it is the recruitment of teachers who have a track record of being able to do this successfully. In terms of the educational programming and curricula, movement is a critical issue with boys as well as class sizes and the physical space. Also the environs of the room can have an impact on boys’ engagement and learning; the learning must be relevant and engaging and occur in a safe environment free from bullying and harassment. Finally, the focus shifted to boys and their masculinity. It was highlighted that teachers need to understand this vital non-verbal factor that, if addressed and considered, can help ensure boys feel that they can engage in learning without breaking these highly valued unwritten rules. The recommendations for practice are summarized below under the four main headings. 1. Building effective relationships between teachers and their male students. • • •

Teachers must spend time getting to know the boys they are working with; getting to know their interests and what engages them. Schools need to employ staff who understand this age group and want to work with them. Schools need to provide a timetable structure that allows deeper relationships between teachers and students to develop—fewer teachers for each boy, and more time with the few that work with the boys.

2. The importance of adult men and women in boys’ lives. • •

Schools need to actively pursue a more balanced ratio of male to female teachers, ensuring the earlier recommendations are also followed. Boys need to see men in nurturing roles and women in positions of power.

3. Educational programs and the learning styles of boys. • •

Ensure boys have ample space to move within during their school day. Boys need lower class sizes to assist their academic success.

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• • • • • •

Redesign classrooms to cater for boysʼ increased need for movement. Ensure learning programs are experiential by nature. Ensure the learning program is integrated and that boys can make links between the traditional subject areas. Insist on a no bullying environment for boys. Ensure all boys are engaged in service learning. Allow boys to have input into key decision-making processes at school.

4. Addressing boys’ needs to gain social power and be “macho.” • •

All teachers need to understand the key issues involved in boys’ social power Schools need to challenge the social power issues.

References Bahr, N., & Crosswell, L. (2011). Contesting lost ground for the middle years in Australia: Using the case study of Queensland. Australian Journal of Middle Schooling, 11(2), 12–19. Biddulph, S. (2018). Raising boys in the twenty-first century. Sydney, Australia: Finch Publishing. Bleach, K. (2000). Raising boys’ achievement in schools. Stoke on Trent, UK: Trentham Books. Blum, R. W., Mmari, K., & Moreau, C. (2017). It begins at 10: How gender expectations shape early adolescence around the world. Journal of Adolescent Health, 61(4), S3-S4. Brown, R. (2011, February 9). Educating girls 1800-1870: Revised version [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://richardjohnbr.blogspot.com/2011/02/educating-girls-1800-1870-revised.html. Epstein, D., Elwood, J., Hey, V., & Maw, J. (1998). Failing boys: Issues in gender and achievement. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Flannery, D. J., & Wester, K. L. (2004). Risk factors related to academic achievement in adolescence. In T. Urdan & F. Pajares (Eds.), Educating adolescents: Challenges and strategies (pp. 1–31). Greenwich, CT: Information Age. Gillard, D. (2018) Education in England: A history. Retrieved from www.educationengland.org.uk/history Harold, B. (2018, January 15). Technology in education: Overview. Retrieved from www.edweek.org/ew/ issues/technology-in-education/index.html Heilman, B., & Barker, G. (2018). Masculine norms and violence: Making the connections. Washington, DC: Promundo-US. Hoyt, D. (2015). Understanding the minds of boys: Strategies for student engagement [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://inservice.ascd.org/understanding-the-minds-of-boys-strategies-for-student-engagement/ Irvine, H., Livingstone, M., & Flood, M. (2018). The man box: A study on being a young man in Australia. Melbourne, Australia: Jesuit Social Services. Retrieved from. Irwin, M. (2009). Educating boys: Helping Kiwi boys to succeed at school. Auckland, NZ: Harper Collins. Levin, D., & Mee, M. (2018). The boy in the middle. AMLE Magazine. Retrieved from www.amle.org/Brow sebyTopic/YoungAdolescentDevelopment/YADet/TabId/207/ArtMID/841/ArticleID/891/The-Boy-inthe-Middle.aspx Lillico, I. D. (2017). Boys and their schooling- Revised edition. Perth, Australia: Tranton Enterprises Pty Ltd. Mackay, H., & Strickland, M. J. (2018). Exploring Culturally Responsive Teaching and Student-Created Videos in an At Risk Middle School Classroom. Middle Grades Review, 4(1). Retrieved from https://scholar works.uvm.edu/mgreview/vol4/iss1/7 Meier, D. (2002). The power of their ideas: Lessons for America from a small school in Harlem (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Nagel, M. (2006). Boys stir us. Victoria, Australia: Hawker Brownlow. Queensland Government. (2010). Improving transitions from primary to secondary school and supporting adolescent development. In A Flying Start for Queensland children: Education Green paper for public consideration. Queensland, Australia: Government Printers. Richardson, C. (2011). ‘Challenge’ in the middle years. Australian Journal of Middle Schooling, 11(2), 38–40. Rimm, S. (2013) Raising amazing boys. Retrieved from www.sylviarimm.com/article_amazboys.html Skelton, C. (2001). Schooling the boys: Masculinities and primary education. Buckingham, UK: Biddles Limited.

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Smyth, J., & McInerney, P. (2007). "Living on the edge": A case of school reform working for disadvantaged adolescents. Teachers College Record, 109(5), 1123–1170. Taie, S., & Goldring, R. (2017). Characteristics of public elementary and secondary school teachers in the United States: Results from the 2015–16 National Teacher and Principal Survey First Look (NCES 2017072). U.S. Department of Education. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2017072. University of Queensland. (2018). Flipped classroom project. Retrieved from www.uq.edu.au/tediteach/ flipped-classroom/what-is-fc.html Van Bergen, P., Bahr, N., Wright, T., Allender, T., Freebody, P., Barton, G., & Neilson, R. (2009). The Awareness and explication of disciplinarity across four secondary subject areas. Paper presented at American Educational Research Association Convention, San Diego. Watson, A., Kehler, M., & Martino, W. (2010). The problem of boys’ literacy underachievement: Raising some questions. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 53(5), 356–361. Weller, D. L. (1999). Quality middle school leadership. Lancaster, PA: Technomic Publishing Company. Woolfolk Hoy, A., Demerath, P., & Pape, S. (2002). Teaching adolescents: Engaging developing selves. In T. Urdan & F. Pajares (Eds.), Adolescence and education: General issues in the education of adolescents (pp. 119–169). Greenwich, CT: Information Age. Xavier College. (n.d.) Faith and service. Retrieved from https://xavier.vic.edu.au/xavier/content/faith-andservice

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11 THE NEED TO TEACH RESPONSIVE DISPOSITIONS IN MIDDLE LEVEL TEACHER PREPARATION Holly Thornton

Young Adolescents and the World Today Adolescence has always been a time of growth, change, and challenge for middle level students. The amount of change young adolescents undergo is second only to the changes experienced in infancy. Students at this age make decisions that may have life altering consequences. They are seeking to figure out who they are, where they belong, and how to make sense of the world in which they live (National Middle School Association [NMSA], 2010). The world too is rapidly changing. Experts say that the overall amount of knowledge that exists is doubling every ten to twelve months. Eighty percent of all jobs students will one day hold have not yet been invented (Dell Technologies, 2017). Futurists add that today’s young adolescents might commonly live to be 120 years old (Dong, Milholland, & Vijg, 2016). It is a world of “look at me” with selfies, YouTube, Snapchat, tweets, Facebook, and reality TV. Individuals spend increasing amounts of time constructing multiple selves for various audiences and peering into the lives of others. The impact of social media, and an increasingly adversarial political culture, has led to the blurring of facts and opinions. Unsubstantiated biases and opinions become the equivalent of vetted concepts grounded in critical thinking and scientific inquiry. In addition, the world in which young adolescents live seems overwhelmed by conflict and violence with a daily reality of bullying, toxic masculinity, suicide, and the fear of being shot or killed in their own schools. In such a reality, young adolescents do not need teachers who see themselves as mere dispensers of knowledge about particular subjects. They need dynamic adults offering a solid core of current knowledge who can create the ability and inclination for students to learn more in the years ahead (Wormeli, 2009). Teachers have perhaps the most significant impact on young adolescent learners (Darling-Hammond, 2000). Early adolescence is our last best chance to use that influence to positively affect students’ choices as they move ahead in their lives. Finding the right kind of middle level teachers is essential to making a difference in students’ lives and creating a more positive future. As society becomes more virtually connected, people become less connected to others through face-to-face interactions. It becomes difficult to distinguish between the virtual world and the

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real world. Willingly consuming and accepting information supplants thinking critically about it. Schools are places where students can learn to make and understand needed distinctions. Teaching in an educational climate that continues to focus on accountability, testing, content coverage, and competition runs counter to teaching for understanding. Thus, it becomes even more important to find teachers who can both reach and teach young adolescent learners. Middle level students learn how to navigate challenges in their lives and how to develop into potential leaders of the future. How a teacher makes meaning of the broader world, and more importantly the world of teaching and learning, significantly affects the nature and depth of student learning (Thornton, 2006). A teacher’s dispositions guide how collective meaning making happens in the classroom. Thus, a teacher’s dispositions are foundational to what transpires in the classroom daily.

Middle Level Education and Dispositions Middle level scholars acknowledge the value of relationships as the foundation of learning (Lounsbury, 1991; Van Hoose, Strahan, & L’Esperance, 2001). Studies show higher achievement when students have a positive relationship with their teachers (Cornelius-White, 2007; Hattie, 2009). These relationships encourage students to become thinkers, community members, problem solvers, and innovators. However, relationships can also encourage students to become selffocused, complacent, compliant re-callers of information. To achieve the former, teachers need to be disposed to be critical, challenging, facilitative, creative, empowering, connected, changedriven, and inclusive. These are referred to as responsive dispositions in action (Thornton, 2006, 2018) and are reflective of middle level thinking and effective teacher attributes (NMSA, 2010). According to the Association for Middle Level Education (AMLE, formerly NMSA), specific attributes are essential to being an effective educator of young adolescents. The first attribute is that effective middle level educators respond to the unique nature of young adolescents and their developmental needs. This commitment to developmental responsiveness affects “all decisions related to organization, policy, curriculum, instruction, and assessment” (NMSA, 2010). Middle level education must also be challenging, empowering, and equitable (NMSA, 2010). Other disposition-based attributes include middle level educators acting as advocates for all young adolescents, enjoying being in their presence, and valuing interdisciplinary work and integrated learning. Effective middle level teachers need to be sensitive to individual differences and respond positively to the natural diversity present in middle level classrooms. Effective teachers are disposed to be inclusive, collaborative, and team-oriented. Human relationships are paramount in the middle level classroom, and all individuals are treated with dignity and respect. Both students and adults recognize and value one another’s differences. Issues of gender, culture, and equity are addressed with sensitivity and fairness. Curiosity, creativity, and diversity are celebrated as students take initiative and risks building on positive relationships with peers and teachers (NMSA, 2010). Teachers possessing responsive dispositions in action are more likely to consistently employ these developmentally responsive practices. Although dispositions are important to middle level philosophy, the focus on dispositions seems to be waning. Dispositional standards have become embedded within AMLE teacher standards rather than being foregrounded as a stand-alone core of middle level education (AMLE, 2012). Dispositions are increasingly embedded within state standards and are often lost in the shuffle as they are subsumed under similar constructs that may dilute the middle level focus. Less attention is given to them within teacher preparation accountability systems that often drive institutional decisions. However, middle level educators continue to recognize the role of dispositions in cultivating developmentally responsive practices and inclusive, harmonious, safe learning communities (Van Hoose et al., 2001).

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The middle school movement is grounded in the concept of the developmentally responsive practitioner. Middle level schools and educators seek to promote harmony among students and teachers, focusing on curriculum, instruction, assessment, and school cultures that address individual students’ physical, sexual, social, and personal development at this dynamic age (Van Hoose et al., 2001). Curriculum is responsive to young adolescents in several ways; it is relevant, integrated, and centered on students’ questions and interests (Vars & Beane, 2000). Instruction is student centered and the use of meaningful assessment strategies guide students’ further learning and development. Responsive classroom management centers on empowering young adolescents to be decision makers and members of a democratic learning community who work together to solve problems and promote a safe, equitable, and challenging learning environment for all (Beane, 1990, 1997; Kohn, 2006). Commitments to responsive practices, such as these, are clearly articulated in This We Believe (NMSA, 2010). The decision to embrace and implement responsive practices and to make this commitment regardless of external factors, rests on the teachers’ underlying dispositions (Thornton, 2018). Beliefs matter. Teachers’ beliefs about students significantly define expectations held for student learning and achievement (Villegas, 2007). Further, these beliefs “lead teachers to treat students differently resulting in positive or negative performance, aspirations, and self-concepts” (Villegas, 2007, p. 374). Teacher dispositions, however, are more than just beliefs. A disposition is the tendency to put those beliefs into practice in the classroom in a specific way (Costa & Kallick, 2000). A teacher’s dispositions are among the most important determinants of student learning in the classroom (Thornton, 2006). A team of middle level teachers may use the same curriculum, the same teaching strategies, and the same approach to management, but the manner in which these are enacted in the classroom may be very different from teacher to teacher. How a teacher is disposed to bring learning to life and make meaning of content and pedagogy with students makes a difference. Finding the right kind of teacher who is disposed to interactions that are best suited for young adolescent learners is important. Although the concept of dispositions in middle level standards is not a new one, the impact of these dispositions on teaching and learning has often been overshadowed by a quest to choose and define dispositions that are easily measurable for the purpose of accreditation. The very definition of dispositions has long been a point of dispute and examination. Dispositions have often been viewed as habits of mind or professional characteristics (Ritchhart, 2001). Katz and Raths (1985) suggested that the term disposition refer to a pattern of acts that are intentional on the part of the teacher rather than unintentional habits. Further, this intentionality is directly related to a particular context and a particular time (Freeman, 2007). Dispositions are sometimes confused with abilities, and they are certainly related. Some abilities are essential to the development of certain dispositions. For example, to develop the disposition to think critically, one needs to cultivate the ability to make inferences and grounded arguments. Ability is the capacity to perform tasks, whereas dispositions describe how those abilities are intentionally manifested (Carducci, 2006). The concept of dispositions as one’s perception of events has been widely embraced (Wasicsko, 2007). This has led to a focus on self-examination of one’s mindset and cultivating the ability to reframe one’s thinking. Unfortunately, perceptual-based approaches to dispositions are limited by their reliance on candidates’ self-reporting and their ability to express metacognitive understanding. Beyond self-reporting, Collinson’s (1996) study of characteristics of exemplary teachers began to identify what teachers bring to the enterprise of teaching, beyond knowledge and skills, that positively influences students and learning. To explore this, evidence indicating what teacher dispositions look like in action needs be examined and understood. Such a framework can address the question of how teachers’ dispositions affect the learning of young adolescents. A tool that allows us to examine this is the dispositions in action framework.

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Dispositions in Action Dispositions in action (DIA) are evidenced in the classroom within teacher/student interactions (Thornton, 2006), thus reinforcing the importance of relationships in the classroom. This framework allows one to examine what dispositions “look like” in practice and how they affect student learning. The framework for disposition in action uses the terms responsive and technical to categorize specific dispositions found within instruction. The disposition to be responsive is a thinking-based orientation that is evident in many dimensions: responsive to the learners’ needs and actions, developmental characteristics, understanding, questions, and work as well as the learning context. Teachers with technical dispositions exemplify the role of teacher as technician. They know how to employ the skills of teaching successfully, but do not focusing on the “why” behind their instructional decisions. Instead, the focus is on efficiency and accountability with little variation from class to class, situation to situation, and student to student (Thornton, 2018). The DIA framework aligns dispositions with classroom domains in which they are typically exhibited. Dispositions found within the domains of practice including instruction, assessment and management are described in Figure 11.1.

DIA and Young Adolescent Learners Stereotypes and negative images are pervasive in media coverage of young adolescents, often portraying them as bizarre and abhorrent (Smith and McEwin, 2011). Middle level teachers know better. It takes a special kind of teacher to understand, reach, and effectively teach these constantly changing young adolescents. In addition to the physical changes of pubescence, middle level students are rapidly developing cognitively, socially, and emotionally. Cognitively, they are moving between concrete and abstract thinking. They are developing the ability to reason and to question as they unearth complexities that used to seem simple to them. The adults they look to for knowing all of the answers suddenly seem not to have them anymore. Young adolescents want and need the approval of these adults in their lives but at the same time wish to break away and become themselves. Socially they are trying to fit in but also be independent. They are trying to determine, “Who am I in this world?” Emotional changes are affected by fluctuating hormonal balances and other physiological factors such as puberty and accelerated growth spurts. Social relationships complicate the management of emotions they are still learning to control. Young adolescents are beginning to navigate the complexity of moral decisions as they begin to empathizing with others. They are “becoming” and then moving into young adulthood. They strive for independence, yet they clamor to belong. They fight the connections they have with their parents, but they need to form alliances with peers and bond with understanding teachers. They are finding themselves and, in the process, will challenge authority, experiment with sarcasm, and try on many different personalities. They are adolescents. (Checkley, 2004, p. 1) Middle level students are often preoccupied with self, but have a strong need for approval and belonging. They may be easily discouraged, but are developing an increasingly better understanding of personal abilities. They may seem disinterested in conventional academic subjects, but are intellectually curious about the world and themselves (NMSA, 2010). The dichotomous nature of their needs and lives is a challenge not only for them, but also for their teachers. It requires a certain set of dispositions to be well matched with the characteristics of ten- to fifteen-year-olds and to appreciate their assets and build learning experiences upon them. The research is abundant and clear about the value of developmentally responsive practices in middle

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Responsive Dispositions

Classroom Function

Technical Dispositions

The disposition to be critical in one’s thinking. Evidenced in dialogue that is: probing, focused on quality, centered on criteria, concerned with deep understanding

Assessment

The disposition to be assuming in one’s thinking. Evidenced in dialogue that is: centered on completion of tasks, focused on correctness, concerned with grades

The disposition to be challenging in one’s thinking. Evidenced in dialogue that is: centered on high expectations, student competence and success for all students The disposition to be facilitative in one’s thinking. Evidenced in dialogue that is: guiding, inquiry oriented, concerned with application and connections to students’ lives, and real world examples, in search of multiple answers and the exchange of ideas

The disposition to be accepting in one’s thinking. Evidenced in dialogue that is: indicative of low expectations, focused on effort and compliance Instruction

The disposition to be creative in one’s thinking. Evidenced in dialogue that is: about multiple ways of framing learning, examples, and paths to understanding diverse learners, responsive to students’ questions, comments The disposition to be empowering in one’s Management thinking. Evidenced in dialogue that is: concerned with student input related to classroom instructional decisions, centered on fairness and equity The disposition to be in connected one’s thinking. Evidenced in dialogue that is: centered on developmental needs, exhibits “withitness” problem solving, conflict resolution, and responsiveness to students as individuals

The disposition to be directing in one’s thinking. Evidenced in dialogue that is: about directing actions of students, coverage of facts, telling information and giving answers The disposition to be repetitive in one’s thinking. Evidenced in dialogue that is: lacking in variety in explaining, exemplifying or representing learning, consistent, the same way for all students

The disposition to be controlling in one’s thinking. Evidenced in dialogue that is: concerned with managing student behaviors and actions including movement, talking, and other forms of interaction The disposition to be distanced in one’s thinking. Evidenced in dialogue that is: general in nature, generic, often remaining the same from class to class and situation to situation, and objective with limited personal connections

Professionalism The disposition to be compliance-driven The disposition to be change-driven in in one’s thinking. Evidenced in dialogue one’s thinking. Evidenced in dialogue that is: that is: concerned with following mandates concerned with improvement of education as a whole, focused on research-based action, and directives, focused on not disrupting the indicative of continuous professional growth status quo or calling unnecessary attention to oneself or one’s school, wanting to please for self and others, willing to question those those in power, and reward driven. in power. The disposition to be hierarchical in one’s The disposition to be inclusive in one’s thinking. Evidenced in dialogue that is: thinking. Evidenced in dialogue that is: representative of multiple perspectives, limited in terms of voice and power, seeking concerned with giving voice to others, approval of authority, using authority over seeking collaboration, reciprocity and others, role-oriented ownership, and leadership from all stakeholders Figure 11.1 Dispositions in action framework.

Holly Thornton

school (Cook, Faulkner, & Howell, 2016). However, teachers are the ones who decide when and how to put those practices into action and bring them to life in the classroom. A teacher’s dispositions underlie these decisions and are evidenced within classroom interactions (see Appendix). Young adolescent learners report better learning experiences with teachers who possess responsive dispositions in action (Thornton, 2018). These responsive dispositions are a parallel to and supportive of developmentally responsive teaching.

DIA and Current Trends in Teaching The reality of the 21st century, according to Zhao (2016), is that people will need to increasingly act as entrepreneurs and creators. Creative and entrepreneurial thinking are not cultivated through memorization, basic application, and standardized tests. Rather, responsively disposed teachers model critical thinking, provide challenge, and act as facilitators of learning to push students to create and become their best selves. Meaningful, engaged learning helps prepare young adolescents to become fully functioning members of society who will be able to guide and direct future change rather than merely accept and react to it. According to This We Believe (NMSA, 2010), the goal of middle level schools is to enable young adolescents to become fully functioning, self-actualized individuals. They need to become actively aware of the larger world and ask significant questions about it as they wrestle with big ideas. They need to be able to think rationally and critically and to express their thoughts clearly to others as they learn to value the diverse people and world in which they live. They need to understand and use major concepts and skills across all content fields to interpret and create knowledge and to enjoy lifelong learning. They need to employ and discover a variety of resources, digital tools, and virtual worlds to communicate and collaborate with others. They need to learn how to develop their own strengths and talents and to recognize and make responsible, ethical decisions. They need to be good stewards of the earth. They need to care, assuming responsibility for their actions and considering their impact on the welfare of others in their local, national, and global communities. Current educational trends are a response to these young adolescent learner needs. Recent educational innovations and professional development have focused on intentionally developing social emotional intelligence (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009) and mindfulness (Jennings, 2015) while embracing a growth mindset (Dweck, 2006). All of these approaches reflect the need for schools to produce thinking and caring individuals who can successfully live in and lead our democracy in the future. Teachers’ dispositions are a main determinant of instructional choices made in response to these innovations and approaches. Dispositions guide educators towards philosophies and practices that are consistent with their beliefs and ways of understanding the world. Teachers with responsive dispositions, such as being “connected”, recognize the importance and support the development of social emotional learning (SEL) and connections with others (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009). An intentional focus on developing connections with others affects the development of young adolescents’ neural circuitry, particularly the executive functions of the prefrontal cortex, which manage working memory and inhibit disruptive emotional impulses (Greenberg, Kusche, Cook, & Quamma, 1995). Further, SEL boosts academic achievement with much of the increased learning attributed to improvements in attention and working memory, key functions of the prefrontal cortex (Greenberg et al., 1995). SEL that focuses on adolescents’ EQ, or emotional intelligence, can enhance student learning and prevent conflict-base problems and violence. Helping young adolescents improve their self-awareness and confidence, manage their disturbing emotions and impulses, and increase their empathy pays off not just in improved behavior but in measurable academic achievement (Jennings & Greenberg,

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2009). For people to get along in an increasingly diverse society, they need to understand and develop emotional intelligence. Responsively disposed teachers empower students to do so. Mindfulness is ability to be fully present, aware of where one is and what one is doing (Jennings, 2015). According to Kabat-Zinn (2009), mindfulness requires paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and without judgement. Mindfulness creates multiple ways of framing learning to develop multiple paths to understanding. Teaching children to develop mindfulness has been documented to help students to reduce anxiety (Semple, Reid, & Miller, 2005), help students with behavior disorders to manage their aggressive behaviors, (Singh et al., 2007), and significantly decrease the impact of ADHD (Zylowska et al., 2008). Overall, it enables children to deal with distressing life situations and the challenges of adolescence in more positive and productive ways. Responsive dispositions parallel and support mindful teaching. This increased focus on consciousness of the mind has also led to the development of the growth mindset concept, whereby one believes that one’s talents and abilities can be continually improved and developed (Dweck, 2006). One’s mindset shapes attitudes so significantly that it may be the ultimate factor that determines our success or failure. Students who believe their personal abilities can be developed have less aggressive tendencies and experience peer pressure with less stress (Zolfagharifard, 2015). Unlike a fixed mindset, which implies intelligence is unchangeable, a growth mindset causes students to perceive the difficulties they face as something they can overcome. This replaces feeling like there is no hope and thinking that something might must be wrong with their intellectual abilities. Responsively disposed teachers encourage students to grapple with difficult ideas, take risks in their learning, and accept and learn from failure as they grow as students and people. Teachers with responsive dispositions are inclusive and empower students within a democratic classroom to make positive change. Democratic thinking needs to be taught rather than assumed. Institutional structures and design that give young people the opportunity to participate in decision-making about meaningful issues can have an impact on their ability to take a collective perspective, engage in prosocial behavior, understand democratic values and processes, and experience personal and political efficacy (Apple, 2009). A participatory, democratic school culture makes a significant difference in the foundational development of social responsibility (Berman, 1997). The current educational culture found in most schools is built upon a philosophy of scientific management that employs teacher-centered approaches whereby the teacher acts as the “expert”, imparting knowledge to students who act as passive recipients. If student roles are to be passive, non-questioning, and dependent on an expert to think for them, this is problematic to the future of our democracy. According to Apple (2014), teachers need to cultivate “caring and connectedness, a sense of mutuality, trust and respect, and a freedom to challenge others, as well as a commitment to challenge the existing politics of official knowledge whenever and wherever it is repressive” (p. 160). Democratic education is, essentially, learning about democracy by living in one. This requires a teacher who has the disposition to embrace the classroom as a democracy.

Dispositions in Action: Findings about Teaching and Learning As discussed previously, responsive dispositions in action reflect the research and knowledge base about young adolescents and their learning. Responsively disposed middle level teachers decide to employ practices that best address the needs of young adolescents. Learning in a responsively disposed middle level teacher’s classroom involves more critical and higher level thinking. Use of the Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes (SOLO) taxonomy (Biggs & Collis, 1982) in comparing teachers who are technically disposed to those who have responsive dispositions revealed that student learning in responsive teachers’ classrooms is conceptually more complex

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and deeper (Thornton, 2006). These findings were regardless of school context (rural, urban, suburban) and subject area (math, science, social studies and language arts) (Thornton, 2006). Classrooms where teachers have responsive dispositions are places for thinking. Connections are also found between responsive dispositions and the edTPA that measures teacher proficiency and often is required for state licensure. An exploratory study indicated a significant correlation between higher responsive DIA scores and higher edTPA scores (Thornton & Neroda, 2018). The success of teacher candidates with responsive dispositions is reflective of their ability to better understand and articulate the complexities and grounding behind instructional design and classroom practices. These candidates are also disposed to employ the analytical thinking required for success in writing edTPA commentaries. The relationship between candidates’ dispositions in action and their success on the edTPA will be studied on a broader scale. Studies of DIA have implications not only for teacher proficiency and student learning, but also for teacher preparation. Culminating field based experiences, such as student teaching or clinical internships, continue to be an important part of teacher preparation programs. Intentionally matching pre-service teachers with mentor teachers who have similar DIA affects the nature and productivity of the experience. The majority of conflicts and challenges that arise within the student teaching experience are related to teacher dispositions more often than pedagogy. As Osguthorpe (2013) stated: The core issue is almost always dispositional in nature and related to the moral and ethical manner in which the student teacher carries out the practice of teaching. In other words, the mentor teacher’s worries might initially be voiced as a concern about instructional method, but they often are more closely connected to a concern about a student teacher’s way of being and moral disposition—the student teacher’s level of responsibility, commitment, open-mindedness, care, kindness, politeness, or some other conception of dispositions. (p. 17) One’s dispositions are the filter through which an educator views and chooses to how to live in the classroom (Harris & Sass, 2011). Pre-service teachers that were matched with mentor teachers who shared similar DIAs had experiences that were reported as more harmonious and successful (Thornton, 2015). When interns and their mentors are similarly disposed, they view teaching and learning in compatible fashions and are able to interact in more productive and meaningful ways. If responsive teacher dispositions correlate with deeper student learning and understanding, as well as teacher proficiency, their place in teacher preparation needs to be more than consequential or an afterthought in program design. The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE, now Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation [CAEP]) maintained that standards focusing on candidates’ dispositions are a reasonable, defensible, and valuable component of quality teacher education programs (Borko, Liston, & Whitcomb, 2007). There is little doubt that future educators are taught the content and best practices that will make up their repertoire of teaching. Teaching dispositions is often not as explicit. Dispositions are interwoven within a myriad of experiences in teacher preparation classrooms. It is somewhat like a hidden curriculum. It is there and being taught, but it is not necessarily clearly evidenced and assessed (Thornton, 2018). Effective teacher dispositions are taught through developing self-awareness, critical analysis, modeling, and coaching. Awareness of one’s dispositions can occur through the exploration of teachers’ personal beliefs and self-identity to understand how teacher candidates receive and process information and experiences. Some approaches to developing self-awareness include classroom case analysis, reflective journaling, values clarification, and peer forums, or discussions

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focused on candidates describing their experiences and reactions to them. This helps pre-service teachers to understand how they are inclined to think and act when confronted with different teaching situations, and develop an awareness of how their dispositions influence their thinking and actions related to teaching (Stooksberry, Schussler, & Bercaw, 2009). Development of teacher dispositions follows a series of discernments about the self in relationship to the role of teacher (Palmer, 2007) and occurs through critical analysis of one’s teaching. Dispositions require justification and cause teachers to explore the reasons why consistent behaviors and thoughts of certain types are central to their teaching. Focused analysis of videos of candidate, novice, and master teacher lessons can occur using the DIA (see Figure 11.2) and other related teacher quality rubrics or frameworks, such as Danielson’s (2007) framework for teaching. Intentional matching of teacher candidates with responsively disposed mentors in the field provide the opportunity for modeling of effective dispositions. Mentor teachers can also use intentional and individualized coaching to develop desired dispositions (Bell, Grant, & Fisk-Moody, 2007). Providing explicit feedback related to behaviors that are indicative of one’s dispositions is one of the most powerful tools a coach can use to help preservice teachers develop desired dispositions (Diez, 2007). Oja and Reiman (2007) suggested the usefulness of teacher educators adopting a developmental perspective when thinking about the nurturing and assessment of educator dispositions. Over time, building knowledge and understanding and honing the skills necessary to interact effectively can cause teacher candidates to complete programs evidencing changes in their dispositions (Diez, 2006).

Conclusion What makes a teacher of young adolescent learners effective? There is abundant research about young adolescent learners, their needs, and how they develop cognitively, socially physically, and emotionally. It seems evident that some teachers are better disposed to teach and reach these young adolescent learners. A teacher’s dispositions define the kind of teaching and learning that takes place in the classroom. Understanding one’s dispositions through an examination of one’s thoughts, ways of knowing, beliefs, and attitudes enables teachers to realize how their dispositions affect their decision-making, and thus how learning is defined in their classrooms. Dispositions may be the key to finding and developing the right kind of teachers for young adolescent learners. Even though it may difficult to quantify these less technical aspects of teachers and teaching, middle level teacher candidates can be taught to develop responsive dispositions. For them to do so, they need a clear, learning-focused framework for effective teacher dispositions such as DIA. Using this framework, teacher candidates can learn how to become self-aware. They can learn to think about and analyze the dispositions that are foundational to the instructional decisions they make. Through thoughtful clinical experiences that use modeling and coaching with responsive mentor teachers in the field, candidates can learn to put responsive dispositions into action. Effective dispositions are an important part of the value added by teacher preparation programs. Intentionally defining and cultivating professional dispositions that work with young adolescent learners should be a core element of our middle level teacher education programs. An examination of teacher dispositions using the dispositions in action framework makes connections between and among teacher quality frameworks. It encourages an examination of the habits of mind that undergird the decisions teachers make through interaction with students. It enables one to look at and understand individual teacher candidates’ responses to the challenges of becoming a teacher. There are clear connections between developing middle level teachers with responsive dispositions and cultivating student learning that promotes mindfulness, critical thinking, student voice,

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and reasoned decision-making. Responsively disposed teachers teach students to value differences and learn how to negotiate and collaborate with others to promote the best interests of all members of the learning community. This is critical to the future of our society, just as teachers with responsive dispositions may be critical to inspiring young adolescents to become adults who will positively affect their lives, our society, and the world.

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Appendix Pedagogy of Dispositions Observation Form Observer: Subject(s)/content area(s): Date:

Responsive interaction with students (empowering/connected)

Indicators of dispositions via Dialogue High Level (3)

Indicators of dispositions via Dialogue Medium Level (2)

Indicators of dispositions via Score/ Dialogue Low Level (1) Comments

Decision Making: The teacher regularly seeks input from students related to instructional strategies, assessment, and the focus of the curriculum and instruction in the classroom.

Decision Making: The teacher occasionally involves students in instructional decisions by giving options within assignments or projects.

Decision Making: The teacher focuses on covering information and material with very few adjustments made related to student feedback or input.

Curriculum and Instruction: The teacher elicits student questions and interpretation of learning to gain data to inform future plans related to aspects of classroom curriculum and instruction.

Curriculum and Instruction: The teacher gives students some choices about what to learn and how to learn.

Curriculum and Instruction: The teacher rarely seeks feedback from students related to curriculum and instruction.

Classroom Expectations: Structure and organization in classroom supports dialogue and interaction with individuals and groups of students in running the classroom.

Classroom Expectations: Students have some choices regarding classroom procedures.

Classroom Expectations: The teacher talks with students and interacts with them in ways that emphasize following directions, rules and completing tasks, (Continued )

(Cont.) Indicators of dispositions via Dialogue High Level (3)

Indicators of dispositions via Dialogue Medium Level (2)

Indicators of dispositions via Score/ Dialogue Low Level (1) Comments

Student Rapport: Student dialogue with each other and teacher is truly collaborative with a focus on quality and mutual support in setting and attaining goals and personal support.

Student Rapport: Classroom conversations indicate a congenial, cooperative atmosphere with some student interaction to achieve learning goals.

Student Rapport: Teacher talk rarely veers from focus on “given” content and coverage of this content with limited student interaction.

Individual Management: The teacher talks with students and interacts with them in ways that show “withitness” and keen awareness of individual students, and flexibility in responding to each student.

Individual Management: The teacher talks with students and interacts with them in ways that show some awareness of individual differences and some variation in responding to students.

Individual Management: The teacher talks with students and interacts with them in ways that center on maintaining consistency and authority in responding to students.

Classroom Management: The teacher proactively addresses disruptions and promotes student engagement in ways that encourage shared responsibility and a sense of community and intrinsic motivation. The focus is on student problem solving.

Classroom Management: The teacher addresses disruptions and promotes student engagement in ways that primarily emphasize extrinsic motivation. The focus is on “on task” behavior.

Classroom Management: Teacher addresses disruptions and promotes engagement in primarily autocratic ways The focus is on individual compliance to class rules and norms.

Responsive interaction within assessment (challenging/critical) Indicators of dispositions via Dialogue High Level (3)

Indicators of dispositions via Dialogue Medium Level (2)

Indicators of dispositions via Dialogue Low Level (1)

Expectations: The teacher regularly talks with students and interacts with them in ways that authentically communicate high expectations for learning.

Expectations: The teacher indicates that some students are capable of meeting high expectations while others are not as capable.

Expectations: The teacher talks with students and interacts with them in ways that emphasize effort and compliance as success.

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(Continued )

(Cont.) Indicators of dispositions via Dialogue High Level (3)

Indicators of dispositions via Dialogue Medium Level (2)

Indicators of dispositions via Dialogue Low Level (1)

Understanding: Dialogue and interaction regularly encourage deeper levels of understanding and emphasize progress toward high quality performances of understanding.

Understanding: Dialogue and interaction go beyond the “givens” of the task toward higher levels of thinking.

Understanding: Dialogue and interaction focus on completion of tasks and assignments with little probing or questioning to move beyond the “givens” of the task.

Questioning: Dialogue and interaction focus on questioning and probing to reveal the students’ depth of understanding to move beyond surface assumptions and statements of “facts”, often seeking students’ opinions, or justifications and reasoning behind responses.

Questioning: Dialogue and interactions typically center on teacher questions that focus on seeking the correct answer to a question or set of questions, with occasional follow up to check for student understanding.

Questioning: Dialogue and interaction centers on the teacher typically providing information, with limited focus on questioning students or student questions.

Methods of Assessment: Assessment of learning (both formative and summative) occurs regularly within the flow of student/ student/teacher interactions throughout instruction and is used to set goals for students and to guide further learning.

Methods of Assessment: Assessment of learning occurs in pre-determined projects, activities, or assignments and is primarily of a summative nature, with occasional informal checks for understanding.

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Methods of Assessment: Assessment takes place almost exclusively separate form instruction (usually post) using methods such as tests and quizzes.

Responsive interaction within instruction (facilitative/creative) Indicators of dispositions via Dialogue High Level (3)

Indicators of dispositions via Dialogue Medium Level (2)

Indicators of dispositions via Dialogue Low Level (1)

Individualization: The teacher frequently responds to student questions, notes their progress, and incorporates their ideas, experiences, and interests into instruction. Conceptual Understanding: Lessons regularly feature the scaffolding of skills and concepts to build on students’ current understanding and questions to obtain deeper levels of understanding including synthesis and evaluation. Developmental Responsiveness: The teacher talks and interacts with students in ways that indicate responsiveness to individual differences in developmental needs.

Individualization: The teacher responds to student questions, progress, and ideas and occasionally builds this into instruction.

Individualization: The teacher emphasizes one approach to learning for all students.

Conceptual Understanding: Lessons occasionally vary the explanation of concepts and the performance of skills in response to students’ questions, typically focused an application level of understanding.

Conceptual Understanding: Lessons emphasize the explanation of concepts in a prescribed order typically focused on a recall level of understanding.

Developmental Responsiveness: The teacher talks and interacts with students in ways that show some awareness of individual differences in developmental needs.

Developmental Responsiveness: The teacher talks with students and interacts with them in ways that are not developmentally responsive and are often the same from class to class and situation to situation and student to student. Relevance: Relevance: Relevance: The teacher regularly relates The teacher occasionally relates The teacher talks with students classroom learning experiences classroom learning experiences and interacts with them in ways to real world situations and to real world situations and that emphasize the coverage of makes connections to students’ makes connections to students’ information. Any connections lives beyond school. lives beyond school. beyond the classroom are incidental. Multiple Paths to Multiple Paths to Multiple Paths to Understanding: Understanding: Understanding: The teacher emphasizes a single The teacher encourages The teacher offers may offer pathway to learning and assessing multiple ways of demonstrating multiple opportunities for whether or not students depth of understanding within student demonstration of demonstrate prescribed skills and and after instruction. understanding primarily after procedures after instruction. instruction. Feedback: Feedback: Feedback: The teacher generally limits The teacher regularly provides The teacher occasionally provides feedback to students feedback to grades on multiple forms of feedback to assignments, with only students to guide the growth of during instruction, primarily their understanding during focused on addressing students’ corrective feedback during instruction, building on and misconceptions. instruction. challenging students’ conceptual understanding. Figure 11.2 Pedagogy of dispositions observation form.

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PART IV

Characteristics of Middle Level Education Learning Environments

12 SUPPORTING YOUNG ADOLESCENT MOTIVATION IN SCHOOL THROUGH AN ADOLESCENT-CENTERED COMMUNITY OF CARE Sarah M. Kiefer and Cheryl Ellerbrock

Young adolescents often experience changes in motivation that can have important implications for their success in school and beyond. However, it is not yet clear how best to promote young adolescent motivation at the middle level. This chapter provides a review of young adolescents’ motivation and adjustment in school and explores new directions for research and theory in middle level education. Specifically, this chapter provides a holistic, contextual approach to understanding young adolescents’ motivation at school by using an adolescent-centered community of care framework. We first provide a review of developmental characteristics of young adolescent motivation. Second, we discuss theoretical underpinnings of an adolescent-centered community of care framework as well as the ways this framework integrates and extends prior motivational theory and research. Third, we discuss how schools, teachers, and peers can support young adolescent motivation in school using an adolescent-centered community of care framework. Last, we consider future directions and implications for supporting young adolescent motivation at the middle level.

Young Adolescent Motivation at School Early adolescence is often viewed as a turning point in development (Jackson & Davis, 2000), and a time when academic and social decisions can have a long-lasting impact on success in school and beyond (Balfanz, Herzog, & Mac Iver, 2007). Young adolescent motivation and engagement is an important yet understudied topic; research in this area consisted of less than 6% of middle level research published between 2000–2013 (Brinegar, 2015; Yoon, Malu, Schaefer, Reyes, & Brinegar, 2015). Motivation is a fragmented field; we conceptualize motivation as “a set of beliefs that drive and sustain behavior and is an important precursor to learning and success in school” (Kiefer, Alley, & Ellerbrock, 2015, p. 1). In this section we discuss developmental and contextual changes in motivation during early adolescence, as well as theoretical frameworks for understanding young adolescent motivation at school.

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Developmental and Contextual Changes Research examining developmental changes in motivation indicate many children and adolescents around the world experience a decline in motivation and engagement with increasing age (Anderman, Maehr, & Midgley, 1999; Wigfield et al., 2015). However, it is important to note that not all youth experience these declines and that there is considerable individual and group differences in students’ motivation in school (e.g., gender, ethnicity, and culture; Wigfield et al., 2015). It is also clear schools, teachers, and peers serve as socializing agents in the development of students’ motivation (Eccles & Roeser, 2011; Kiefer et al., 2015; Ryan, 2001; Wang & Eccles, 2013; Wentzel, 2016). Negative shifts in student motivation are often the result of contextual changes associated with the transition into a middle level school (Eccles & Roeser, 2011). The transition into a middle level school is characterized by multiple changes, including less high-quality relationships with teachers and peers, fewer opportunities for autonomy and challenge in academic work, higher levels of academic competition, lowered self-perceptions, and lower levels of motivation and engagement (Eccles et al., 1993; Eccles & Roeser, 2011; Wigfield et al., 2015). These negative shifts are not inevitable, however, as many students do not experience decreases in motivation during the middle grades (Anderman et al., 1999). Recent research indicates student motivation and engagement are malleable factors and can be increased through developmentally responsive interventions (Wigfield & Wentzel, 2007; Yeager, Dahl, & Dweck, 2018).

Theoretical Frameworks There are several established theoretical frameworks for understanding young adolescent motivation at school. In this chapter, we focus primarily on three theories: self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000), stage-environment fit theory (Eccles & Midgley, 1989; Eccles et al., 1993), and expectancy-value theory (Eccles-Parsons et al., 1983; Wigfield & Eccles, 2000). These theories provide a foundation for understanding young adolescents’ motivation within the middle level school context. According to self-determination theory, students’ behavior is strongly influenced by three universal, innate psychological needs—autonomy (the urge to control one’s own life), competence (the urge to experience mastery, to have the right level of challenge), and relatedness (the urge to interact with, be connected to, and care for others; Deci & Ryan, 2000; Ryan & Deci, 2000). Students need to satisfy all three needs in order to prevent motivational declines in school (Sheldon & Niemiec, 2006). Educators can support young adolescents’ motivation and success in the middle grades by: (a) promoting students’ sense of control and autonomy; (b) creating authentic and relevant learning experiences and helping students to recognize, monitor, and strategize throughout the learning process; and (c) developing high-quality relationships and an emotionally supportive learning environment (Headden & McKay, 2015; Reeve, 2006). Adolescents’ needs, especially autonomy, can increase as a result of school-based interventions (Su & Reeve, 2011). Similar to self-determination theory, stage-environment fit theory posits young adolescents’ motivation is promoted when the learning environment is responsive to their changing developmental needs (Eccles & Midgley, 1989; Eccles et al., 1993). According to Eccles (2004): Individuals have changing emotional, cognitive, and social needs and personal goals as they mature … schools need to change in developmentally appropriate ways if they are to provide the kind of social context that will continue to motivate students’ interest and engagement as the students mature. (pp. 125–126)

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Young adolescents’ developmental needs are often met within high-quality relationships with peers and teachers at school and include gaining a sense of responsibility, identity development, making a difference, and authentically engaging in one’s environment (Eccles, 2014). Responsibility involves being trusted by peers and adults and facing natural consequences for one’s actions. Gaining a sense of self includes identifying and enacting one’s values and sense of purpose. Making a difference refers to making a meaningful contribution to one’s community or groups to which one belongs. Engagement involves being authentically and actively involved in one’s environment. Being responsive to adolescents’ developmental needs within the school environment allows student motivation to flourish (Eccles & Roeser, 2011). Classroom-based interventions using the TARGETS framework (task, authority, recognition, grouping, evaluation, time, and social supports) have been found to meet student needs and successfully promote a mastery goal oriented learning environment at the middle level (Lüftenegger, van de Schoot, Schober, Finsterwald, & Spiel, 2014). In contrast to the first two theoretical frameworks, the expectancy-value theory developed by Eccles and colleagues (Eccles-Parsons et al., 1983; Wigfield & Eccles, 2000) focuses on individual, social, and cultural influences on the development of motivation in school (Wigfield et al., 2015). Expectancies include students’ beliefs about their abilities and chances of success (e.g., “Can I do this task?”; Hulleman, Barron, Kosovich, & Lazowski, 2016). Task values involve the extent to which students value an activity, including intrinsic value, utility value, attainment value, and perceived cost (e.g., “Do I want to do this task, and what do I have to do to succeed on this task?”; Hulleman et al., 2016). Together, students’ expectancies and values determine their motivation and success in school. Expectancies and values are embedded within a sociocultural context and are often internalized through the process of socialization. Thus, adolescents’ development of motivation is shaped by feedback from schools, teachers, and peers, as well as adolescents’ own personal (e.g., individual) and social (e.g., collective) identities (Eccles, 2009; Hulleman et al., 2016; Wigfield et al., 2015). Although motivational theories have been beneficial for understanding the adolescent learner, they often are used in isolation. Integrating theoretical models that focus on the interplay between the developing individual and changing context (e.g., self-determination theory, stageenvironment fit theory) as well as socio-cultural influences and the role of identity (e.g., expectancy-value theory) may help to better understand the ways adolescent learners perceive and experience motivation in middle level schools. In the next section we discuss an adolescentcentered community of care framework to support young adolescent motivation at school that integrates theory and research on adolescents’ characteristics, needs, and motivation.

Adolescent-Centered Community of Care An adolescent-centered community of care is a holistic and integrated theoretical framework designed to understand young adolescent motivation and adjustment middle level schools. This framework provides a contextual view regarding the ways schools, teachers, and peers may promote student motivation and adjustment. In this section, we provide an overview of an adolescent-centered community of care and how this framework provides insight into understanding and supporting young adolescent motivation and success in school.

Conceptualization of an Adolescent-Centered Community of Care Grounded in the aforementioned theoretical frameworks (i.e., self-determination theory, stageenvironment fit theory, and expectancy-value theory), an adolescent-centered community of care is a learning environment that is responsive to the needs of young adolescents, including their 163

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need to receive care (Kiefer & Ellerbrock, 2012; Noddings, 2005). It is a community characterized by students and teachers caring about and supporting one another through positive schoolbased relationships and where individuals’ basic and developmental needs are satisfied within a group setting and members feel a sense of belonging and identification with the group (Ellerbrock & Kiefer, 2010; Kiefer & Ellerbrock, 2012). An adolescent-centered community of care meets students’ needs by promoting school organizational environments, teacher characteristics and instructional practices, and peer relationships that support young adolescents’ changing academic, social, emotional, and psychological needs within the middle level school. The promotion of an adolescent-centered community of care has the potential to support young adolescent motivation as well as social and academic adjustment (e.g., classroom engagement, achievement, and school belonging) in the middle grades. Within an adolescent-centered framework, adolescents are considered active agents in their learning and development, and motivation is viewed as process oriented, contextual, and developmental in nature (Roeser & Galloway, 2002). Adolescents’ perception of school as a caring community is dynamically created within a school context. Students are motivated and perform their best in school when they feel someone cares about them and they are actively involved in their learning and held to high expectations and positive norms within a classroom and school community (Headden & McKay, 2015). Students develop competence through clear teacher expectations and responsive instructional practices; autonomy through choice, voice, and task meaningfulness; and relatedness through teacher and peer support, equitable treatment, and emotional safety and well-being (Roeser & Galloway, 2002). A community of care provides a context for adolescents to develop a sense of responsibility through mutual trust among schools, teachers, and peers. It also provides opportunities for students to make a difference through meaningful contribution and to actively engage in a supportive social context. Meeting students’ developmental and psychological needs within high-quality relationships promotes the socialization of values and norms that help shape students’ developing identities. A community of care is characterized by robust, sustained relationships that focus on promoting students’ social and emotional well-being just as much as their learning and achievement (Cavanagh, Macfarlane, Glynn, & Macfarlane, 2012) and communicating clear norms and expectations (Battistich, Solomon, Watson, & Schaps, 1997). Students are more likely to align their values with those espoused by caring school communities (Battistich et al., 1997). In turn, students are motivated when they feel that success in school aligns with their values as well as their personal and social identities (Eccles, 2009; Oyserman & Destin, 2010). Caring communities involve acknowledging and respecting students’ identities and include communicating with youth in a way that allows them to maintain and further develop their sense of self (Cavanagh et al., 2012). This integrated framework can help to explain how students do not experience motivation similarly within a shared environment, such as a classroom or school (Martin et al., 2015; Roeser & Galloway, 2002), and can inform ways for schools to optimize adolescent motivation and success in school.

The Need for an Adolescent-Centered Community of Care Framework It is well known that responsive middle level school environments and positive school-based relationships are necessary to support young adolescent motivation, engagement, and learning (e.g., Eccles & Roeser, 2011; Ellerbrock & Kiefer, 2010, 2013; Reeve, 2006). Middle level scholars have noted the importance of developing school contexts that meet students’ needs and fostering caring and supportive relationships in the middle grades (Jackson & Davis, 2000; NMSA, 2010). However, relatively little attention has been given to care and caring school communities at the middle level (e.g., Adler, 2002; Cushman & Rogers, 2008; Ferreira & Bosworth, 2000; Kiefer & 164

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Ellerbrock, 2012) and the ways teacher care impacts young adolescent motivation (Bieg, Rickelman, Jones, & Mittag, 2013). The field of motivation research is relatively fragmented and often does not use a holistic approach to understanding young adolescent motivation. A holistic approach to understanding young adolescent motivation at school includes a concurrent focus on individual psychological factors, social relationships, and school factors among youth who have different levels of investment and success in school (Roeser & Galloway, 2002). Motivation research has focused primarily on academic or social aspects of individual student’s experiences at school, rarely combining the two into an integrated approach (Kiefer & Ryan, 2008; Roeser, Eccles, & Sameroff, 2000). Other motivational research has focused primarily on the influence of school context on student motivation rather than on individual student experiences (Roeser & Galloway, 2002). Aligned with prior research, an adolescent-centered community of care takes a holistic, contextual approach to studying individual adolescent’s motivation within the middle level school environment and incorporates academic and social factors in school (Kiefer & Ryan, 2008; Roeser & Galloway, 2002; Yoon et al., 2015). This framework is central to advancing theory and research at the middle level regarding how school organizational structures, teacher characteristics and practices, and peer relations shape students’ motivation and adjustment. In addition to advancing middle level theory and research, there is a need in today’s middle level schools to meet young adolescents’ basic and developmental needs through fostering responsive learning environments, educator practices, and peer relationships. Educators need to connect with and support diverse young adolescents and youth from underserved communities. An approach responsive to the local context and needs of youth is necessary to support all young adolescent learners. Educators can support students’ learning by fostering positive relationships and responsive instruction within an adolescent-centered community of care (Headden & McKay, 2015). High-quality relationships and instruction can provide skills and knowledge critical for achievement and help youth see the value in academic work and foster motivation by aligning success in school with their developing identities. Adolescents are highly motivated to act in ways that align with their sense of self, as identity helps them to make sense of the world and to prepare for the future. Although all youth want to be successful in school, some students experience challenges and barriers in school or society that may cause them to perceive school as something that is “not for people like me” (Oyserman & Destin, 2010, p. 1001). Educators can be attuned to how young adolescents’ developing identities and motivation align with school (Reeve, 2006) and establish a community of care where all students view school as a place where they are valued and can be successful.

Key Elements of an Adolescent-Centered Community of Care To foster an adolescent-centered community of care, middle level schools must institute organizational structures responsive to the needs of young adolescents (Ellerbrock & Kiefer, 2013, 2014; Ellerbrock, Main, Falbe, & Franz, 2018; Jackson & Davis, 2000; Kiefer & Ellerbrock, 2012; NMSA, 2010). Also, teachers must demonstrate responsive characteristics and implement responsive practices (Ellerbrock & Kiefer, 2014; Kiefer & Ellerbrock, 2012) for young adolescents to develop high-quality peer relationships (Benson, Leffert, Scales, & Blyth, 2012) in the middle grades. In this section, we consider the key elements of an adolescent-centered community of care—school organizational structures, teacher characteristics and instructional practices, and peer relations. We discuss ways middle level educators can foster responsive learning environments and positive school-based relationships that support young adolescent motivation, engagement, and learning. 165

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School Organizational Structures Young adolescent students’ motivation is best supported when high-quality relationships and responsive practices are embedded in the structure of the school and reinforced throughout the day. However, what it means to care and how relationships grounded in care are established and maintained on a day-to-day basis within the organization of a school is relatively understudied (Alder, 2002; Schussler & Collins, 2006). School organizational structures are important to investigate as they may provide a climate where care can thrive (Noddings, 2005). Middle school organizational structures, such as interdisciplinary teaming and its complementary structures (e.g., proximity, common planning time, flexible block scheduling, advisory) have been well documented to help foster a supportive learning environment in which purposeful learning and meaningful relationships can thrive (Ellerbrock & Kiefer, 2013, 2014; George & Alexander, 2003; Jackson & Davis, 2000; Kiefer & Ellerbrock, 2012; NMSA, 2010; Wallace, 2007). Together, these organizational structures provide the infrastructure necessary to position teachers to meet the needs of their students. Interdisciplinary teaming—a group of two or more teachers who share a common group of students throughout the school day—is commonly referred to as a “signature middle grades practice” (Arhar, 2013, p. 615) and the “heart” of successful middle level schools (NMSA, 2010, p. 31). Interdisciplinary teaming is often most effective when schools implement proximity— team classrooms are within close vicinity to one another—and common planning time—time during the school day when team teachers meet on a regular basis to focus on curricular, team, and individual student-related needs (Jackson & Davis, 2000; NMSA, 2010). Through flexible block scheduling, the school day can be organized in a way that allows educators to fulfill an advisory-like role, act as a mentor, and advocate for students. Having an adult advocate and a consistent time during the school day for teacher-student interaction is a powerful way to develop positive school-based relationships and help to meet adolescents’ changing needs. As stated by Jackson and Davis (2000), teaming and complementary structures “offer students and teachers a dynamic structure for forging close relationships” (p. 142). Despite the importance of interdisciplinary teaming and its complementary organizational structures, a literature review conducted by Ellerbrock et al. (2018) found that studies published since 2000 on interdisciplinary teaming suggest an overall downward decline in implementation. A 2009 national study found that 72% of middle schools throughout the United States applied interdisciplinary teaming, a decrease of 5% from 2001 (McEwin & Greene, 2010). Some states reported even lower levels of implementation. In a 2007 Florida survey, one-third of respondents reported full implementation of interdisciplinary teaming and 16% reported partial implementation (George, 2007). Suggested causes for the decline in interdisciplinary teaming and its complementary structures include state and national policies that do not align with the practice, a disconnect between organizational structures and the assessment and accountability movement, inadequate professional development about the purposes and implementation of organizational structures, and costs associated with implementation (Arhar, 2013; George, 2007; McEwin & Greene, 2010). A responsive school environment with organizational structures that meet young adolescents’ needs is important as students encounter numerous developmental shifts during a time when their motivation and engagement may decline (Eccles & Roeser, 2011). When the school environment is responsive to students’ basic and developmental needs, intrinsic motivation, student engagement, and a sense of community are enhanced (Battistich et al., 1997; Deci & Ryan, 1985; Eccles & Roeser, 2011; Ryan & Deci, 2000). Without these responsive school organizational structures, the ability to foster an adolescent-centered community of care and, thus, foster student motivation and adjustment in school, may be jeopardized.

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Teacher Characteristics and Instructional Practices Although school organizational structures are important to setting the foundation for supporting an adolescent-centered community of care, it is what occurs within these structures between and among teachers and students that makes all the difference. This section discusses the role of teacher characteristics and instructional practices in fostering an adolescent-centered community of care that supports student motivation and adjustment in school.

Teacher Characteristics Teacher characteristics that help to foster an adolescent-centered community of care include knowing, caring for, and connecting with students as well as viewing oneself as an adult advocate with the best interest of all young adolescents in mind. Young adolescents connect most with teachers who they believe care about their personal and academic well-being (Martin & Dowson, 2009; Schussler & Collins, 2006). Teacher involvement supports the development of highquality, warm caring teacher-student relationships. Teacher care has been defined in various ways (e.g., Gilligan, 1982; Noddings, 1984, 2005; Thompson, 1998, 2003) and the importance of caring teacher-student relationships cannot be understated. However, exactly what constitutes caring teacher characteristics and behaviors and what these relationships actually look like is relatively unclear. In recent years, scholars have argued for a more holistic definition of care in which teacher care is culturally relevant to diverse student populations (Roberts, 2010). Further, including student voice regarding what is caring and what constitutes a caring teacher-student relationship is critical yet often not included in research, including studies highlighting minority youth (Tosolt, 2009). It is important to know what teacher characteristics and behaviors students themselves view as caring. In an adolescent-centered community of care, teachers can serve as an adult advocate who shepherd young adolescents’ personal and academic development (Ellerbrock & Kiefer, 2013; NMSA, 2010). While school organizational structures can help support this act—notably interdisciplinary teaming, advisory, and homeroom (Ellerbrock & Kiefer, 2013)—adult advocacy is not something that simply occurs within a set structure or even during at a select time of day. Rather, it is an ongoing act of genuine care: “Advocacy is not a singular event of a period in the schedule, it is an attitude of caring that translates into actions, big and small, when adults respond to the needs of each young adolescent in their charge” (NMSA, 2010, p. 35). Noddings (2005) and other scholars (Garza, 2009; Mayeroff, 1971; Osterman, 2010) asserted teacher care is a vital teacher characteristic to fostering positive, caring teacher-student relationships during adolescence. These relationships allow students to feel truly known, experience receiving and reciprocating care, and form a positive connection with their teacher. Teachers are responsible for establishing and maintaining caring relationships with students while simultaneously helping students learn ways to develop caring relationships with others (Noddings, 2005). Teachers promote an adolescent-centered community of care in which students’ sense of classroom and school belonging, motivation, and engagement are positively enhanced when they authentically know students, develop a caring and enduring connection, and view themselves as an adult advocate. As stated in Jackson and Davis (2000), “When students make a lasting connection with at least one caring adult, academic and personal outcomes improve” (p. 143). Close and caring teacher-student relationships are a major contributor to developing a sense of relatedness and belonging for students in the classroom and the school (Ellerbrock, Kiefer, & Alley, 2014; Osterman, 2010). Fostering a sense of belongingness is linked to increases in student motivation and engagement in school (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Goodenow, 1993; Nichols, 2008; Osterman, 2000) and to stronger academic outcomes, such as higher attendance and better

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grades (Nichols, 2008; Osterman, 2010). Bieg et al. (2013) reported middle school students in the United States and Germany who perceive high levels of teacher care report high levels of autonomous motivation. Conner and Pope (2013) found the more adolescents believe their teachers care about them the more engagement (affective, behavioral, and cognitive) they report. Middle level schools that foster an adolescent-centered community of care ensure every student has at least one caring adult who knows them well, cares for them unconditionally, and offers comprehensive academic and personal guidance without critical judgment.

Instructional Practices In general, young adolescents report responsive, caring teachers as those who engage in needsupportive instructional practices. Autonomy-supportive practices include providing meaningful choices, demonstrating a sense of mutual respect, and providing relevant learning experiences (Reeve, 2006; Stroet, Opdenakker, & Minnaert, 2013). Teacher-structure practices include holding high academic and behavioral expectations, monitoring student learning, providing appropriate levels of challenge and support, as well as providing constructive and timely feedback (Stroet et al., 2013). Teacher-involvement practices include getting to know students, demonstrating kindness, listening to students, and caring about students’ academic and personal success as well as being available to talk to students on an individual basis (Stroet et al., 2013). Teachers can foster positive, caring relationships and an autonomy-supportive classroom environment by tuning into students and modifying teaching based on student needs (attunement); supporting self-directed learning (supportiveness); creating warm, accepting, respectful classroom environments (relatedness); and helping students understand why behaviors are appropriate or inappropriate (gentle discipline; Reeve, 2016; Reeve & Jang, 2006). A recent study conducted by Kiefer and Pennington (2017) examined the influence of teacher need supportive teaching (autonomy support and structure) on young adolescents’ academic motivation, classroom engagement, school belonging, and achievement in one urban, diverse middle level school through the school year. The results indicated unique and interactive influences of teacher autonomy support (choice, respect, relevance) and structure (high expectations, monitoring) on later student adjustment and showed that gender moderated these relations (Kiefer & Pennington, 2017). High levels of autonomy support and structure were related to positive adjustment, but high levels of one aspect of need-supportive teaching was not sufficient for optimal adjustment. An implication for teachers is to tune into the unique needs of boys and girls in the classroom, to be aware how need-supportive practices are complementary, and to find ways to support students with multiple instructional practices (Reeve, 2006). Responsive teacher practices also include providing care and fun in learning (Adler, 2002; Cushman & Rogers, 2008; Kiefer & Ellerbrock, 2012; Wentzel, 1997) and implementing “warm demanding” teaching (Bondy & Ross, 2008). Teachers can promote caring relationships by modeling caring behavior for students (Noddings, 2005) as well as by generating genuine interest in the curriculum and activating prior knowledge (Cushman & Rogers, 2008). These practices— coupled with teacher characteristics that communicate high levels of involvement—help to promote an adolescent-centered community of care. Teachers may inadvertently work against a community of care if they react to common student motivational problems in the classroom (including a low sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness) with frustration, reducing student autonomy through removing privileges, or limiting meaningful interactions among teacher and classmates (Furrer, Skinner, & Pitzer, 2014). Middle level schools that encourage positive teacher-student relationships and support responsive teacher characteristics and practices are positioned to nurture an adolescent-centered community of care (Kiefer & Ellerbrock, 2012) that supports student motivation and adjustment in school. 168

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Teacher characteristics and instructional practices influence student motivation and adjustment in school. Kiefer, Ellerbrock, and Alley (2014) found that teacher-student relationships, teacher expectations, and responsive instructional practices support young adolescent motivation. Themes of this qualitative study included knowing, caring for, and connecting with students; communicating high expectations; engaging students in hands-on learning activities; and providing individualized learning supports as keys to supporting motivation. The findings indicated students perceived their motivation was supported when expectations and instructional practices were implemented within the context of high-quality teacher-student relationships. These findings support the notion that teacher characteristics and practices are critical to fostering young adolescent motivation and lend support to the significance of cultivating an adolescent-centered community of care at the middle level.

Peer Relationships Peer relationships play a central role in promoting an adolescent-centered community of care and supporting students’ motivation and adjustment in school (Kiefer et al., 2015; Rubin, Bukowski, & Laursen, 2009). High-quality peer relationships characterized by trust, effective communication, and a willingness to provide academic and emotional support help to foster young adolescent motivation and positive views of learning (Headden & McKay, 2015). Relationships with peers who model positive and responsible behaviors are key developmental assets and a cornerstone of building healthy communities for youth (Benson et al., 2012). This section discusses the increasing salience of peers during the middle grades, the role of peer academic and emotional support in promoting student motivation, and the role of teachers in promoting positive peer relationships.

Salience of Peers Peer relationships become increasingly salient (Cillessen, Schwartz, & Mayeux, 2011) and popularity peaks in importance for students during the middle grades (Cillessen & Rose, 2005). Peers can promote young adolescents’ motivation by meeting their basic psychological and developmental needs (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Eccles et al., 1993)—especially their needs for relatedness including acceptance, status, and respect (Rubin et al., 2009; Yeager et al., 2018). Specifically, youth can support relatedness by providing opportunities to talk and listen to each other, provide emotional support, share learning experiences, and develop a sense of mutual respect (Furrer et al., 2014). Peers can promote autonomy by understanding others’ perspectives, encouraging self-exploration, sharing ideas, and being responsive to others (Deci, La Guardia, Moller, Scheiner, & Ryan, 2006; Furrer et al., 2014). Peers can promote competence by giving and receiving constructive feedback, modeling academic skills, resolving conflicts, providing help, and developing shared academic goals and behavioral norms (Furrer et al., 2014). As students enter middle level schools, they are often concerned about fitting with perceived peer group norms (Galván, Spatzier, & Juvonen, 2011) and being cool (Bellmore, Villarreal, & Ho, 2011) as they navigate a larger, more complex peer system (Rubin et al., 2009). Peer norms increasingly value aggression and disengagement and devalue academic engagement in the middle grades (Bellmore et al., 2011; Bowker, Rubin, Buskirk-Cohen, Rose-Krasnor, & Booth-LaForce, 2010; Kiefer & Wang, 2016). Although negative peer influence is prevalent, positive peer influence is also present, and students have the ability to resist negative peer norms (Benson et al., 2012).

Peer Academic and Emotional Support Student perceptions of peer academic and emotional support are central to developing a community of care and promoting success in school (Anderman, 2003; Bishop & Pflaum, 2005; 169

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Goodenow, 1993). Peer support provides students with a sense that they can rely on others (Hamm & Faircloth, 2005) and a foundation for positive academic and social adjustment in school (Goodenow, 1993; Wentzel, Battle, Russell, & Looney, 2010). Peer academic support includes clarifying teacher directions, providing information, and comparing schoolwork to promote motivation and engagement (Hamm & Faircloth, 2005; Wentzel et al., 2010). Peer assistance with homework and studying supports young adolescents’ classroom engagement and school belonging (Kiefer et al., 2015; Nichols, 2008). Thus, peer academic support allows young adolescents to meet their needs for competence, to develop a sense of autonomy and shared responsibility with their academic work, and to engage in meaningful classroom tasks. Peer emotional support, including providing emotional support and security (Wentzel et al., 2010), is associated with motivation, engagement, and belonging (Kiefer et al., 2015). This type of peer support allows students to meet their needs for relatedness and to develop a sense of autonomy and shared responsibility within their social relationships. Together, academic and emotional support from peers provides a strong foundation for an adolescent-centered community of care and allows for learners to develop a strong, positive identity that values motivation and success in school.

The Role of Teachers Teachers can provide many opportunities for healthy peer relationships to foster a community of care that promotes motivation and allows youth to thrive (Benson et al., 2012). However, many middle level teachers are not aware of the impact high-quality relationships have on adolescent development and success in school, and positive peer relationships are not always promoted in practice (Davis, 2006). Teachers can directly support peer relations by enacting need-supportive teaching practices, including teacher involvement such as promoting liking and trust among classmates, treating students with care and affection, and being a dependable source of academic and emotional support (Furrer et al., 2014; Stroet et al., 2013). Teachers may unintentionally undermine positive peer relationships by engaging in rejecting, unpredictable, and coercive interactions (Furrer et al., 2014). How teachers react to peer motivational problems in the classroom can also shape peer relations and student motivation. For example, teachers may view all peer relations as a bad influence and not provide opportunities for the development of close peer relationships. Alternatively, teachers overly focused on peer status and friendships may provide preferential treatment and not provide an inclusive environment for all students (Stipek, 2002). An implication for middle level educators is to consider ways they can help young adolescents feel someone cares for them and promote student motivation by establishing and maintaining positive, high-quality, meaningful relationships with adults and peers (Headden & McKay, 2015). Teachers can also indirectly influence student motivation by shaping classroom and peer norms regarding academic effort and achievement (Hamm, Farmer, Lambert, & Gravelle, 2014). By being attuned to peer dynamics in the classroom, including peer norms and peer group peer affiliation, teachers can provide a more responsive learning environment for young adolescents (Hamm, Farmer, Dadisman, Gravelle, & Murray, 2011). An implication for middle level educators is to be aware of the ways they can directly support students through teacher involvement and indirectly support students by fostering positive peer norms. While most research has focused on teacher and peer support separately, Kiefer and associates’ (2015) mixed methods study found middle level teacher and peer support is both social and academic in nature and has important implications for student motivation, engagement, and belonging. The findings also indicated that teacher and peer support play a vital role in fostering a responsive learning environment that aids school adjustment. An important implication for educators is to understand how to promote teacher and peer academic and emotional support for 170

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young adolescents and the effects these supports may have on student academic motivation, engagement, and school belonging.

Conclusion: Future Directions and Implications for Young Adolescent Motivation Looking forward into the 21st century, middle level educators must consider how adolescentcentered communities of care may help foster student motivation and adjustment. In this section we discuss new directions for research and theory development of adolescent motivation in middle level education. To deepen understanding of the dynamic nature of motivation and ways to promote an adolescent-centered community of care, we make three key recommendations for middle level researchers: use a holistic and contextual approach; incorporate multiple research methods; and integrate research, practice, and policy through the implementation of researchbased practice. We conclude with a discussion of implications for researchers, practitioners, advocates, and adolescent learners.

A Holistic, Contextual Approach To study young adolescents’ motivation at school, we recommend using a holistic, contextual approach aligned with prior research (Roeser & Galloway, 2002; Yoon et al., 2015) through implementing an adolescent-centered community of care framework. This perspective includes understanding young adolescents’ changing academic, social, emotional, and psychological needs and how these needs are met within middle level schools (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Eccles & Roeser, 2011; Yoon et al., 2015). Middle level educators and researchers can use an adolescent-centered community of care as an integrated, holistic framework to advance understanding of the role that school organizational structures, teachers, and peers play in shaping the development of young adolescent motivation. We also recommend using an inclusive approach to capture the educational experiences of all students and to develop a more holistic, diverse approach to care theory (Roberts, 2010; Tosolt, 2009). Student academic motivation in urban, ethnically diverse school contexts has been under-examined, especially in the middle grades (Daniels & Arapostathis, 2005; Matsumura, Slater, & Crosson, 2008). Additional research is needed to better understand the intersectionality of gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, culture, and socioeconomic status and how they shape adolescents’ motivation (Penner & Saperstein, 2013). Researchers also need to learn more about the motivational experiences of students from underserved communities (e.g., minority students, students with exceptionalities, and language minority students) and youth who do not fit into discrete social categories (e.g., multiracial, gendernonconforming, and transgender youth; Dunham & Olson, 2016). Using an inclusive approach may provide an opportunity to understand diverse students’ motivational experiences in school and to find ways to foster an adolescent-centered community of care among students from under-represented groups. This may also provide insight into understudied topics related to young adolescent motivation and diversity (e.g., equity, social justice, and discrimination; Brinegar, 2015). Promoting equity and social justice as well as identifying factors that lead to discrimination is a critical yet under-explored area in middle level research on motivation (Brinegar, 2015) and is central to promoting an adolescent-centered community of care and transforming the educational experiences of young adolescents.

Multiple Research Methods We recommend using multiple research methods to further investigate young adolescent motivation through an adolescent-centered community of care framework. Mixed methods and interdisciplinary collaboration are needed in middle level research, as are studies that seek triangulation across 171

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quantitative and qualitative methods (Lerner, Lerner, De Stefanis, & Apfel, 2001; Yoon et al., 2015). Regarding quantitative research, there is a need for more multivariate and multilevel designs that examine multiple aspects of the individual and school environment (Eccles & Roeser, 2011; Lerner et al., 2001). Longitudinal data are needed to tease apart reciprocal influences on the development of young adolescents’ motivation and to determine individual motivational trajectories over time. Person-centered techniques can allow researchers to examine how subgroups of young adolescents experience a community of care that is similar to a case-like approach used by educational practitioners (Roeser & Galloway, 2002). Additionally, qualitative research that incorporates student voices is needed in order to capture youth’s perceptions of a community of care and the complexities of young adolescents’ motivation at school (Daniels & Arapostathis, 2005; Kaplan, Katz, & Flum, 2012; Kiefer et al., 2014; Schmakel, 2008). Including longitudinal qualitative studies that target student voices, especially those from underserved communities, would provide a more inclusive perspective of adolescents’ experiences of school as a community of care. Studies that incorporate change-sensitive methods are necessary to examine how young adolescents experience motivation and a community of care as they move through the school day as well as the role of school organizational structures, teachers, and peers in shaping student experiences in school. Recent research has used novel research methods to examine adolescents’ every day and real-time motivation. Martin and colleagues (2015) collected twenty high school boys’ real-time motivation at school using a mobile device, including three ratings throughout the day, five days a week, or four weeks (60 possible time points per student). They found most variability in motivation is within individual students and that it is not the time of day, but what is happening at a specific point in the day that affects motivation. These results reinforce the notion that motivation is dynamic and highly contextualized, and that we cannot assume young adolescents are singularly motivated through the day. Furthermore, Wallace and colleagues videotaped classroom instruction and explored middle grades students’ responses to cue-based videos to develop a richer conceptualization of how teachers promote autonomy-supportive classrooms (Wallace & Sung, 2017; Wallace, Sung, & Williams, 2014). Their findings provide insight into students’ interpretations of the motivational significance of teachers’ autonomy-supportive teaching (i.e., meaningful choice, relevance, promoting independent thinking, and open communication) that have not been captured by previous survey-based research. Together, these findings support the use of more sensitive measures and have implications for school-based interventions with a focus on the person and activity as well as conditions and teacher practices that promote motivation. Using more change-sensitive measures and multiple research methods may provide promise into understanding the dynamic nature of adolescents’ experience of a caring community and motivation in middle school.

Research-Based Practice Third, we recommend using research-based practice as a way to implement an adolescent-centered community of care in schools and to integrate research, practice, and policy in middle level education. Research-based practice includes the use of rigorous research methods to improve middle level research and practice (Yoon et al., 2015). There is an increased interest in applied research in the area of adolescent development, including action research and community-based participatory research, applied developmental science, translational research, and improvement science (Hamilton, 2015; Lerner, Jacobs, & Wertlieb, 2005). These applied approaches can support research-based practice by allowing researchers and educators to collaboratively identify youth issues or an area needing improvement within a school community, design and conduct research, as well as make recommendations for practice and policy. Educational practitioners bring with them a deep knowledge of the local context and professional wisdom that informs the research process, as they learn 172

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new things about their students’ motivation and maintaining a community of care every day. Educational researchers bring with them a research-based understanding of early adolescence and a deep knowledge of the research process that allows practitioners to engage in high-quality research and research-based practice (Hamilton, 2015). Educational researchers and practitioners can engage in collaborative, applied research to investigate problems, issues, and challenges situated within the middle school context (Yoon et al., 2015). Lastly, we recommend ongoing training and professional development for researchers and practitioners in order to better understand how to establish and maintain an adolescent-centered community of care and support young adolescents’ motivation at the middle level. University training programs may consider adopting a scientist-practitioner model to train future educational researchers as well as a scholarly practitioner model to re-envision professional practice preparation (Perry, 2016) in the field of middle level education. Training models that emphasize research-based practice as a way to investigate pressing educational issues may hold promise for developing ongoing collaborations among educational researchers and practitioners to improve motivational research and practice as well as optimize young adolescents’ motivation in the middle grades. Traditional teacher education programs may not provide sufficient training, as a 2014 study conducted by the National Council on Teacher Quality found that among 105 programs, 57% did not address motivation (Greenberg, Putman, & Walsh, 2014). The findings mirror certification standards as only 24 states mention student motivation as a required area of training (Greenberg et al., 2014); there are also often few avenues for teachers to gain relevant knowledge and skills on the job (Headden & McKay, 2015). To implement sustainable motivation-enhancing, developmentally responsive strategies, clinically rich pre-service education programs and in-service professional development is needed to provide educators with ongoing support.

Implications for Researchers, Practitioners, Advocates, and Youth The research discussed in this chapter has implications for researchers, practitioners, and advocates of young adolescent learners. First, the role of the school in fostering a caring community that supports student motivation needs increased attention and research, including interactions with teachers and peers in the classroom and school levels. Understanding individuals’ experiences within a community of care, as well as perceptions of the broader community of care at the classroom and school level, is needed. Second, the teacher plays a vital role in fostering an adolescent-centered community of care where students’ needs are met, teachers and students care about and support another, and individuals feel a sense of belonging within a specific classroom, organization, or group. Teachers play a unique role in fostering caring environments and helping youth learn how to be successful, active participants in these environments. Third, it is necessary to go beyond the classroom and school to develop a comprehensive community change effort to strengthen adolescent development (Benson et al., 2012). Adult mentors and advocates do not necessarily need to be within the school context; adults within the community may play a vital role in supporting young adolescents’ needs and enhancing their motivation and success in school (Jackson & Davis, 2000; NMSA, 2010; Yoon et al., 2015). Lastly, there is a need to integrate middle level research, policy, and practice that advocate for and support the needs of young adolescents. To date, most middle level research has not translated into policy at the state or national level in the United States. Additionally, current middle level practice often differs from or is in opposition to research-based, effective practices for young adolescent learners, especially in regard to responsive organizational structures and teacher practices. If the goal of middle level research is to inform policy and practice, a stronger connection between these three things— research, policy, and practice—is necessary. 173

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13 CLASSROOM BEHAVIOR MANAGEMENT IN MIDDLE LEVEL EDUCATION A Self-Regulatory Approach to Empower Teachers and Adolescent Learners Karen L. Peel

Middle level education spans the primary school and the secondary school settings and represents an important stage in students’ development. During this phase of schooling, students are moving from childhood towards adolescence and adulthood within generally two systemically different school environments. In this chapter, new insights for the primary–secondary schooling transition years are outlined that acknowledge the relevance of promoting students’ self-regulated learning (SRL) during this stage of their development (Farrington et al., 2012). The multidimensional theory of SRL has become a focus of educational research (Bembenutty, Kitsantas, & Cleary, 2013; Panadero, 2017; Pintrich, 2000; Usher & Schunk, 2018; Zimmerman & Schunk, 2011), as learning has been recognized as active and constructive processes that are driven by cognitive, motivational, and social dimensions. Against this backdrop, the significant issues influencing policy, procedures, and practices in education are considered in relation to teachers’ instruction, classroom management, and control of classrooms for young adolescent learners. Empowering students to take responsibility for, and control of, their learning is a philosophical approach to classroom behavior management that requires a shift in thinking from policy makers and the teaching profession. Professional philosophies about teaching and learning distinguish how teachers view their roles and the roles of students in their classrooms (Landau, 2009). A proactive teaching and learning perspective offers an alternative pathway for teachers to manage classrooms, with the aim of improving student learning opportunities as opposed to controlling their behavior for compliance. For instance, a self-regulatory approach to classroom behavior management moves the teachers’ roles beyond maintaining order in the classroom (Alderman & MacDonald, 2015) and toward supporting students to develop as self-regulated learners. Teachers provide students with opportunities to take control of their own learning and behavior and thereby gain partners for managing a positive classroom in which both students and teachers are empowered for lifetime learning. This chapter recognizes and reviews middle level education and adolescent development to discuss the advancement of a teaching and learning philosophy that supports the needs of young

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adolescents during this phase of their education. Literature is presented as evidence of the value in promoting a self-regulatory approach to classroom behavior management that empowers teachers to teach and empowers adolescent students to learn as they share the responsibility for maintaining the positive classroom environment. For teachers to enact such an approach in middle level education, a framework has been developed from research that was conducted with teachers in primary and secondary school settings of Years 5 to 9 in Australia (Peel, 2018). Principles for practically guiding teachers’ design and management of classroom environments, learning experiences, and assessments (Nelson & Kift, 2005) are transformed to frame key teaching elements that describe how teachers provide opportunities for students’ SRL within social environments.

Recognizing Middle Level Education and Adolescent Development The recognition of middle level education as a significant phase of learning has emerged from an understanding of the changes young adolescents experience when transitioning from primary to secondary school (Pendergast, 2017a). The term young adolescents refers to the developmental characteristics of students in the age group of 10 to 15 years (Bahr, 2017). As students enter this challenging developmental stage, the stakes for academic performance increase, and their choices can have lifelong impact (Farrington et al., 2012). During this phase of learning, young adolescents are immersed generally in cognitive, emotional, and physical changes that can place a substantial burden on them as they are developing a set of moral beliefs, and are acquiring independence and autonomy (Ellis, Marsh, & Craven, 2005). These developmental changes occur at the same time that students enter the secondary school system where there are also significant social and academic changes to the familiar learning environment of the primary school setting (Mackenzie, McMaugh, & O’Sullivan, 2012). Changes that can impact how well students adjust to meet their learning needs include: the physical structure of school, lesson timetabling, teaching practices, academic challenges, rules and behavioral expectations, assessment demands, and the interactions that students have with their peers and teachers (Ganeson & Ehrich, 2009; Mackenzie et al., 2012; Manning & Bucher, 2012; Martin & Sass, 2010). Of concern is the reality that the transition phase from primary to secondary school has been described by parents and teachers and in the media as a “time of storm and stress” (Aronson & Good, 2002, p. 299), as a “period of turmoil” (Knipe, 2015, p. 227) and, in terms of engagement and achievement, as the “middle school plunge” (West & Schwerdt, 2012, p. 63). The new expectations and requirements that challenge students’ established routines, and that require their adaptability and resilience, may undermine their learning motivation (Grolnick & RafteryHelmer, 2015; Martin, Way, Bobis, & Anderson, 2015). Accordingly, Pendergast (2017a) highlighted the “predictable, measurable decline in student achievement in the middle years” (p. 4) as a significant challenge to contemplate what quality teaching means in the context of meeting the needs of adolescent students. Likewise, Eccles and Roeser (2011) reported that “a substantial number of adolescents become less interested in and less engaged in their education as they move into and through secondary school, leading to excessively high rates of school failure and drop out” (p. 233). In all, students’ disengagement from their academic learning can have a profound effect on their learning progress and behavioral responses and on the overall classroom environment. Despite these concerns, research conducted in Australia by Mackenzie et al. (2012) proposed that students leaving the primary school setting and entering the secondary school system have both positive and negative perceptions of the changes they experience. As such, quality teaching in the later primary and early secondary schooling years has been identified as a “critical key to

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transition, as it engages and motivates students to reach their potential and helps to minimize the negative effects of transition” (Pendergast, 2017b, p. 100). Enhancing the development of the middle level education as a phase of middle schooling was documented in the Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals (Ministerial Council on Education Employment Training and Youth Affairs [MCEETYA], 2008) as one of eight areas for action to achieve the goal for all young Australians to become “successful learners, confident and creative individuals, and active and informed citizens” (p. 7). The connection is significant between the identified capabilities of self-regulated learners and the characteristics of successful learners, which are prolific in the Australian educational policy documents (e.g., Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2018; Middle Years of Schooling Association (MYSA), 2008). More broadly, lifelong learning from a political perspective has been a focus of European educational policies since 2000 (Lüftenegger et al., 2012) as it “encompasses formal and informal learning aimed at personal fulfilment, active citizenship, flexibility of employability and social inclusion” (Adams, 2007, p. 149). Distinctively, the ideals of successful learning and lifelong learning were used synonymously in the literature with SRL (Pendergast et al., 2005; Schloemer & Brenan, 2006). Lifelong learning qualities depict the strategic actions of active learners in their pursuit to acquire knowledge and skills (Pendergast et al., 2005; Schunk, 2005). Similarly, theories of SRL describe learners controlling their thoughts and actions to achieve goals by responding to the demands of tasks across wide-ranging environments (Perry, Mazabel, Dantzer, & Winne, 2018). According to Aspin and Chapman (2001), learners with these qualities are considered to be decidedly employable as they are aware of their capabilities, and they are able to direct their learning and adapt to changing situations. Undoubtedly, middle level education has been targeted as a critical stage of development in adolescents’ lives for effective lifelong learning. Jackson and Davis (2000) referred to this stage of students’ development as a turning point that depends on their capabilities to manage their own learning, make decisions, and meet their needs. In essence, teachers in middle level education play vital roles in creating classrooms that promote opportunities for students to be active learners and who develop a reliable set of strategies, assess their progress, and persist in increasingly complex academic tasks as they proceed through school and beyond (Farrington et al., 2012).

Reviewing Teaching and Learning Philosophy for Middle Level Education In Australia, initial reforms related to education for young adolescents were published as a discussion of practices in a report entitled In the Middle: Schooling for Young Adolescents (Schools Council, 1993). The topics in the report included young adolescents’ development, the structure of the middle school curriculum, the learning needs of young adolescents, and the expected outcomes of middle schooling. To address these considerations, Barratt (1998) presented findings on a project that was undertaken nationally entitled Shaping Middle Schooling in Australia: A Report of the National Middle Schooling Project. Middle schooling was described as “bridging the conventional primary/secondary divide” (Barratt, 1998, p. 1). The collective view of the research highlighted the importance of appropriate principles to recognize middle schooling practices that meet young adolescents’ specific needs. In 2008, the Middle Years of Schooling Association (MYSA) released a position paper entitled Middle Schooling: People, Practices and Places (MYSA, 2008). The MYSA position paper described a middle schooling philosophy as being “an intentional approach to teaching and learning that is responsive and appropriate to the full range of needs, interests, and achievements of middle years students in formal and informal schooling contexts” (p. 1). Fostering young adolescents’ learning

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capabilities is identified in middle level education literature as a topic relevant to current Australian and international educational policy, research, and debate (Howell, Faulkner, Jones, & Carpenter, 2018; J-F, Swabey, Pullen, Getenet, & Dowden, 2018; Lüftenegger et al., 2012; Pendergast, 2017a). Hence, there is a need for initiatives that articulate a comprehensive range of teaching practices to meet the specific demands of young adolescents. It is argued that failure to understand and meet the learning needs of adolescent students can lead to their disengagement from schooling that is reflected often in poor learning achievement and unproductive behavior. The literature advocates philosophical approaches to adolescent education that are in tune with enabling students to gradually accept responsibility for their learning (Egeberg & McConney, 2017). Young adolescents desire active learning experiences to seek and enjoy challenges (Dweck, Walton, & Cohen, 2014) and to satisfy their curiosity (Engel, 2013). They need to believe in their capability to meet with success (Farrington et al., 2012). In addition, young adolescents yearn to belong to a community of learners as they search to discover their self-identity (Dweck et al., 2014). Substantial evidence confirms that teachers play key roles in providing opportunities that assist young adolescents to meet their learning needs whilst developing their SRL capabilities in middle level education (Farrington et al., 2012; Grolnick & Raftery-Helmer, 2015). Furthermore, Freiberg and Lamb (2009) emphasized the movement from teacher to person-centered classrooms that transpires as a “gradual progression of building trust and developing shared responsibility for the management of the classroom” (p. 100).

Linking Classroom Behavior Management and SRL Effective and ineffective classroom behavior management impacts the flow of teaching and teacher–student relationships and, hence, the quality of students’ learning (Eisenman, Edwards, & Cushman, 2015). Interestingly, there is much literature devoted to understanding classroom behavior management from a students’ compliance paradigm despite evidence that has shown “control and quick fixes” are not effective (Egeberg, McConney, & Price, 2016, p. 12) and often exacerbate behavioral problems in schools (Maguire, Ball, & Braun, 2010). Even so, approaches to classroom behavior management that are aimed at controlling students’ actions continue to pervade educational policy and to influence teachers’ practices in classrooms. This is evidenced in the research about students’ behavior in schools by Briesch and Briesch (2015) who reported, “Although positive behavior change has been documented, a central limitation of teacherdirected interventions is that behavior remains externally managed” (p. 45). In a recent report, Developing Behaviour Management Content for Initial Teacher Training, Bennett (2016) proposed recommendations for initial teacher education to frame the ways that pre-service teachers in the United Kingdom were to be prepared in the area of classroom behavior management. The recommendations in the report highlighted the “3Rs of the behaviour curriculum” (Bennett, 2016, p. 5): routines, relationships, and response strategies by teachers. Yet, there arguably was a serious omission of a fourth R: teaching students to take responsibility for their learning. Similarly, in the United States of America, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) identified five key strategies for effective classroom management that include rules, routines, praise, consequences for misbehavior and active student engagement (Greenberg, McKee, & Walsh, 2013). Once again, the ideal of students sharing the responsibility for their learning was not included as a future priority for effective classroom behavior management though it is supported by research. The evidence presented illustrates the significance of the relationship between the provision of opportunities for SRL and a proactive approach to classroom behavior management. Accordingly,

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the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST) requires teachers to plan lessons for effective student learning within supportive and safe learning environments (AITSL, 2017). Egeberg et al. (2016) reviewed the research about effective classroom management in relation to the expected teaching standards and established the following: It is evident from both the research and the standards that knowing and understanding young people, their needs and underlying motivations for their behaviours will help to inform a teacher’s instructional and behavioural approach to classroom management and should therefore also inform initial teacher programs in their approaches to effectively teaching classroom management. (p. 14) Research findings substantiate the enhancement of students’ SRL as a conception of classroom behavior management to support a shift in school policy thinking, teacher professional understanding, and initial teacher education (Alderman & MacDonald, 2015; Bear, 2015; Briesch & Briesch, 2015; Kohn, 2006; Martin et al., 2016; McCaslin et al., 2006; McDonald, 2013; Perry, Hutchinson, & Thauberger, 2008).

Articulating a Self-Regulatory Approach to Classroom Behavior Management Three fundamentals are proposed to clarify how self-regulated learners engage in constructing and rationalizing goals and then in accept responsibility for monitoring cognition, motivation, and behavior to realize their capabilities (Peel, 2018). The SRL fundamentals are represented as the rationale for learning, responsibility for learning, and capability for learning. These fundamentals have been developed from the different theoretical perspectives of SRL to provide a comprehensive view of how students activate, control, and reflect constructively on their learning. When students rationalize their learning, they gain an interest in the task and set learning goals to maintain their purposeful engagement (Renninger & Hidi, 2016). Students who accept responsibility for the learning are personally aware of, and are in control of, their actions to activate task strategies, monitor their progress, and adapt skills to apply in different learning situations (Haggard & Tsakiris, 2009). As SRL is a cyclical process, students’ perceptions of their capability for the learning are influenced directly by their previous experiences and their expectation of future learning success (Bandura, 1997). From an understanding of what is fundamental for students to self-regulate their learning, key teaching elements for SRL have been identified through research conducted in Australian primary school and secondary school classrooms and with teachers of young adolescent students (Peel, 2018). The key teaching elements were presented in the findings from the thematic analysis of data that were collected through teacher interviews and classroom observations. The SRL fundamentals were significant for the data analysis as they were implemented to theoretically inform and describe how the teachers in the study provided opportunities for the students to selfregulate their learning. In the following discussion, five review principles—design, engagement, capabilities for life, diversity, and assessment (adapted from Duncan et al., 2009; Nelson & Kift, 2005) have been embraced to organize the research findings as 20 key teaching elements. The review principles explain how the teachers designed experiences to activate learning, engaged students in worthwhile, enjoyable and interactive learning, contributed to the development of the students’ lifetime learning capabilities, responded to learning differences, and communicated feedback on learning progress. The review principles and their embedded key teaching elements are presented with

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evidence from the literature to support how they contribute to the framing of a self-regulatory approach to classroom behavior management for middle level education.

The Design Principle for SRL The design principle, as a self-regulatory approach for planning and delivering curriculum to activate learning, includes the following elements: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Challenging, goal-orientated learning; Relevant topics of interest; Communicated expectations and procedures; and Teacher-directed instructions, scaffolded learning, and practice time.

To plan and deliver curriculum that activates student learning, challenging goal-orientated tasks are designed to acknowledge what is to be achieved by the end of the lesson (Marzano, 2007). Stating the goals does not necessarily mean that they will be completed always in that lesson. However, the goals describe the skills and understandings that guide the learning experiences and are to be reflected on at the end of the lesson so students feel challenged and yet successful in what they do achieve (Manning & Bucher, 2012). For students to work toward these goals, teachers design learning that connects with topics that are of interest to the young adolescents and, most importantly, with topics that do not exclude students from connecting with the learning. Their interest in the topics triggers their curiosity and challenges them to investigate further (Renninger & Hidi, 2016). When students emotionally connect to the content they are more likely to identify a purpose for the learning (Cooper, 2014). Furthermore, to manage classroom environments that are conducive to learning, teachers communicate the expectations and the procedures that enable students to make responsible decisions about their behaviors for learning (Rogers, 2015). They provide a social environment of predictability and certainty for young adolescents to interact in a safe place with reduced feelings of misapprehension and anxiety. Finally, varied levels of instruction, from teacher-directed to student-led, are designed to release the responsibility for the learning gradually to the students (Vygotsky, 1978). Effective teacherdirected instruction is designed to connect the learning goals to the newly imparted information through meaningful teacher–student interactions (Rupley, Blair, & Nichols, 2009). Likewise, adolescent students develop their capabilities through the scaffolds that are designed to offer different levels of structured learning support, and they gain confidence through the provision of multiple opportunities to practice what they have learned (Duckworth, Grant, Loew, Oettingen, & Gollwitzer, 2011).

The Engagement Principle for SRL The engagement principle, as a self-regulatory approach to classroom learning that targets worthwhile, enjoyable, and interactive learning, includes the following elements: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Accessible resources; Feedback that celebrates accomplishments; Meaningful experiences and elements of fun; and Collaborative learning with groupings that suit the task.

When teachers design and implement instruction from a curriculum, the nature of lessons will present different learning situations in which the students are in variable motivational states of

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involvement. Students are influenced by a range of desires that internalize learning and external enablers intended to promote learning engagement. For instance, access to authentic resources stimulates students’ curiosity and enables students to see a practical relevance to the application of the learning (Pendergast & Main, 2017). Active student-centered learning is supported by multimodal resources that provide rich sensory input (Darling-Hammond, 2008). Students view, hear, construct, create, interact with, and manipulate these resources for learning goal achievement and for learning enjoyment (Farrington et al., 2012). Accordingly, adolescent students’ feelings of accomplishment over challenges and enjoyment of their learning experiences sustain their learning engagement when they are acknowledged through positive feedback about their progress (Eccles & Wigfield, 2002). Celebration of successes within a collaborative learning environment becomes part of the culture that should be a routine classroom event to enhance students’ feelings of belonging (Marzano, 2010). Likewise, challenging, meaningful, and fun learning potentially increases students’ internal motivation to participate and engage (Csíkszentmihályi, 2008) and reduces unproductive behavior in the classroom. Students’ engagement in, or disengagement from, learning directly influences their behavior and their future attempts to learn (Clark, 2012). Finally, the establishment of trusting relationships for collaborative learning, at a time when adolescents place increasing importance on their peer group relationships, instills a sense of belonging (Dweck et al., 2014). It is essential that the students feel emotionally secure when engaging in collaborative learning (Manning & Bucher, 2012). When collaborating to construct knowledge, the nature of the task often dictates the social dynamics of paired, small group and whole class configurations (Perry & Rahim, 2011). Indeed, how students feel in their classroom environment is an important precursor of their academic engagement and achievement (Kutsyuruba, Klinger, & Hussain, 2015).

The Capabilities for Life Principle for SRL The capabilities for life principle for a self-regulatory approach to classroom learning includes the following elements: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Modelled learning strategies for emulation; Structured learning for visible thinking; Real-world transferable skills; and Purposeful learning constructed from prior knowledge.

Teaching adolescents to become lifetime learners depends significantly on their development of effective learning strategies. Opportunities to observe teachers’ modelling of learning strategies increases adolescent students’ self-awareness of how they are learning, and emulation of the strategies can improve their capabilities to meet academic goals (Duckworth et al., 2011). For example, teachers may model information seeking strategies by demonstrating to students how to be discerning about what is relevant and irrelevant information. Additionally, young adolescents are gradually gaining the capabilities to engage in more abstract operations (Manning & Bucher, 2012), so it is important that they are aware of, and can visualize, their thinking. Visible thinking is enhanced when teachers structure learning using, for example, graphic organizers, templates, and mind maps. Such structures provide students with different modes to demonstrate their thinking and offer a language to verbalize their strategies (Farrington et al., 2012). The application of structures develops the students’ awareness of what is being learned and how it is being learned for transference of learning to different situations (Flavell, 1979).

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Furthermore, authentic learning motivates students to apply their skills as it situates the learning tasks in contexts with real-world relevance (Herrington, Reeves, & Oliver, 2014). For instance, problem-solving and decision making are lifelong learning skills when they are developed during participation in tasks that encourage students to look for out-of-school applications. Finally, purposeful learning that links to the students’ prior learning clarifies to the students the value of the learning (Reeve, 2009). Students’ curiosity to learn more about what they already know emanates from their desire to explore learning that is relevant to their lives and assists them to feel capable and responsible for their learning.

The Diversity Principle for SRL The diversity principle, as a self-regulatory approach for responding to learning differences and implementing timely interventions, includes the following elements: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Respectful communities for social development and wellbeing; Adjustments of learning processes; Modifications to product styles to demonstrate learning; and Interventions that safeguard future accomplishments.

There is tremendous diversity in a class of adolescent student learners that requires teachers’ consideration when establishing and maintaining positive classroom environments. Establishing a respectful community culture, recognizing and responding to learning differences, and implementing timely learning interventions are important antecedents of students’ academic achievement and their social and emotional wellbeing (Kutsyuruba et al., 2015). Developing a respectful community of learners involves the teachers and the adolescent students taking responsibility to manage their classroom proactively and collaborating to construct knowledge (Hadwin, Järvelä, & Miller, 2011; Martin et al., 2016). Social interactions and conducive relationships are essential for collaborative tasks (Perry & Rahim, 2011). Hence, social skills need to be explicitly taught for all to feel comfortable. For example, adolescent students need to understand that their opinions are important and need to know when to voice them, but they also need to acknowledge that other peoples’ opinions are to be respected. Furthermore, differentiation of learning includes creating a learning environment that enables all students to feel an expectation of success and to have opportunities to develop capabilities to achieve challenging goals. Adjustments to teaching and learning processes are based on knowing the students’ strengths and needs, so that the instructional level is appropriately challenging for the individual and, hence, there are options for students to choose (Main, 2017). When teachers address variations in students’ interests they spark their curiosity and their readiness and capabilities for learning (Tomlinson & Murphy, 2015). Likewise, modifications to the style of learning products are made by teachers to accommodate a wide array of capabilities (Tomlinson & Murphy, 2015). Product modifications maintain high expectations and appropriate challenges for all students whilst providing opportunities for students to demonstrate their capabilities within the optimal zones for their learning success (Vygotsky, 1978). Finally, it is not surprising that teachers’ knowledge of their adolescent students’ learning capabilities enables implementation of timely interventions that safeguard their future accomplishments. These interventions are designed to ensure students maintain consistent learning growth and sustain readiness for future learning engagement (Tomlinson & Murphy, 2015).

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The Assessment Principle for SRL The assessment principle, as a self-regulatory approach for judging and communicating learning progress to generate feedback, includes the following elements: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Questions that monitor and clarify understanding; Goal-focused feedback; Tools to self-assess strategy use and time management; and Acknowledgement of learning growth.

Assessment becomes integral to the learning culture when it is interwoven with teaching and learning (Wyatt-Smith, Adie, van der Kleij, & Cumming, 2017). For instance, teachers can continually monitor the students’ learning progress through questioning, and students are provided with opportunities to clarify their understanding (Anderman, Andrzejewski, & Allen, 2011). Alternatively, providing students with opportunities to ask questions about what they are learning challenges them to express their genuine interest and motivation to inquire into the topic (Jirout & Klahr, 2012). Furthermore, teachers’ judgements and communicated feedback provide powerful indicators for students to understand and appreciate what they have done well and what they need to do

A Self-regulatory Approach to Classroom Behavior Management Design • Challenging goal orientated learning; • Relevant topics of interest; • Communicated expectations and procedures; and • Teacher-directed instructions, scaffolded learning and practice time.

Engagement • Accessible resources; • Meaningful experiences and elements of fun; • Feedback that celebrates accomplishments; and • Collaborative learning with groupings that suit the task.

Capabilities-for-life • Modelled learning strategies for emulation; • Structured learning for awareness of thinking; • Real-world transferable skills; and • Purposeful learning constructed from prior knowledge.

Diversity • Respectful communities for social development and wellbeing; • Adjustments of learning processes; • Modifications to product styles to demonstrate learning; • Interventions that safeguard future accomplishments.

Assessment • Questions that monitor and clarify their understanding; • Goal focused feedback; • Tools to self-assess strategy use and time management; and • Acknowledgement of learning growth.

Figure 13.1 A self-regulatory approach to classroom behavior management.

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for learning progression (Wyatt-Smith & Klenowski, 2014). Goal-focused learning offers a structure for teachers to provide feedback (Marzano, 2010). Students can use this feedback to monitor their progress. Likewise, teachers are responsive to this feedback through their differentiation of instruction and resources to meet the students’ needs. Table 13.1 A Review Tool for a Self-regulatory Approach to Classroom Behavior Management Review principles

Key teaching elements for a self-regulatory approach to classroom behavior management

Design: Plan and deliver curriculum to activate learning.

1. Can the students identify an understanding goal and a skills goal that provide learning challenges? 2. What is of relevance and interest to the students about the topic and skills they are learning? 3. Do the students know the expectations and the procedures to follow? 4. What teaching instructions are implemented to teach explicitly and to scaffold the students’ learning of the content and the skills? When is there time provided for learning practice?

Engagement: Target worthwhile, enjoyable, interactive learning.

5. What resources are made assessable for the students to select and share for authentic learning? 6. When and how is feedback given to the students to celebrate their accomplishments? 7. What is meaningful about the learning experiences that the students would find enjoyable? 8. Is the task suited to individual, paired, small group or whole class work? When are the students asked to collaborate with others to share their learning?

Capabilities for life: Contribute to lifetime learning capabilities.

9. What learning strategies are modelled for the students to emulate? 10. What structures provide students with modes to demonstrate their thinking, and with a language to verbalize their strategies? 11. What real-world transferable skills are the students learning? 12. How does the students’ prior knowledge link with and offer purpose for what they are learning?

Diversity: Respond to learning differences and implement timely learning interventions.

13. What ethos underpins the respectful community culture for cooperative and shared learning? How are the social skills required for the task taught explicitly for students to interact with others? 14. How are the learning processes adjusted for the individual students to participate in learning? 15. How are the final product styles modified for the individual students to demonstrate their learning? 16. What interventions are planned for future implementation to safeguard students’ learning accomplishments?

Assessment: Judge and communicate learning progress to generate feedback.

17. What questions are asked to monitor what is understood and what needs clarification? When are students provided with opportunities to ask questions about what they are learning? 18. When is feedback provided for the students to judge their progressive achievement of the understanding and skills goals? 19. What tool provides a set of criteria for the students to self-assess their strategy use and to manage their time? 20. How and when is feedback on personal learning growth communicated to students?

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Additionally, teachers generally assess students’ work to a set of criteria that reflects the understanding and skills goals. This should be shared with the students so they can be primed about what they are to do, informed to manage their time, and positioned to self-assess their progress. Prompting adolescent students to complete self-assessments enables them to accept the responsibility to practice self-reflection and to critique the applied learning strategies to determine which worked for them (Labuhn, Zimmerman, & Hasselhorn, 2010). Finally, the basic function of assessment focuses on determining and communicating the academic progress of what students know and can do already and what they need to learn. The positive outcomes of assessment include the students’ awareness about their learning growth and their acceptance of responsibility for their sustained engagement (Paris & Paris, 2001). Figure 13.1 presents the review principles and key teaching elements for a self-regulatory approach to classroom behavior management. The key teaching elements for a self-regulatory approach to classroom behavior management could be practically employed by teachers in middle level education settings to make informed decisions about implementing such an approach. The key teaching elements have been transformed into questions in Table 13.1 that are intended to assist teachers to identify alignments with their practice and to provide suggestions for their professional learning.

Conclusion Middle level education represents a time of potential transformation for young adolescents as they move toward adulthood, and it exemplifies an important stage of development for students to act, think, and feel as self-regulated learners. Teachers play prevalent roles in managing classroom environments and behaviors for learning. Yet, there are diverse views about students’ behavior in schools and about the many ways in which students’ behavior can be regulated. Even the misconception of the term regulation conjures up an image of behavior being controlled externally. This chapter is intended to extend understanding of the knowledge of how teachers promote students’ SRL in middle level education. Teachers’ perceptions of the learning needs of their young adolescent students, the reasons for their behaviors, and the influences that impact these behaviors drive the teachers’ subsequent actions and responses. When teachers follow a pathway of proactive teaching for SRL in their classrooms, they provide a pathway for their students to develop academically, socially, and emotionally in school and life. A starting point for middle level educators is to investigate how they share the responsibility for, and control of, behavior and learning with their adolescent students. The theoretically evidenced and practice-based framework articulated in this chapter is specifically designed for promoting adolescents’ SRL in middle level education. Furthermore, the framework has been transformed so it can be implemented as a tool that empowers teachers to review their classroom practices. Significantly, the framework offers a self-regulatory approach to classroom behavior management that has the potential to positively impact school policies and procedures in middle level education.

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14 IT’S A HUMAN RIGHT! YOUNG ADOLESCENTS NEED TO PLAY IN THE MIDDLE GRADES Bea Bailey

Many educational leaders throughout our global community realize the manifold benefits of play in elementary schools and make provisions for young children to have recess or structured play time during the school day. Elementary teachers often encourage forms of play throughout the school day as a way to enable their students to experiment with and consolidate understandings within various disciplinary studies while they also work with them to develop important psychomotor and social skills. Some elementary school teachers can even easily summarize the essence of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) Article 31 that insists upon the child’s right to play: 1. States Parties recognize the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts. 2. States Parties shall respect the right of the child to participate fully in cultural and artistic life and shall encourage the provision of appropriate and equal opportunities for cultural, artistic, recreational and leisure activity (United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights [UNHCHR], 1989). These educational leaders understand the need for and advocate within their realms of influence for the child’s right to play. What many influential global educational leaders do not realize, however, is that this UN CRC Article refers to children who range in age from birth to just under 18. While some international advocates for play in organizations like the International Play Association (IPA) have perhaps over-emphasized the very young child’s right to play to the exclusion of early adolescents, they have increasingly become more adamant in stressing the importance of play for children aged 11 to 15. Emerging researchers who study early adolescent play within the wide umbrella of wellness or as it relates to social or cognitive development offer compelling reasons for middle grades leaders throughout the world to take seriously the manifold affordances that play offers these young people.

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As will be shared in the sections that follow, several recent studies since 2000 offer support for the benefits for play among young adolescents. Most of these, however, relate to an overall theory of play and do not address young adolescent play (YAP) specifically. Others, in contrast, focus on the overall general emotional, mental, or physical developmental benefits of play but again they tend to focus on development throughout the life span or among children within varying age ranges but do not separate out young adolescents when they focus on middle grades students. Additional studies on play have evolved within various middle grades disciplinary areas. Interestingly, these researchers who have engaged in exploratory classroom research seem to have stumbled upon the merits of young adolescent play as it relates to various forms of skills-based learning without having necessarily reviewed play research encouraged by not only the IPA but also The Association for the Study of Play (TASP), and the U.S. Play Coalition. Despite these efforts on varied fronts to offer research insight into play during the middle grades, the Association for Middle Level Education (AMLE) has less to offer in terms of its explicit recommendations or mandates for play within its teacher preparation program recommendations or in This We Believe: Keys to Educating Young Adolescents (National Middle School Association, 2010). Standards for exemplary middle level schools, such as the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform’s Schools-to-Watch framework, do not explicitly give merit credit to schools that take play seriously by providing at least a minimum amount of unstructured play within the school day—inside or beyond classrooms. Likewise, the Middle Level Education Research Special Interest Group (MLER SIG) within the American Educational Research Association (AERA) offers scant support for research on young adolescent play. The recent volume, Research to Guide Practice in Middle Grades Education (Andrews, 2013), offers key research related to middle grades education fundamentals, academic excellence, social equity, developmental responsiveness, and organizational supports and structures as well as professional preparation and professional learning. Yet, a close review of the section on developmental responsiveness does not have a single research summary that deliberately addresses play. The chapters do not cite research on play or its benefits or limitations for young adolescents, nor do they offer insight into how middle schools can structure for or support play within the school day or full academic program (Nesin & Brazin, 2013; Parikh, Janson, & Daniel, 2013). One of the biggest stumbling blocks to offering a full throttle research agenda on middle level play or developing policy agendas for it is that there is not a good operational definition of just what young adolescent play entails. General theories abound, but there is no clear direction for using those theories to develop a consensual understanding or theory of young adolescent play so scholars can extend the conversation to the middle grades research and leadership communities.

Toward a Theory and Operational Definition of Young Adolescent Play (YAP) Recently, a noted play scholar and activist, Dorothy Sluss, and I shared a working definition of young adolescent play (YAP) at the annual conference of the U.S. Play Coalition (2018). Play scholars from around the world and from a wide variety of disciplinary fields were on hand as we unveiled our synthesis of research literature on YAP that was then used to help us shape a working definition of YAP for various stakeholders. Based on literature on play published since 2000, we contended that early adolescent play is best understood by noting characteristics of its actions. Actions of early adolescent play are: 1) As voluntary as possible. Play for early teens should be freely chosen especially because they are developing their sense of self or identity (Erikson, 1994); providing multiple materials, such as 195

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3)

4)

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many different games within a play setting, allows the participants to choose what they prefer to do. This, in turn, enables early teens to begin to understand their preferences and strengths. During play, early teens can decide not to engage in activities that they find difficult, which is something that they cannot do during instruction. They have some choice. Pleasurable. Fun or joy occurs when activity is pleasurable, and this is also important for young adolescents. When a play activity is enjoyable, participants will stay engaged longer than when an activity is not enjoyable. For example, it is difficult to stop a chess game when the students are enjoying the game. Active involvement or engagement has long been a component of play activities. Engagement has recently become a goal for instruction in the middle grades. When students are actively engaged in an activity, their concentration improves and they get into a flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 2009; Wilhelm & Smith, 2006). Often symbolic/imaginative. Play is so important for young children because it enables pretend play. In the same way, play activities for young adolescents can include imaginative play. Simulations are a form of pretend play. As a play scholar has noted, young adolescents can learn to perform on wider stages in real life as they learn to create the settings for their own performances that enable them to practice who they hope to become (Lobman, 2018). Another way of thinking of the imaginative nature of play is to see it as “as if” behavior or actions that create a virtual reality that temporarily suspends the limits of the real world (Lester & Russell, 2010). Freer of external rules/guided more by mental rules. The rules of play are governed by internal mental structures. So, creating or altering rules that are in place provides a source of pleasure for young adolescents. For example, there are few games of touch football that use the same rules, yet the game endures. Action-oriented rather than product-oriented. Young adolescents enjoy games for the sake of playing the games. It is play when they play for the sake of play. When they begin focusing on the score rather than the game, they move from play to competition with a focus on winning. When one team wins, the game is over. When teams are playing, they often lose track of the score and the play continues until an external factor ends the game. Pathways to self-realization. Synthesizing philosophical work on play, Henricks (2014) built a strong case that actions of play lead toward self-realization in many ways. Young adolescents need play as much as younger children because they also play to realize or produce who they want to become. Play as rehearsal supports physical, social, and cognitive training or development (Sluss & Bailey, 2018).

What follows is an examination of the recent literature on adolescent play that comes not only from play scholars but from disciplinary educationists, psychologists, therapists, physicians, social scientists, play advocates, and leaders in the United Nations who take play quite seriously. The review is intended to reveal ways researchers can build upon these efforts while leaders in middle grades reform can use insights from it to advocate for young adolescents’ right to play.

Young Adolescent Play (YAP) and Its Potential to Support Healthy Development Many recent studies related to adolescent play examined the role of play in several forms of healthy development. The developmental play literature was primarily related to physical and mental health development.

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Physical Development and Young Adolescent Play (YAP) In terms of the related play literature on physical development, most of it emphasized exercise efforts rather than adolescent play as described in this chapter. Here, the play advocates have a major problem. Exercise classes or physical education are often labeled as forms of play, and literature searches allowed these studies to surface, but they have little to do with the vast play literature that is evolving. Studies that focused just on sports or physical activity such as exercise or weight lost studies were omitted as they do not come close to the standards of play as expressed in the consensual definition of adolescent play offered in this review. Still, we have several studies that do relate to YAP and physical well-being. Beets and colleagues (2009) conducted a meta-analysis of 797 articles related to the effects of physical activity and fitness in after-school programs. Only eight were found worthy of their review since they actually measured physical activity. Based on these eight studies, there was limited evidence that after-school programs improved physical activity and other health-related concerns or aided in physical development. Future researchers could consider more fully the research on YAP and use it as they design these health engendering physical activity programs. The programs could, for example, give youth participants plenty of choice in the physical activities, making them fun, letting the youth make up many of the rules among themselves as long as they met basic physical fitness goals. They could play pick-up games of touch football or basketball, for example, or choreograph and perform dances on their own. Another study blatantly posited that if youth do not play now they will pay later (Faigenbaum & Myer, 2012). According to this report published by the American College of Sports Medicine, global health recommendations suggest that young adolescents should get a minimum of one hour of physical activity per day to avoid myriad physical health-related complications later in life. The operational term “exercise deficit disorder,” or EDD, captured the growing lack of physical activity among youth who exercise less than one hour a day. The suggested intervention was to not focus on “free play,” which would align more with YAP, but instead suggested that exercises be prescribed by health care providers or physical education teachers. The report even suggested that “exercise” is “medicine” rather than a form of adolescent play, although it could be both. The study further suggested the use of medicine balls, dumbells and elastic bands to help young teens enhance motor skills and muscle strength, but they do not offer motivational strategies for using these—which is a key component of YAP. The researcher also advocated developing exercise programs that encourage a more positive attitude toward exercise. One possibility would be to make the exercise experiences more like adolescent play. Perhaps the researchers could review the extensive work on the benefits of and rights to teen play and then develop strength-training programs that are more playful, that give participants joyful opportunities to lift weights in various configurations of their own choosing as they perhaps listen to their preferred music while they also engage in unscripted dance or improvisational exercise and moves. Easy adaptations like these could help youth engage in meaningful self-fashioning through their self-directed play performance while also getting essential exercise that is so sorely needed. Much more work is needed to unite the sports medicine community with play professionals and middle level education researchers.

Young Adolescent Play (YAP) and Its Potential to Enhance Mental, Emotional and Personal Well-Being The play therapy community, in contrast, has been involved in the larger play conversations through the last decades. They have experimented with and documented several efforts that are carefully constructed to align with young adolescent play research. Lobman’s research studies

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(2010) have found their way into her own Teachers College Press book and into an edited book on Vygotsky and creativity. She is quite absorbed in the whole idea of using improvisational activities throughout the curriculum and developmental spectrum to encourage identity development, much as YAP encourages. Her studies suggested that teens within youth leadership programs in inner cities were able to practice who they are not, which is a language for understanding their own development, and as a way to become creators of developmental environments for themselves and others. Rich in ethnographic detail, Lobman’s study explained how teens learned to perform on a wider stage as they broke out of their role and rule-governed identities as well as stagnated ways of behaving. This then led to opportunities for creativity and new life possibilities. Her after-school All Stars Project yielded insightful comments from participants such as this: “Performance allows you to become a new person, BUT not entirely new because it’s still me doing those new things” (Lobman, 2017, p. 226). The playful, creative environments enabled much of this personal development. Lobman (2017) concluded that play did allow for a healthy adaptation to the world as it is, but it also was a critical ingredient for personal and societal transformation. Quoting Vygotsky (2004) she reminded researchers, if human activity were limited to reproduction of the old, then the human being would be a creature oriented only to the past and would only be able to adapt to the future to the extent that it reproduced the past. (p.15) Other studies related to YAP and general learning strategies offered promise as well. Green and colleagues (2013a, 2013b, 2014), for example, have used many components of adolescent play to help treat complex trauma in teens and to aid in supporting secure attachments in adolescent relational development. One of their studies, for example, made good use of mandala construction to help teens diagnosed with ADHD (Green et al., 2013a). Interestingly, several studies (Perryman, Moss, & Anderson, 2016; Plotts, Lasser, & Prater, 2008; Swank & Lenes, 2013) involved play therapy sessions in which young teens engaged in sand play therapy. Perryman and Plotts have developed clinical procedures for preparing the sand trays with meaningful figurines so that care professionals can listen to individual teens as they share responses to questions such as, “What would you do if you were this particular figure?” The teens then shared stories and moved the figurines around to aid their narrative construals. They were asked to explain what would need to be added to the sand tray to help them overcome their lonliness, for example. Likewise, Swank and Lenes used qualitative methods to explore how adolescent females would respond to a group sand tray experiments. They found that the girls developed self-expression, insights, growth opportunities, hope, and group dynamics skill. Repeated case studies are encouraged as these researchers note compelling reasons that teens benefit from these sand tray therapies in terms of mental well-being. Martinez and Lasser (2013) reported impressive success with helping teens in another way by encouraging them to develop their own board games within counseling sessions to promote social, emotional, and behavioral development. They even think the board games can be used beyond counseling sessions within school settings. Basically, students developed games that had obstacle and opportunity cards that helped them think through their problems with the support of a counselor as they strove to craft their own helpful solutions. Similiarly, Rosselet and Stauffer (2013) found adolescent play to be of help with gifted students in terms of helping them practice social and emotional self-regulation skills. Their case study led them to believe that much more research is needed to encourage role-playing games among gifted students. Shen (2016, 2017) took a slightly different research approach as she surveyed 86 Texas school counselors who applied play therapy across cultures. These counselors felt that play therapy facilitated more response from most teens cross-culturally regarding ethnicity (except Asian), gender, 198

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and special needs. The counselors were careful to modify their play techniques for students to accommodate special needs and the teens’ special cultural contexts. This study offered evidence that use of YAP can aid in enhancing the emotional and psychological well-being of youth. Over the past half century in the United States, children’s free play with other children has declined sharply. Over the same period, anxiety, depression, suicide, feelings of helplessness, and narcissism have increased sharply in young adolescents. Gray’s research (2011), which sounded an alarm, documented these historical changes and then surmised that the decline in play has contributed to the rise in the psychopathology of young people. According to his decades of research, play functioned as the major means by which young adolescents (1) developed intrinsic interests and competencies; (2) learned how to make decisions, solve problems, exert self-control, and follow rules; (3) learned to regulate their emotions; (4) made friends and learned to get along with others as equals; and (5) experienced joy. Through all of these effects, YAP helped promote mental health. Another synthesizing report also signaled a warning. McCulloch’s (2008) study revealed that girls in the UK are under severe stress and could benefit from YAP.

Young Adolescent Play (YAP) and Enhanced General Learning Several high-quality studies related to adolescent play and its impact on general learning gains have made their way into highly reputable research journals. Conklin’s research (2014) published in the American Educational Research Journal added to the growing literature of effective teaching practice. Drawing on theories of play that closely align with the proposed operational definition of YAP, she analyzed data from a two-year qualitative case study of eight novice middle grades teachers. Her research revealed that adding dimensions of play to frameworks of middle grades instruction led to impressive engagement gains, which led to student choice and self-direction, imaginative creations, and a general sense of non-stressed interest in and joy from their classroom work. Another study by Honeyford & Boyd (2015), published in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, revealed that an after-school program for middle school youth that employed play benefitted youth. Again, the definition of “play” that was used within the research closely resembled the YAP definition within this chapter. The students were asked to produce self-portraits as they played. The inclusive participatory approach helped reticent students hop on board by using complex literacy practices as they shaped their identities. The experiential nature of the task, that required visual representations, led to understandings of academic literacy concepts. Published within the Journal of the Learning Sciences, Sullivan and Wilson (2015) focused on middle level science classes as they examined the role of playful talk in negotiating the “how” of collaborative group work. Relying on Vygotskian notions of using playful talk as a mechanism for identity exploration and group status negotiation, the findings from their investigation revealed that sixth graders used playful talk to position themselves within their groups, to maintain bonds that enabled higher levels of coordination and opportunities to learn, and to pivot toward a selfselected identity aimed at times toward shaping their status within the group. All in all, the playful talk enabled groups to manage tensions and even open opportunities to learn for lower status group members. This study suggested that affective aspects of collaborative learning are helpful and come from playful talk, which accords nicely with this chapter’s suggested YAP actions. Other studies also offered insights into how YAP supports learning throughout the disciplines. Foster (2011) found some promise in using simulation strategy games within computers to encourage disciplinary knowledge construction. Holmes, Linden, and Shen (2013) studied seventy-four young adolescents of mostly Filipino and part Hawaiian heritages to see how their play preferences affected their school performance. Among their several findings, they discovered that youth who preferred unstructured play activities tended to achieve academic success. Using this 199

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insight, they suggest that school policy makers encourage this form of unstructured play, which again aligns with this chapter’s synthesizing definition of YAP. Likewise, Louk and Vanderschuren (2010) described empirical studies that have investigated whether social play is rewarding in terms of academic learning. They then explained the brain circuits and neurotransmitters that underlie the pleasurable aspects of play. They concluded that the pleasure of play had the ability to reinforce learning activities and that neurotransmitters and the brain regions that are deeply involved in motivation and pleasure also influence the pleasures and motivations that social play produces. Rea, Millican, and Watson (2000) wrote as experienced teacher-researchers who desired to instill life-long learning among middle grades students. They found that serious play motivated students to learn and want to continue to learn. They maintained that students in their study engaged in creative open questioning, exploration, and discovery. As they guided students to “big ideas,” students began to construct their own critical understandings. They contended that this serious play or what the play community would support as YAP helped learning come alive with fun activities that were personally relevant. Throughout their article in the Middle School Journal they offered images of serious play activities that related to a toy car race that helped students learn physics. Readers could “see” that the students were having fun while learning academic concepts. Warner also conducted her research (2008) within schools in which she worked. As a wellness coach with a graduate degree from Harvard, she wanted students to play and learn as well. She has suggested that instead of having structured play activities within recess, advisories, classrooms, and after-school programs, why not make it more playful. Her list of suggestions practically duplicate YAP’s ideals: • • • • • • •

Let kids make some of the rules, but provide structure so they can improvise. Suggest, and then help enforce that all voices be heard. Don’t keep score. Play games that encourage strategy making and creativity. Laugh. Have fun! Be open to changing the game. Some of the most interesting games I’ve played have happened when a student has suggested, “What if we tried this?” Set the example. Play as a faculty—not just competitive games, but those that require imagination and strategy. Take risks. Physical activity can definitely be one place for teenagers to engage in playtime, but only when it is structured in such a way that the competition is not central to the enjoyment of the game, and kids are able to play together naturally in ways they invent (Warner, 2008, p. 4).

Clearly, research is evolving to suggest that YAP can enrich learning throughout the middle grades curriculum. Diverse disciplinary scholars offered potent suggestions for how this can be done and they shared their work in premier research outlets.

Young Adolescent Play (YAP) and Discipline Specific Learning in the Middle Grades Amazingly, disciplinary middle grades researchers seem to be stumbling upon the virtues of YAP without having much background in the field of play research. Still, their work offers additional fodder that YAP can support learning throughout the curriculum in exciting and meaningful ways. This last section of this literature review will look at ways in which researchers within the content areas are discovering for themselves that YAP aids and abets learning.

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Social Studies and Young Adolescent Play (YAP) in the Middle Grades By far, social studies researchers are finding more ways to encourage YAP within middle level schools than colleagues in other disciplines. What is remarkable is that these researchers have discovered many unique and meaningful ways in which YAP can facilitate social studies learning although few have conducted actual classroom research. Kawashima-Ginsberg (2013), in contrast, who conducted research for The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, analyzed National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data related to civics and wondered if the recommended strategies of discussion, debate and simulations boost NAEP civics performance. She found that in the eighth grade, White students received more of these promising practices including YAP’s highly prized simulations. Regrettably, however, most students were only exposed to simulations about 48% of the time. Students from less affluent homes had about 10% less opportunity to engage in meaningful simulations. Yet, across all ethnic groups, students who had some access to simulations had higher civics scores. Perhaps more focus on simulations for all students would help with improved civics scores. YAP simulations seem to hold promise in this study if teachers will only take the time to implement them. A social studies educator and researcher developed a highly nuanced instructional unit related to ecological sustainability. The unit was heavily laden with a meaningful and sustained simulation that functioned like a Dungeons and Dragons game. Students could easily suspend disbelief and enter into this historical simulation. They had to imagine how they would feel if their small pre-Columbian island was suddenly inundated with Westerners who had little understanding of who they were. Although this unit overview was rife with play potential, the unit was not implemented and there was little indication that YAP was a focus. Still, it offered a compelling example of how a highly playful simulation could be developed and used to encourage learning through YAP. Another simulation or dramatic re-enactment instructional possibility was offered by Morris and Obenchain (2001), but again it simply shared how such YAP could be encouraged in a middle grades classroom. There was no study related to the actual implementation of the simulation experience. Still, it merits attention since it offers possibilities for play. Likewise, a highly nuanced set of simulations for a unit on Jamestown was developed by Pahl (2007), a social studies educator. It offered five detailed and believable simulations related to settling Jamestown in 1606. Some YAP advocates might suggest that his simulations were a bit prescriptive. The students had to engage in quite a bit of calculating and problem solving. Still, the unit had the potential to let students suspend disbelief as they imagined being on the Godspeed. Then, they had to track their voyage to Jamestown. They also had to address all the early nighmare problems at Jamestown. They then were required to engage in a simulation that enabled them to begin to answer whether Captain John Smith and Pocahontas had a romantic relationship. The unit concluded with a required comparison among Pocahontas, Sacajawea, and Malinche. Again, this was not a research study but it showed the dedication that some leaders within the social studies field have toward simulations. Knowing more about the attributes of YAP could perhaps help these teachers refine their unit and make it a bit more student-governed, but their unit idea is yet another indication that the social studies community is open to simulations and see their validity as a teaching tool. Likewise, Robinson and Schur (2010) began with the premise that students benefit from and retain deeper understanding when they engage in simulations. They, too, offered detailed instructions for enabling eighth grade students to play as they began to study the various positions held during abolitionist days. They believed that students needed to re-imagine the controversial concerns of the period from all sides and that students can best do this through YAP.

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Sanchez (2006) offered yet another detailed simulation for middle grades social studies students that addressed issues related to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in the early 1900s. He offered detailed background about the event and specifics for how to set up the playful simulation. He contended that the trial simulation is much more than just a fun activity. Rather, it could promote all kinds of learning. He then proffered a whole host of post-simulation discussion questions that get at the issues of the historical event. Again, we have a dedicated leader within the field already convinced of the power of YAP. He did not even offer any type of grading rubric. Instead, he wanted students and teacher to become absorbed in the playful simulation with assurance that learning gains would be made. Still another social studies educator, Schur (2007), simply assumed that a simulation would help eighth graders feel the impact of the Puritan society as it related to their witch hunt. Like the others cited in this section, she offered highly detailed suggestions for how to help students get into the world of Salem. This should be good news for play advocates that social studies educators, in particular, seem so certain of the benefits of simulations as do the experts at NAEP that they just assume that YAP works. They could benefit, however, from talking with play researchers especially as they begin to document the results of these suggested interventions and begin to explain why they seem to work so well. Wright-Maley (2016) moved a step further and studied the effects of simulations within her social studies classroom. She used the term “enactivist pedagogies” to describe her efforts with YAP. Using such a term may make it more palatable among administrators than “play,” which may evoke frivolous associations. She studied two veteran middle level teachers who used play as a regularly occurring feature in their social studies classes that they co-constructed and co-taught. The teachers revealed that this YAP pedagogy was challenging but invaluable when approaching social studies teaching. Clearly, much more can be done to explore why YAP works so well within the social studies classroom. Much more data and much larger and reliable studies are needed to better appreciate this long standing commitment to YAP within social studies classrooms.

Science and Young Adolescent Play (YAP) in the Middle Grades Swedish science education researchers were interested in spontaneous play and imagination in everyday science classroom practice. Andrée and Lager-Nyqvist (2013) wanted to move toward a more Vygotskian learning environment in which knowledge was socially constructed despite the fact that they were required to follow a scripted science curriculum. They engaged in empirical research in two Swedish compulsory schools in grade six. They collected data throughout units on “The Chemistry of Food” during a 10-week period using video recordings. Through their analysis of the data, they found that students often engaged in spontaneous play in which they transformed the given instructional tasks. Amazingly, the students began, for example, to explore the epistemic values and norms of science. They realized that through play their students could transform and transcend existing classroom norms in beneficial ways. For example, in one analyzed episode, students began to play as scientists as they attempted to test if there was fat in water. They even suggested they might be up for a Nobel Prize. They actually made fun of the scripted exercise in which they knew there was no fat in water but they had to pretend to go through a step-by-step process that was disguised as inquiry. If nothing else, the spontaneous play enabled them to make the lab experience more palatable while clearly resisting. They seemed to yearn for a scientific set and context but could achieve it only fleetingly through liberating spontaneous play.

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Why are there so few studies or published examples of classroom play within the middle grades science classroom? Is science so serious that it leaves no room for YAP? Is play more of a humanities method?

English Language Arts and Young Adolescent Play (YAP) in the Middle Grades Few studies surfaced related to YAP and English language arts. Perhaps the research focus on instructional methods related to drama and simulations has long passed. Perhaps it is just assumed wisdom that these YAP practices work well. Also, many writing strategies could be considered YAP activities especially when free writing and ungraded creative writings are encouraged. Still, a few studies have been conducted since 2000 that suggest that YAP has had an impact. Bartanen and Littlefield (2015) offered a historical study that made a strong case that play theory and its role in personal development and interpersonal and group interaction had an impact on the theory of forensics as a form of playfulness. They explained, for example, that debate can now be seen as a form of rich play and that game theory evolved from play theory. Drawing on Gray (2011), who was cited earlier, they, too, identified several characteristics of play that are practically duplicates of the ones offered in this chapter’s synthesizing YAP definition: Play is self-chosen and self-directed; play is an activity in which means are more valued than ends; play has structure, or rules, which are not dictated by physical necessity but emanate from the minds of the players; play is imaginative, non-literal, mentally removed in some way from real or serious life; and play involves an active, alert, but non-stressed frame of mind. (p. 443) The scholars then explained how forensics matches met these play standards since students, for example, chose to join debate teams. For the debaters, debating is more important than winning. They also often pretend to be arguing before deliberative bodies such as city council. Although debate can be stressful, it can produce exhilaration as if the participants are in a state of flow. Often the debaters lose track of self and time since their mind is wrapped up in the ideas, rules, and actions of the game. The researchers then explain how this playful learning process has become valuable as a tool for preparing citizens for the 21st century and how it has aided participants in social empowerment. Smith (2012) explored how computer game play could be understood as an imaginary stage for reading. In his carefully constructed study, he compared two groups of fifth graders. One group read a story from a regular book that had a map to go with it. The other group had the same book that also had an embedded computer game within it. The students in both groups received no reading directions or notifications of post-tests. Yet, a dependent measure was included, which was a post-test of questions related to spatial dimensions of the story. Participants who read the books with the embedded games scored significantly higher on all post-test questions. The researcher surmised that the computer game play helped the readers create a mental model of the story setting. This becomes a quite helpful scaffold when we learn that the text within the study was a detective story. The students may have used the iMapBook game to get a lay of the museum within the story. They had to go back and reread (which greatly aids comprehension) to make sure they had the details so they could then push a button to move to the next page. Keep in mind that the readers using the iMapBooks did not expect a test, but they were so engaged that they took the time to reread their texts, or when they were notified that they had made a mistake, they took the time to go back and reread again to find out how to move forward. They were self-directing their play without coercion and learning as well. Perhaps the iMapBook computer game did become an imaginary stage for reading— and for reading quite fluently in comparison to other fifth graders who lacked the playful option. 203

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Both of these provocative studies suggest that much more research can flow from their work in terms of how YAP can enrich emerging literary fields and support the use of emerging instructional technologies that aid literacy development.

Mathematics and Young Adolescent Play (YAP) in the Middle Grades Play theory and practice related to mathematics studies are at the heart of early childhood and elementary research, but there were few studies or published articles since 2000 that have focused on YAP within middle grades mathematics. Zosh, Hassinger-Das, Toub, Hirsh-Pasek, and Golinkof (2016) offered insight on how play supported learning and the common core state standards. Like many mathematics educationists, these researchers worried that teachers would be pushed to use direct instruction since U.S. students’ mathematics scores fell so far below those in other countries. Yet, they used evidence from the research literature to show that playful learning, or what this chapter refers to as YAP, can be an alternative and powerful pedagogical approach. They proffered examples of applications of principles of playful learning that could be used to help students perform in accord with specific state standards for mathematics. This sole study in middle grades mathematics provided some hope that math educators and researchers will discover ways to explore the benefits and possible limitations of YAP within this developmental level.

Conclusion Much more research is needed to give YAP a place within middle level schools, even though play is a right for all children (UNHCHR, 1989). With a usable, operational definition of YAP, middle grades educators can apply it more readily in educational studies as they seek to discern how it either motivates students or actually helps them learn or even makes them healthier— either physically or emotionally. Since the middle level philosophy emphasizes the thoughtful support of development of the whole child, YAP certainly seems to be a method that can encourage this development. More research is needed to discover ways to incorporate YAP within various disciplines and the school day. Middle level researchers and leaders also need to give attention to recess, for example, especially because it is dwindling within middle schools. Does recess encourage YAP? Why or why not? What about after-school programs and athletics? Does YAP have a place within these settings? Middle level schools should be places where our country renders our international civic obligation to honor the child’s right to play—and according to the UN definition of a child, middle grades students are children—and they NEED to play.

References Andrée, M., & Lager-Nyqvist, L. (2013). Spontaneous play and imagination in everyday science classroom practice. Research in Science Education, 43(5), 1735–1750. doi:10.1007/s11165-012-9333-y Andrews, P. G. (2013). Research to guide practice in middle grades education. Westerville, OH: Association for Middle level Education. Bartanen, D. M., & Littlefield, S. R. (2015). Competitive speech and debate: How play influenced American educational practice. American Journal of Play, 7(2), 155–173. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/ docview/1661719676 Beets, M. W., Beighle, A., Erwin, H. E., & Huberty, J. L. (2009). After-school program impact on physical activity and fitness: A meta-analysis. American Journal of Medicine, 36(6), 527–537. Conklin, H. G. (2014). Toward more joyful learning: Integrating play into frameworks of middle grades teaching. American Educational Research Journal, 51(6), 1227–1255. doi:10.3102/0002831214549451 Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2009). Finding flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York, NY: Harpers Collins. Erikson, E. (1994). Identity, youth and crisis. New York: Austen Riggs Monograph.

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Faigenbaum, A. D., & Myer, G. D. (2012). Exercise deficit disorder in youth: Play now or pay later. Current Sports Medicine Reports, 11(4), 196–200. doi:10.1249/JSR.0b013e31825da961 Foster, A.. 2011. The process of learning in a simulation strategy game: Disciplinary knowledge construction. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 45(1), 1–27. Gray, P. (2011). The decline of play and the rise of psychopathology in children and adolescents. American Journal of Play, 4(3), 443–456. Green, E. J., Drewes, A. A., & Kominski, J. M. (2013a). Use of mandalas in jungian play therapy with adolescents diagnosed with ADHD. International Journal of Play Therapy, 22(3), 159–172. doi:10.1037/ a0033719 Green, E. J., & Myrick, A. C. (2014). Treating complex trauma in adolescents: A phase-based, integrative approach for play therapists. International Journal of Play Therapy, 23(3), 131–145. doi:10.1037/a0036679 Green, E. J., Myrick, A. C., & Crenshaw, D. A. (2013b). Toward secure attachment in adolescent relational development. International Journal of Play Therapy, 22(2), 90–102. doi:10.1037/a0032323 Henricks, T. (2014). Play as self-realization: Toward a general theory of play. American Journal of Play, 6(2), 190–213. Holmes, R. M., Linden, S., & Shen, L. (2013). Children’s thinking styles, play and academic performance. American Journal of Play, 5(2), 219–238. Honeyford, M. A., & Boyd, K. (2015). Learning through play. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 59(1), 63– 73. doi:10.1002/jaal.428 Kawashima-Ginsberg, K. (2013). Do discussion, debate, and simulations boost NAEP civics performance? Medford, MA: The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, Tufts University. Retreived from https://civicyouth.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/CIRCLE_NAEPBechtelFactSheetA pril30.final_.pdf Lester, S., & Russell, W. (2010). Children’s right to play. An examination of the importance of play in the lives of children worldwide. Working Paper No. 57. The Hague, The Netherlands: Bernard van Leer Foundation. [Reprinted and available via International Play Association]. Lobman, C. (2010). Creating developmental moments: Teaching and learning as creative activities. In M. Connery, V. John-Steiner, & A. Marjanovic-Share (Eds.), Vygotsky and creativity: A cultural-historical approach to play, meaning-making, and the arts (pp. 199–214). Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang. Lobman, C. (2017). Performing on a wider stage: Developing inner-city youth through play and performance. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 24(3), 217–231. doi:10.1080/10749039.2017.1315673 Lobman, C. (2018). Reconnecting learning to development through performance ensembles. In Creativity in theater (pp. 209–220). Louk, J., & Vanderschuren, M. J. (2010). How the brain makes play fun. American Journal of Play, 3(2), 315–337. Martinez, A., & Lasser, J. (2013). Thinking outside the box while playing the game: A creative school-based approach to working with children and adolescents. Journal of Creativity in Mental Health, 8(1), 81–91. McCulloch, A. (2008). A generation under stress? Retrieved from www.mentalhealth.org.uk/pulications/ a-generation-under-stress Morris, R., & Obenchain, K. (2001). Three methods for teaching social studies to students through the arts. Retrieved June 30th, 2008 fromhttp://www.quasar.ualberta.ca/css/Css 53 4/ARsocstud through arts.htm. National Middle School Association. (2010). This we believe: Keys to educating young adolescents. Westerville, OH: Author. Nesin, G. & E. Brazin. (2013). Developmentally responsive middle schools: Needed more than ever. In P. G. Andrews (Ed.), Research to guide practice in middle grades education (pp. 469–493). Westerville, OH: Association for Middle Level Education. Pahl, R. (2007). Sailing to Jamestown, 1606–1607: Five classroom activities. The Social Studies, 98(3), 83–87. Parikh, S. B., Janson, C., & Daniel, L. G. (2013). Mental health and young adolescents. In P.G. Andrews (Ed.), Research to guide practice in middle grades education (pp. 531–558). Westerville, OH: Association for Middle Level Education. Perryman, K. L., Moss, R. C., & Anderson, L. (2016). Sandtray supervision: An integrated model for play therapy supervision. International Journal of Play Therapy, 25(4), 186–196. doi:10.1037/pla0040288 Plotts, C., Lasser, J., & Prater, S. (2008). Exploring sandplay therapy. International Journal of Play Therapy, 17(2), 138–153. doi:10.1037/1555-6824.17.2.138 Rea, D., Millican, K., & Watson, S. (2000). The serious benefits of fun in the classroom. Middle School Journal, 31(4), 23–28. Robinson, A., & Schur, J. (2010). Advocating for abolition: Staging an abolitionist society convention. Social Education, 74(4), 178–183.

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15 CREATIVITY AND NON-TRADITIONAL APPROACHES FOR MIDDLE-LEVEL MUSIC EDUCATION Robert L. Lyda, Jane M. Kuehne, and Shane E. Colquhoun

In music education, professional gatherings (e.g., the Tanglewood Symposium, Housewright Symposium, and Tanglewood II) and standards initiatives (e.g., School Music Program Pre-K-12 national standards, Opportunity-to-Learn standards, 2014 Music Standards) have shown a path of envisioned diversification for music education in the United States (Choate, 1968; Madsen, 2000; MENC, 1994; Music Educators National Conference [MENC] Task Force for National Standards in the Arts, 1994; Palmer & De Quadros, 2013; State Education Agency Directors of Arts Education [SEADAE], 2014). The profession has consistently advocated for teaching music in ways to include more students, especially at the middle and high school levels, moving from a one-size-fits-all model of ensemble instruction to a comprehensive approach. However, music educators have done little more than pay lip service to these goals. The authors of This We Believe (Association for Middle Level Education, 2010) advocated for equitable learning opportunities. Traditional secondary-level music programs do not fully meet this goal. Williams (2012) reported fewer than 20% of secondary students are enrolled in traditional music classes (band, choir, orchestra) and the National Assessment of Educational Practices Music Assessments reported fewer than 19% of eighth grade students nationally were enrolled in these classes (U.S. Department of Education, 2008, 2016). These enrollment statistics are due in part to the structure of secondary-level music education. When students move from an elementary to middle level school, music education becomes optional (Randles & Williams, 2017). Those who choose not to enroll in traditional music courses (ensembles) are called “non-traditional music students.” Williams (2012) said they often have musical lives independent of school, and though they may not read music, they often sing or play an instrument (typically drums, guitar, or keyboard). In addition, he said they may be unmotivated academically, have a history of discipline problems, may be a special needs student, and may aspire to a career in music recording or the music industry (Williams, 2012). The authors believe using creative activities, non-traditional course models, and informal music teaching and learning strategies in both traditional and non-traditional settings provide ways to “reach and teach” all students, including those who otherwise would not be involved in school music. Furthermore, the change must begin at the middle level when students experience

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rapid intellectual, physical, and social growth. When students are afforded student-driven nontraditional, informal music learning activities framed within the creativity model, they have an avenue and catalyst for self-expression while learning about their own place in the world.

Defining Creativity in Music Education Wallas (1926) presented the first detailed model of the creative process. He said creativity included four non-linear steps in the creative process: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. Distinguishing markers for each stage may not be clearly present and the process is not complete until an acceptable solution is verified. In preparation, the creator defines a problem or need, formulates initial and, if necessary, subsequent plans to test solution(s), and gathers the tools needed to solve the problem. During incubation, the creator leaves the problem to unconsciously think about the problem and potential solutions. This leads into an illumination, or “light bulb” moment when the creator recognizes connections that may solve all or part of a problem. Finally, in the verification phase, the creator actively tests and shares problem solutions. If the problem is not yet solved, earlier stages are revisited until the problem is solved. Amabile (1996) proposed a five-stage componential model of creativity that is dependent upon the influence of task motivation, creator personality and cognitive traits, domain-specific skills, and social environment. The first four stages (problem identification, preparation, response generation, response validation, and communication) are similar to Wallas’ (1926) model, though Amabile added a fifth outcome stage that includes community or domain-specific acceptance or rejection which leads to completion or a return to a previous stage. An appealing aspect of the Amabile’s (1996) model is that it applies to any problem or task, from ordinary daily problems to monumental problems that change human history or specific domains (p. 112). She suggested a person’s social environment influences their creativity. Furthermore, she suggested that for optimal creative output, the problem or task must be open-ended, the learner should be intrinsically motivated, must have a high level of specific skills in a domain, and the environment should be structurally conducive for creative thought (Amabile, 1996, 2012). Finally, Webster (2002) developed a model of creative thinking in music education (Figure 15.1) that encompasses multiple musician roles. Using work from Csikszentmihalyi (1988, 1996) and Wallas (1926), Webster shifted creativity from the external to the internal, and defined creative thinking in music as “the engagement of the mind in the active, structured process of thinking in sound for the purpose of producing some product that is new for the creator” (2002, p. 26). Like Wallas’s model, his model has four non-linear stages: preparation, time away, working through, and verification. However, he abandoned Wallas (1926) idea of illumination, suggesting that illumination occurs throughout the creative thinking process rather than in a singular moment or step. In addition, he said that learners move back and forth between the stages, using convergent and divergent thinking, to create a tangible product. Furthermore, the entire process is influenced by “enabling skills,” such as student aptitude, understanding of concepts, craftsmanship and aesthetic sensitivity, and “enabling conditions,” such as personal and social/cultural conditions.

Who Is Truly Creative? Renowned music education philosopher Bennett Reimer (2003) advocated for music educators to provide students with creative experiences in every musical course and for every musician role. He said that all people are creative, including children, and that when given carefully structured learning experiences, children can learn the skills to think and act creatively. Furthermore, Reimer suggested that each musician role has its own creative behaviors and education, and that hallmarks of creativity such as imagination, divergent thought, and originality must be visible

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Product Intention Compose

Perform Music of Others

Listen Repeatedly

Listen Once

Improvise

Thinking Process Divergent Thinking

Time Away

Enabling Conditions

Enabling Skills

Preparation

Working Through

Aptitudes Conceptual Understanding Craftsmanship

Exploration Primitive Gesturals Planning

Revising Editing Forming New Ideas

Personal Subconscious Imagery Motivation Personality Social/Cultural Context Task Peer Influence Past Experience

Verification Rehearsal Polishing

Convergent Thinking

Creative Products Composed Music Scores/Recordings

Recorded Performances

Written Analysis

Mental Representations of the Music Heard

Recorded Improvisations

Figure 15.1 Model of creative thinking in music (adapted from Webster, 2002).

throughout each role. Finally, he said when students create new music they are making meaning out of their own learning, and that this is often visible when they create and perform their own and others’ music. There are two views of creativity, Big-C and little-c (Amabile, 1996, 2012; Elliott, 1995; Hickey, 2012; Odena, 2012; Reimer, 2003; Richardson, 1983; Running, 2008). When a creator changes human history or significantly changes a specific domain and has his/her work emulated by others, he/she is considered Big-C. People that are Big-C creators are few and far between and may only be evident once a generation (e.g., Mozart, Gandhi, Freud, Einstein, Picasso) (Gardner, 2011). In contrast, little-c creativity focuses on using imaginative thinking to solve problems in every day, ordinary settings (Amabile, 1996; Hickey, 2001, 2012). While we may teach students who will become Big-C creators, little-c creativity is most applicable to the music classroom because students are often engaged in problem solving behavior to solve immediate problems within the classroom and are not necessarily trying to change an entire field of study (Barrett, 2005; Burnard, 2006; Odena, 2012). In addition, many caution against using Big-C rules and standards for little-c creativity (Barrett, 2005; Odena, 2012; Reimer, 2003; Stauffer, 2001). Burnard (2006) suggests that the classroom is an effective incubator of little-c creativity because students are often engaged in problem solving behavior. The

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purpose of the creative behaviors in the classroom is improving students’ creative output, not a field of study. In addition, Stauffer (2001), suggested that carefully executed experiences with little-c creativity allow students to show and apply what they know about music while making personal and collaborative meaning. Students need practical ways to create music because it can increase their levels of divergent thinking (Sovansky, Wieth, Francis, & McIlhagga, 2014). When they have formal music training that focuses solely on performance, they view creativity through that single lens, and this can be detrimental to their creative development (Hewitt, 2009; Mellor, 2007; Seddon & O’Neill, 2003; Webster, 1996). Conversely, when students have limited training or formal music experiences, their creativity resembles their own personal tastes and choices (Airy & Parr, 2001; Mellor, 2007).

Implementing Creativity in the Music Classroom Since the 1960s, music educators have advocated for students to be engaged in creative learning tasks (Choate, 1968; MENC Taskforce for National Standards, 1994; SEADAE, 2014; Wisconsin Music Educators Association, 2018). The School Music Program national standards (MENC, 1994) included two standards specifically targeted at creative endeavors—composing and improvising. The current National Core Music Standards (SEADAE, 2014) include a “Creative Strand” for all learner levels (PreK-12). That said, research in music education creativity focused primarily on one type of musical creativity, composition. Music composition is a meaning-making enterprise for students and it should encompass and highlight students’ domain-specific skills and knowledge as well as their cognitive abilities (Burnard & Younker, 2002, 2004; Wiggins, 2007; Younker, 2000), and the classroom environment should encourage students to take risks and find their own way (Burnard, 2006; Hickey, 2012; Wiggins, 2007; Younker, 2000). In addition, when considering music composition, intrinsic motivation for a task affects the level of creative output, and in some cases a reward or incentive for creative behavior increased creative output, though task conditions may affect both external reward and intrinsic motivation (Amabile, 1996; Hickey, 1997). Teachers should design creative tasks with freedom for students to find their own way (Wiggins, 2007), and engage in dialogue with students who are composing music to foster higher levels of thinking and to help develop a persistent inquiry which can lead to higher involvement and student investment in solving musical problems (DeLorenzo, 1989). External reward should not be confused with assessment, and music composition should be an ongoing process and not always attached to a grade (Hickey, 2012). Assessment should be viewed in the context of the creative process, as a revision and extension process, providing students the opportunity to return to earlier stages to fix, explore, or extend thinking ultimately yielding better creative output (Webster, 2002). Amabile (1982, 1996, 2012) advocated using consensual assessment to evaluate creative products. Consensual assessment assumes that the most reliable assessors of any creative product are members of a domain or community of practice and that, when assessing a product, their shared understanding of the process is the most valid and reliable. The most reliable assessors of student creativity are people who understand the music classroom environment, the task, and developmental and cognitive abilities of students (Hickey, 2001; Lyda, 2014; Priest, 2001; Webster & Hickey, 1995).

Views on Creativity and Performance The music educator’s role in creative activities cannot be understated. They structure the classroom environment based on their own personal musical lives and influences and view creativity from two lenses, in the classroom and external to the classroom (Crow, 2008). Their views are

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often colored by the heavy focus placed on music performance quality in teacher-training programs (Langley, 2018; Odena, 2001). Though research suggests adding creative activity in performance classes does not negatively impact performance quality (Kaschub, 1997; Randles, 2010; Riley, 2006), educators argued that it will (Byo, 1999; Fairfield, 2010; Langley, 2018; Riley, 2006; Strand, 2006). This is compounded by administrator and community pressures to provide high quality performances (Abril & Gault, 2008; Fairfield, 2010; Strand, 2006). Furthermore, though teachers felt it was important to facilitate creative thinking, they thought creative music learning standards were least important and the performance standards were most important (Fairfield, 2010). Training may better equip teachers to implement creative activities in their classrooms, but it appears it does not affect their views, interest, or their feelings on being inadequately trained (Fairfield, 2010; Langley, 2018; Riley, 2009). Teachers often view creativity in the context of a place (Crow, 2008; Langley, 2018; Odena & Welch, 2007; Orman, 2002), which is usually outside of the music classroom setting. That said, their own personal creative experiences do not always transfer to their classrooms (Crow, 2008; Langley, 2018; Odena & Welch, 2007). Perhaps this is because teaching using creative experiences is different than teaching for performance quality because there is no predetermined conclusion or objective assessment with creative experiences (Hickey, 2012; Kaschub & Smith, 2009; Wiggins, 2003). In addition, external constituents (e.g., parents, non-music educators, administrators) do not always see the value of student-created music (Fairfield, 2010), which can discourage creative activity implementation. Teacher and student views about the importance of classroom activities do not always align. Student views are influenced by their understanding of what “being creative” is, which echoes the teacher’s learning goals (Langley, 2018). Students thought creative activities happened during class time and included performing music directed by their teacher. When asked about creativity outside of school, both students and teachers had different varying views (Langley, 2018). One difficulty with understanding the teacher’s role in teaching and facilitating creative experiences is that teachers often view creativity as situated in the context of a place (Odena & Welch, 2007; Orman, 2002). Most often music teachers view creativity outside of the classroom differently than from creativity found within the classroom. Several authors have mentioned (Hickey, 2012; Kaschub & Smith, 2009, p. 59; Wiggins, 2003) that teaching creative experiences is different than performance because there is no predetermined conclusion with creative experiences. Several studies have also suggested that music teachers should be engaged in creating with their students (Dogani, 2004; Kaschub, 1997; Younker, 2000). When the students see the teacher co-creator and not the expert then the students will see themselves as creators and more fruitful experiences will emerge (Burnard, 2006; Gromko, 2003; Ruthmann, 2008). Although many studies on creativity in music education have focused on composition and improvisation, these are not the only ways students can be creative in music. One of the appealing aspects of Webster’s (2002) model of creative thinking in music is that the products created are varied. We also believe that it is more important to structure learning experiences for students using a framework for creativity. Using research as a guide, we believe students should solve varied (musical) problems applicable to their own worlds. Creative endeavors should be student-focused, taking into account student choice and preference, in an environment that fosters creativity with the teacher as a guide, mediator, and/or co-creator.

Informal Music Learning Informal music learning allows music educators to create a classroom environment that is student-centered, autonomous, and democratic (West & Cremata, 2016). The key difference between formal and informal music learning is the teacher’s role. Formal music education is

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teacher-driven and sequenced with music and materials chosen by the teacher (ensemble model). The teacher plans the lesson or rehearsal plan, makes all choices in the lesson, and the outcome is based on teacher desires. Conversely, informal music learning is student-driven and sequenced with music and materials chosen by students, with guidance from the teacher (Folkestad, 2006). In addition, during informal music learning, students work at their own pace and progression in friendship-based groups and learn by listening and emulating what they hear, and it integrates listening, performing, improvising, and composing throughout the process. The teacher guides learning based on student choices and questions, without an intentional presence (Green, 2008). Typical music genres in informal music learning include rock (Fornäs, 1995; Green, 2008; Jaffurs, 2004), rap (Söderman & Folkestad, 2004), Celtic music (Waldron & Veblen, 2009), and computer-based music (Folkestad, 1999). Though it may appear informal music learning is popular music focused, it can be used in any music learning setting, traditional or non-traditional (Vitale, 2011). For example, the Lakewood Project (Constantine, 2011), which identified as a “rock orchestra,” used informal music learning in an ensemble setting that included traditional instruments (e.g., string instruments) and non-traditional instruments (e.g., electric strings, rhythm section). They used unstructured, student-driven learning and included traditional string students alongside non-traditional music students who did not read music. Furthermore, Isbell (2016) incorporated informal music learning in her methods course and found that as the course progressed, pre-service educators increased skill levels, comfort, and acceptance of non-traditional strategies.

Non-Traditional Music Education and Its Challenges Non-traditional music education includes a wide variety of courses and learning experiences, including music technology-focused courses, knowledge-focused courses, performance-focused courses, and specific music skill-focused courses (see Figure 15.2 for example course titles). Typically, music educator preparation programs prepare pre-service educators to teach ensemble courses (i.e. concert band, orchestra, chamber choir) that perform standard Western classical music, while non-traditional music is neglected (Bauer & Dammers, 2016; Davis & Blair, 2011; Emmons, 2004; Springer, 2016; Springer & Gooding, 2013; Wang & Humphreys, 2009). Furthermore, their collegiate solo and ensemble performance experiences are also heavily focused in Western classical music (Brinckmeyer, Gonzales, & Stein, 2009; Kruse, 2015). So, it is not surprising that they feel inadequately prepared to teach non-traditional music courses (Bauer, 2013; Bauer & Dammers, 2016; Colquhoun, 2018) and that they struggle to find a place for it in their classrooms and music programs (Bauer, 2013; Bauer & Dammers, 2016; Bernard, 2012; Kruse, 2015; Mantie, 2013; Springer, 2016; Springer & Gooding, 2013). One area in non-traditional music is popular music (though this is not the only area). Incorporating popular music requires a pedagogical change (Abramo, 2010) and sufficient exposure to (a) teaching popular music styles, (b) performing/modeling on popular music instruments, (c) teaching improvisation for popular music, (d) composing music, (e) imitating music by ear, and (f) incorporating technology (Emmons, 2004). Unfortunately, both pre-service and in-service music educators have little if any formal coursework in popular music pedagogy (Springer, 2016; Springer & Gooding, 2013). Though they listened to popular music regularly (Brinckmeyer et al., 2009; Kruse, 2015), they felt classical and jazz music was more appropriate than other styles and that rap and pop music were not appropriate for ensemble settings (Kruse, 2015). However, though music educators felt unprepared to incorporate popular music, they believed that it is sufficient to address the national standards and most effective with older students (Springer, 2016). Teacher preparation should be more balanced to prepare future music educators to teach both traditional and non-traditional courses, using formal and informal teaching and learning strategies,

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and embracing classical and non-classical music genres. Furthermore, when the culture of higher education music changes to include non-traditional music students, classroom music practices can change (Bernard, 2012). Without this shift, we disenfranchise students who can be musical code switchers, who are proficient in both traditional and non-traditional music (Isbell & Stanley, 2018). Collegiate music programs must allow students opportunities in many musical styles, not just classical music, and must diversify pedagogy instruction to include non-traditional and informal music learning. In addition, they should include a more collaborative approach whereby students learn both the significance of traditional and non-traditional music learning and the significance of music content as it applies across a broader spectrum of content area curricula. It is critical for music teacher preparation programs to prepare passionate and innovative teachers who will provide quality instruction in music for all students, and a collaborative resource for incorporating music across the curriculum.

A Call for Change and Increased Opportunity What must change to provide creative music learning opportunities for middle level learners? First, there must be a cultural shift in what is important in music education. The music education profession must move from merely paying lip service toward actually learn to value teaching more than the 20% of middle level learners in ensemble classes. The profession must embrace non-traditional music course options and accept “giving up classroom control” in both traditional and non-traditional settings to enable student creative development. The authors of This We Believe (National Middle School Association, 2010) suggested understanding the middle level learner is foundational, and that this influences curricular choices, teaching and learning strategies, and the learning environment and leads to value for teaching students at this level. Early adolescent years for students are marked with rapid and often significant changes in brain development, intellectual learning and thought capacity, social-emotional development, moral logic and reasoning, self-identity development, understanding one’s place among peers, and discovering effects of behaviors (Caskey et al., 2010; Caskey & Anfara, Jr., 2014). This rapid growth and change makes creative activities critically important educational experiences. More importantly, when students are afforded student-driven non-traditional, informal music learning activities framed within the creativity model, they have an avenue and catalyst for appropriate self-expression while learning about their own place in the world. In most music education programs, pre-service educators are prepared to teach music at all levels (PreK-12) through two to four different music method courses and in general education courses that focus on learning theory, assessment, motivation, and special needs students (Hewitt & Koner, 2013; Schmidt, 1989). However, throughout the music education degree, there is also a strong emphasis on personal solo and ensemble performance, and ensemble teaching techniques in courses taught by music education and collegiate performance faculty and ensemble directors (Hewitt & Koner, 2013; Levine & Kohut, 2017; Mark & Gary, 2007; Myers et al., 2016; Odena, 2001; Schmidt, 1989). These experiences are heavily focused on classical music styles (Bauer & Dammers, 2016; Brinckmeyer et al., 2009; Davis & Blair, 2011; Emmons, 2004; Kruse, 2015; Springer, 2016; Springer & Gooding, 2013; Wang & Humphreys, 2009). As a result, music educators are “educationally” prepared to teach many student levels, but their value for traditional content supersedes value for teaching the learner (Langley, 2018; Strand, 2006). Music teacher preparation must shift from performance-emphasis to learner-emphasis. Pertl (2017) suggested reshaping collegiate music curricula must begin with changing the culture of collegiate music major programs. To do this, university music faculty, who often self-identify as “music conductors,” must shift their views from a content/subject-area focus to a student/ learner focus and include informal music learning and non-traditional course pedagogy and models.

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What Does This Look Like? As shown in Figure 15.2, non-traditional music courses can be stand-alone classes, or they can work in-tandem to create comprehensive music learning activities in both non-traditional and traditional music classes. Figure 15.2 includes two potential models for including informal music learning and creative activities in music.

Non-Traditional Music A year-long non-traditional music course called “Rock Music Developments” can combine knowledge-, performance-, technology-, and skill-based components. Students learn knowledge through teacher lectures (formal) and self-directed (informal) learning about historical developments in rock and roll. They receive teacher- and self-guided performance instruction on modern instruments such acoustic and electric guitar, bass, and drums. Once sufficiently proficient, students may form a garage band to listen and learn together through personal and online video (i.e. YouTube). They can rehearse and perform music together, using technology to record and edit their performances. Finally, students can begin creating their own music using background knowledge, songwriting skills, performance, and technology to record and produce their own two-song demo project. This model incorporates informal music learning and creativity activities in a non-traditional music class designed so that students can “own” their learning and the products of their work.

Traditional Music Giving up a segment of time in performance rehearsal to allow students to think critically about different musical problems helps them develop their own views and realize their voices are valuable in the classroom. In a choral, band, or orchestral ensemble class, students can discover background knowledge of a piece they are performing through informal searching and sharing among themselves and the teacher. Students can work to solve musical performance problems identified during ensemble rehearsal time using music sequencing and editing software (technology) to create their own background practice tracks, and/or self-composed harmonies (skills), melodies that emulate the music they are performing, or their own music for the ensemble and use technology to record, edit, and share their work.

Suggestions for the Future The authors strongly advocate that all school music courses should be taught by comprehensively prepared and highly qualified music educators who are trained to teach music and who are passionate about helping students develop. In addition, all music educators, regardless of specialty area, should be prepared to teach and embrace teaching both traditional and non-traditional music classes. Moreover, music teacher preparation programs must add middle and high school general music tracks that focus on teaching all students (rather than the selected 20% who enroll in ensemble classes) and have a strong creative music and informal music learning drive and that include experiences and pedagogical training in musical styles beyond the traditional classical genre. To accomplish this, music and music education faculty must also be trained and must shift the hiring paradigm to embrace faculty who are experienced in these areas, but who may not be classical performers or conductors. If this was embraced, music education could meet the goals voiced for more than fifty years. Middle level learners need a place to belong, a place to express themselves in appropriate ways, and a place where development and assessment are self-driven and do not carry

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Technology Focus Audio Production Sound Design iPad Ensembles Electronic Musicianship

Skill Focus Songwriting Guitar Skills DJ Techniques Keyboard Skills

COMPREHENSIVE MUSIC LEARNNING National Standards Areas: Performing, Creating, Responding, Connecting

Knowledge Focus Evolution of Jazz Music of the World Music Soundtracks Developments in Rock

Performance Focus Steel Band Mariachi Band Garage Band A Cappella Voice

Figure 15.2 Non-traditional music course examples and relationships (adapted from Colquhoun, 2018).

a “grade” assignment. A well-designed music program can fill this need through studentcentered, creative experiences led by a music educator who is committed to teaching all students and who is a guide, mentor, collaborator, and sounding board who helps students see their own value.

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Formal and informal learning situations or practices vs formal and informal ways of learning. British Journal of Music Education, 23(2), 135–145. doi:10.1017/S0265051706006887 Fornäs, J. (1995). The future of rock: Discourses that struggle to define a genre. Popular Music, 14(1), 111–125. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/853345 Gardner, H. (2011). Creating minds: An anatomy of creativity. New York, NY: Basic Books.

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Green, L. (2008). Music, informal learning and the school: A new classroom Pedagogy. London, UK: Routledge. Gromko, J. E. (2003). Children composing: Inviting the artful narrative. In M. Hickey (Ed.), What and how to teach music composition: A new horizon for music education (pp. 69–90). Reston, VA: Rowman & Littlefield Education. Hewitt, A. (2009). Some features of children’s composing in a computer-based environment: The influence of age, task familiarity and formal instrumental music instruction. Journal of Music Technology and Education, 2(1), 57–67. Hewitt, M., & Koner, K. (2013). A comparison of instrumental music methods course content at NASM-accredited institutions. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, (197), 45–61. doi:10.5406/bulcouresmusedu.197.0045 Hickey, M. (1997). The computer as a tool in creative music making. Research Studies in Music Education, 8(1), 56–70. doi:10.1177/1321103X9700800106 Hickey, M. (2001). An application of Amabile’s consensual assessment technique for rating the creativity of children’s music compositions. Journal of Research in Music Education, 49(3), 234–244. doi:10.2307/3345709 Hickey, M. (2012). Music outside the lines: Ideas for composing in K-12 music classrooms. London, UK: Oxford University Press. Isbell, D. S. (2016). Apprehensive and excited: Music education students’ experience vernacular musicianship. Journal of Music Teacher Education, 25(3), 27–38. doi:10.1177/1057083714568020 Isbell, D. S., & Stanley, A. M. (2018). Code-switching musicians: An exploratory study. Music Education Research, 20(2), 145–162. doi:10.1080/14613808.2016.1238061 Jaffurs, S. E. (2004). The impact of informal music learning practices in the classroom, or how I learned how to teach from a garage band. International Journal of Music Education, 22(3), 189–200. doi:10.1177/ 0255761404047401 Kaschub, M. (1997). A comparison of two composer-guided large group composition projects. Research Studies on Music Education, 8, 15–28. doi:10.1177/1321103X9700800103 Kaschub, M., & Smith, J. (2009). Minds on music: Composition for creative and critical thinking. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers. Kruse, A. J. (2015). Preservice music teachers’ experiences with and attitudes toward music genres. Journal of Music Teacher Education, 24(3), 11–23. doi:10.1177/1057083714530721 Langley, D. W. (2018). Students’ and teachers’ perceptions of creativity in middle and high school choral ensembles. Music Education Research, 20(4), 445–462. doi:10.1080/14613808.2018.1433150 Levine, V. L., & Kohut, E. (2017). Finding a balance: Music at liberal arts colleges. In R. D. Moore (Ed.), College music curricula for a new century (pp. 47–68). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Lyda, R. L. (2014). A comparison of music compositional process and product of two groups of secondary students: Using only acoustic instruments versus using acoustic instruments and iPads. (Doctoral Dissertation). Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10415/4426 Madsen, C. K. (Ed.). (2000). Vision 2020: The Housewright Symposium on the future of music education. Reston, VA: Music Educators National Conference. Retrieved from https://nafme.org/about/history/vision-2020the-housewright-symposium-on-the-future-of-music-education/ Mantie, R. (2013). A comparison of “popular music pedagogy” discourses. Journal of Research in Music Education, 61(3), 334–352. doi:10.1177/0022429413497235 Mark, M. L., & Gary, C. (2007). A history of American music education. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield. Mellor, L. (2007). Computer-based composition in the primary school: An investigation of children’s “creative” responses using the CD Rom Dance eJay. Musicae Scientiae, 11(1), 61–88. doi:10.1177/ 102986490701100103 Music Educators National Conference. (1994). Opportunity-to-learn standards for music instruction: Grades preK12: Curriculum and scheduling, staffing, materials and equipment, facilities. Reston, VA: Author. Music Educators National Conference Task Force for National Standards in the Arts. (1994). The school music program: The K-12 national standards, pre-K standards, and what they mean to music educators. Reston, VA: Author. Myers, D., Campbel, P. S., Chattah, J., Higgins, L., Levine, V. L., Rice, T., … Sarath, E. (2016). Transforming music study from its foundations: A manifesto for progressive change in the undergraduate preparation of music majors. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.18177/sym.2016.56.fr.11118 Odena, O. (2001, September). How do secondary school music teachers view creativity? A report on educators‘views of teaching composing skills. Paper presented at the annual conference of the British Educational Research Association, University of Leeds. Odena, O. (2012). Creativity in the music classroom. In G. McPherson & G. Welch (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of music education (Vol. I, pp. 512–528). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Odena, O., & Welch, G. F. (2007). The influence of teachers’ backgrounds on their perceptions of music creativity: A qualitative study with secondary school music teachers. Research Studies in Music Education, 28(1), 71–81. doi:10.1177/1321103X070280010206

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Visions of Research in Music Education, 14(1), 1–17. Retrieved from http://users.rider.edu/~vrme/v14n1/ vision/Riley%20Final.pdf Running, D. J. (2008). Creativity research in music education: A review (1980–2005). Update: Application of Research in Music Education, 27(1), 41–48. doi:10.1177/8755123308322280 Ruthmann, S. A. (2008). Whose agency matters: Negotiating pedagogical and creative intent during composing experiences. Research Studies in Music Education, 30, 43–58. doi:10.1177/1321103X08089889 Schmidt, C. P. (1989). An investigation of undergraduate music education curriculum content. Bulletin for the Council of Research in Music Education, 99, 42–56. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/40318324 Seddon, F. A., & O’Neill, S. A. (2003). Creative thinking processes in adolescent computer-based composition: An analysis of strategies adopted and the influence of instrumental music training. 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Waldron, J., & Veblen, K. (2009). Learning in a Celtic community: An exploration of informal music learning and adult amateur musicians. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 59–74. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/40319320 Wallas, G. (1926). The art of thought. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Wang, J. C., & Humphreys, J. T. (2009). Multicultural and popular music content in an American music teacher education program. International Journal of Music Education, 27(1), 19–36. doi:10.1177/ 0255761408099062 Webster, P. (1996). Creativity as creative thinking. In G. Spruce (Ed.), Teaching music (pp. 87–97). London, UK: Routledge. (Reprinted from Music Educators Journal, 76(9), pp. 22–28). Webster, P. (2002). Creative thinking in music: Advancing a model. In T. Sullivan & L. Willingham (Eds.), Creativity and music education (pp. 16–33). Edmonton, Alberta: Canadian Music Educators Association. Webster, P., & Hickey, M. (1995). Rating scales and their use in assessing children’s music compositions. The Quarterly Journal of Music Teaching and Learning., 6(4), 28–44. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com /iimp/docview/740954237 West, C., & Cremata, R. (2016). Bringing the outside in: Blending formal and informal through acts of hospitality. Journal of Research in Music Education, 64(1), 71–87. doi:10.1177/0022429416637596 Wiggins, J. (2003). A frame for understanding children’s compositional processes. In M. Hickey (Ed.), Why and how to teach music composition: A new horizon for music education (pp. 141–165). Reston, VA: Rowman & Littlefield Education. Wiggins, J. (2007). Compositional process in music. In L. Bresler (Ed.), International handbook of research in arts education (pp. 453–476). New York, NY: Springer-Verlang New York, LLC. Williams, D. B. (2012). The non-traditional music student in secondary schools of the United States: Engaging non-participant students in creative music activities through technology. Journal of Music, Technology & Education, 4(2–3), 131–147. doi:10.1386/jmte.4.2-3.131_1 Wisconsin Music Educators Association. (2018). Comprehensive musicianship through performance (CMP). Retrieved from: https://wmeamusic.org/cmp/ Younker, B. A. (2000). Thought processes and strategies of students engaged in music composition. Research Studies in Music Education, 24(1), 24–39. doi:10.1177/1321103X0001400103

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16 CONTINUING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND MIDDLE YEARS TEACHERS What the Literature Tells Us Katherine Main and Donna Pendergast

The Need for Professional Learning Schools and, ultimately, teachers are increasingly being held accountable for measurable increases in students’ academic achievement. A growing body of research shows that teacher training is critical to student performance and that there is a direct link between teacher and teaching quality and students’ academic success (Hanushek & Rivkin, 2006; Hattie, 2012). Thus, the attitudes, skills, competencies, and experience that teachers bring to the classroom are among the factors that determine how well a child learns and performs (Darling-Hammond, 1999; Goe, 2007; Harris & Sass, 2009). For teachers to stay up-to-date with their content knowledge and skills and to keep abreast of pedagogical reform, engaging in continuing professional development (CPD) is essential (Desimone, 2009). However, as Main and Pendergast (2015) have argued, there is a “conceptual vagueness … [as well as] disparity and ambiguity” about what effective CPD actually is and what it aims to achieve (p. 4). For the most part, the focus of CPD has been on skills growth, personal development, social control, and learning opportunities to support the development of professional competence (Friedman & Phillips, 2004). In the literature, CPD is also called professional development, professional learning, staff development, and in-service training that tends to include any activities that provide educators with opportunities to acquire or enhance their knowledge, skills, attitudes, and beliefs that necessary for them to create high levels of learning for all students (National Staff Development Council [NSDC], 2001). Such activities can include participation in workshops, conferences, professional reading, research projects, and courses that may be short or long in duration and formal or informal. The activities can also be regarded as an integral part of the experiential learning acquired through leadership positions (Main & Pendergast, 2015). However, for the purposes of this chapter, CPD is any activity that is undertaken that provides an opportunity for teachers to build their sense of efficacy through enhancing their knowledge and skills to better meet the educational needs of their students and improve their learning outcomes (Coleman & Goldenberg, 2011; NSDC, 1999). Moreover, the effectiveness of CPD can be measured through teachers’ increased sense of efficacy with a causal relationship demonstrated between a teacher’s sense of efficacy and improved classroom practices (Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk-Hoy, 2007).

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Within the middle years of education, typically applied to learners in the age range 10–15 years (Pendergast, 2017), our understanding of adolescence as a developmental stage continues to broaden and deepen. As such, the middle years have become a focus for educators to understand the unique learning needs of this age group as well as effective pedagogies to support that learning. That is, “the more teachers learn about their students, the more able they are to design experiences that foster learning” (Edwards & Nicoll, 2006, p. 583). For experienced teachers and for those new to the profession, working with this age group presents instructional challenges that may not have been adequately addressed in their initial teacher education training (Flowers, Mertens, & Mulhall, 2002)—regardless of whether that has been a recent or not so recent experience. Thus, the need for targeted and specialized professional development is necessary to provide teachers with opportunities for continual improvements to their pedagogical practice. While some researchers contend that professional development should focus primarily on teaching and student learning (Guskey, 2000), others suggest that professional development is also about deepening content knowledge for teachers (Antoniou & Kyriakides, 2011; Barber & Mourshed, 2007). However, given that teachers exert a more significant influence on student achievement than any other school factor (Hattie, 2012; Wallace, 2009), instructional leaders face an imperative that teachers are equipped with the knowledge and skills necessary to provide increasingly effective teaching and learning for individual students. We take the view that understanding what constitutes effective CPD is an important asset to ensure appropriate and high impact CPD is utilized to achieve this aim. In this chapter we begin by considering what is already known about CPD, and then we will focus deeply on the literature related to the effectiveness of professional development targeting middle years teachers to identify the types of professional development practices that have the most significant impact on outcomes for middle years learners. For each of the studies reviewed, we explored (a) where the research was conducted; (b) which approaches, methods, and technologies the researchers used in the study; and (c) the main research findings. We begin by providing a general overview of CPD and how it impacts student learning.

General Principles: CPD and How It Impacts Student Learning Yoon, Duncan, Lee, Scarloss, and Shapley (2007) argued that three specific elements of professional development are necessary if the learning is to positively influence students. First, the professional development must enhance the teacher’s knowledge and skills within the focus area. Second, the knowledge and skills must have been shown to improve classroom teaching (i.e., evidenced-based). Third, there must be a transfer from the professional development experience that directly links to improved teaching and thus raises student achievement. If one link is weak or missing, improved student outcomes cannot be expected. For example, Guskey and Sparks (2004) linked student achievement to teacher professional development and noted that if a teacher fails to apply new ideas from professional development into their classroom instruction, students are unlikely to show any academic gains. To be effective, the content of professional development must promote learning that allows teachers to make classroom connections that have strong value for student learning (DarlingHammond, 2008). When teachers assume inactive roles in their learning, content remains vague and disconnected from their classroom context. Moreover, when ongoing support wanes, professional development opportunities fall short of maximizing learning for teachers (Pianta, Mashburn, Downer, Hamre, & Justice, 2008). Quite simply, only sustained professional development with ongoing support and dialogue can have positive effects for teachers and students. Researchers have suggested well-structured and organized training that has a clear

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purpose and focus for all participants as a design for effective professional development (Guskey & Yoon, 2009). Unfortunately, these well-designed professional development programs do not represent most professional development experienced by teachers (Darling-Hammond, Wei, Andree, Richardson, & Orphanos, 2009). Many teachers find that professional development imposes a model from outside the school or district not related to their specific needs and contexts (Guskey & Yoon, 2009). According to Dana’s (2010) model of job-embedded learning as a means of professional development, CPD should be “situated in educational contexts with actual children, actual curriculum, and actual problems of practice” (p. 322). This aligns with Guskey and Yoon’s (2009) notion that CPD should be targeted to the context and needs of individual teachers and should include opportunities for ongoing reflection and practice. Jobembedded learning can be implemented through school-university partnerships because “universities can offer schools the tools and personnel to help facilitate job-embedded learning in schools. Schools can offer the universities the rich, ripe context for teacher learning to occur” (Dana, 2010, p. 322), especially if there is informed and voluntary consent by the teachers (Stinson, 2009). Teachers learn instructional methods in various ways. Although professional learning opportunities are commonly provided by school systems, learning that takes place during these events is not necessarily transferred to or implemented in the classroom. Bandura (1977), author of the self-efficacy theory, addressed this issue by describing the role of selfefficacy in one’s belief systems. Bandura (1994) defined self-efficacy as “people’s beliefs about their capabilities to produce designated levels of performance that exercise influence over events that affect their lives” (p.1). Self-efficacy levels indicate how one’s capabilities to perform acts at specific levels and are based on one’s choices of actions and the intensity and persistence that one is willing to endure to complete the task (Bandura, 1977). Teacher efficacy refers to the level of effort teachers are willing to exert in specific teaching situations and the level of persistence teachers are willing to put forth when confronting obstacles. Tschannen-Moran, Hoy, and Hoy (1998) stated that “greater efficacy leads to greater effort and persistence, which leads to better performance, which in turn leads to greater efficacy” (p. 234), and the opposite also is true. Teachers’ competence completing tasks can be strengthened by training and positive experiences (Bandura, 1993). Further, teachers must be provided multiple opportunities to participate in high-quality, targeted professional development (MacBeath, 2011). Issues related to preparedness and confidence to teach specific age-groups are especially prominent in middle level school environments where many teachers continue to hold elementary credentials (Flowers et al., 2002).

Method We used a systematic quantitative literature review (SQLR) methodology (Pickering & Byrne, 2014; Pickering, Grignon, Steven, Guitart, & Byrne, 2015) to explore contemporary literature that focuses on effective professional development targeting middle years teachers. We restricted the search to peer-reviewed journal papers published in English language journals between the years 2000 to June 2018. We set these parameters to ensure studies were of a high caliber and were recent and relevant to the purpose. The search strategy encompassed systematically reviewing peer-reviewed published papers with an initial database search of PsycINFO, Proquest, Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC), Science Direct, Active learning, and Education Research Complete, Teacher Reference Center, EBSCOhost, SAGE, Emerald, JSTOR and the Internet search engines Google and Google Scholar. We undertook this search for papers that explored professional development and professional learning strategies adopted 222

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Table 16.1 Inclusion Search Terms Search terms

AND

AND

1. middle school teachers 2. middle years 3. professional learning 4. teacher 5. continuing professional development 6. middle school experts 7. professional education and training 8. learning communities 9. or/1–9

10. network 11. professional 12. professional development 13. upskill* 14. upskilling 15. student outcome 16. learning pathways 17. profession* 18. professionalism 19. or/10–19

20. learning 21. knowledge sharing 22. teacher community 23. student diversity 24. pedagogy 25. learning styles 26. multiple intelligences 27. Bloom 28. Bandura 29. social networks 30. peer learning 31. self-efficacy 32. teacher efficacy 33. in-service, and teacher education 34. teacher knowledge 35. or/20–35

by middle level school teachers in education settings with the aim of maximizing relevant findings for papers published within the last decade. The key terms we used are shown in Table 16.1. This search was performed in June 2018.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria Along with the 35 key inclusion search terms listed in Table 16.1, studies had to target the middle years and examine the application of professional development or professional learning strategies by teachers in which the outcome variable was based on “what works”; that is, “why certain professional development or professional learning practices work and don’t work” and “student outcomes.” Studies with in-service teachers who participated in selforganized and non-institutional situations of informal professional interchange were included in this review. Participant gender, race, age, type of course being undertaken and other demographic information were not subject to limitation. Studies in which participants were not classified as middle years teachers were excluded. Figure 16.1 provides a schematic of the search we conducted.

Stage I: Description of Included Papers As indicated in Figure 16.1, the initial database search strategy using the descriptors middle school teachers, professional development, or professional learning resulted in 610 articles, of which 230 had been peer-reviewed and were published in academic journals. These findings were further screened using the descriptors student outcome*, upskilling, student diversity and continuing professional development. This further screening resulted in 110 peer-reviewed articles that could not be clearly excluded based on the above criteria. Duplicates from other databases where then excluded, resulting in a sample of 55 articles at the end of stage I.

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Figure 16.1 Schematic of the systematic quantitative literature review.

Stage II: Secondary Searches In the secondary searches, additional articles were identified through reference sections, theoretical discussion papers, and bibliographic references in order to ensure completeness. An additional five studies were identified, resulting in a total of 60 articles. Sixty full-text articles were assessed for eligibility and ultimately nine papers remained which were considered relevant for this SQLR. That is, they met all of the inclusion criteria. A full list of included articles (n = 9) is presented in Table 16.2.

Deepening Our Understanding: What the SQLR Tells Us We used SQLR to focus deeply on the literature related to the effectiveness of CPD for middle years teachers so we could identify the types of professional development practices that have the most significant impact on outcomes for middle years learners. Here we consider the findings

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Reference

Flowers, N. Mertens, S.B. & Mulhall, P. F. (2002). Research on Middle School Renewal Four Important Lessons About Teacher Professional Development. Middle School Journal, 33:5,57–61.

Hilton, A. & Hilton, G. & Dole, S. & Goos, M. (2016). Promoting middle school students’ proportional reasoning skills through an ongoing professional development programme for teachers. Education Studies Math 92,193–219.

Monet, J.A & Etkina, E. (2008). Fostering Self-Reflection and Meaningful Learning: Earth Science Professional Development for Middle

No

1

2

3

Teachers felt that an inquiry-based approach to teaching science was important but struggled to implement inquiry into their day-to-day practice;

Participants were 10 middle grade sci- • ence teachers from K-8 elementary schools in Colorado, USA. Data were collected during a professional development program in

An analysis of teachers’ journal reflections during an inquiry-based professional development program.

(Continued )

Teachers are not well prepared to teach mathematical content and many make the same mistakes and experience the same conceptual difficulties as their students; Professional development that promotes teachers’ conceptual knowledge and classroom strategies can impact on students’ learning outcomes.

Participants included 90 teachers and • 1303 students (years 5–9) in Queensland, Australia. Data were gathered through pre- and post-survey using a 12 item, two-tiered diagnostic instrument. • Teachers participated in a series of four workshops on proportional reasoning skills.

To investigate the efficacy of ongoing teacher professional development for promoting middle years students’ proportional reasoning.

•

•

•

Most middle grades teachers do not have middle grades certification; Professional development must be ongoing, outcome-based, and foster continuous improvement; There is a mismatch between the availability of professional development activities and teacher participation; Teachers and administrators offer differing opinions about teacher needs for professional development because they each serve very different roles within the school.

•

Findings/Outcome

85 middle grades schools (5–8, 6–8, 6–7 grade configurations) though a self-study teacher (n=1551) and administrator (n=75) survey exploring teacher participation in professional development activities as well as the areas where teachers need additional training. Data were collected in the USA states of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi in 1998.

Participants, method, design, course & duration

To provide data to support and guide middle grades schools through reform and restructuring using the best educational, organizational, and technological resources and practices available in order to improve student achievement and related student outcomes.

Aim(s) of the study

Table 16.2 Summary of Papers Included for Review

Lakin, J. M. & Wallace, C. S. (2015). Assessing Dimensions of Inquiry Practice by Middle School Science Teachers Engaged in a Professional Development Program. Journal of Science Teacher Education 26,139–162.

Green, J. D., Gonzalez, E. M., LópezVelásquez, A.M., & Howard, E.R. (2013). Hands-on professional development: middle school teachers’ experiences with a curriculum intervention research project:

5.

School Science Teachers. Journal of Science Teacher Education 19,455–475.

Reference

4.

No

Table 16.2 (Cont).

This study explores the benefits of an eight-week curriculum intervention study that served as a form of Professional Development (PD) for teachers.

The current study focuses on the validity of assessments developed for evaluating teachers’ use of inquiry strategies and classroom orientations.

Aim(s) of the study

•

•

•

Teachers’ knowledge of academic vocabulary teaching increased through their participation in the professional development; Teachers’ acquired new instructional strategies for teaching vocabulary and reading;

Teachers tended to self-report higher levels of inquiry strategy (IS) use than their students perceived; Teachers’ understanding of inquiry-based teaching varied; The 5Es scale is more valid for measuring frequency of use than the IS scale; Professional development programs need to challenge pre-conceived notions and be designed to challenge and support knowledge and understanding of inquiry-based strategies.

•

•

•

Teachers’ perceptions of what inquiry-based teaching meant were challenged through the professional development program; The mode of professional development delivery is important to enable change in teachers’ conceptualisation of strategies; Meaningful reflection on learning supports learning.

•

Findings/Outcome

The study involved 26 teachers from • the New England region of USA. Middle years teachers undertook a 12hour training session and were coached for eight weeks throughout the imple- • mentation of the curriculum in their classrooms.

Participants were 90 middle school science teachers Alabama, USA and 1085 students. Teachers participated in professional development workshops during the year. Data collected: Teachers: Survey—either Inquiry Strategies Scale or the 5Es Inquiry Scale. Students: Pre- and post-tests.

2004 that included nine two-hour and 15 minute workshops, two six-hour Saturday workshops, and approximately 18 hours of independent study. Data instruments included a survey, pre- and post-tests on teachers’ pedagogical knowledge, and structured reflective journals.

Participants, method, design, course & duration

Yost, D.S. and Vogel, R (2007) Urban The study reviewed the development Professional Development Working to and implementation of a professional Create Successful Teachers and development program. Achieving Students. Middle School Journal, 38: 3,34–40.

Bryant, D. P., Linan-Thompson, S., The study aimed to examine teachers’ Ugel, N. Hamff, A. and personal knowledge about their strugHougen, M. (2001). The Effects of gling readers and reading strategies. Professional Development for Middle School General and Special Education Teachers on Implementation of Reading Strategies in Inclusive Content Area Classes. Learning Disability Quarterly, 24: 4,251–264.

6

7

Middle School Journal, 45: 2 Unique Contexts for Learning and Teaching, 27–32.

Ten sixth-grade middle school teachers, including general and special education teachers, participated in a four-month professional development and intervention program. Data were collected through pre- and post-interviews; in-service evaluation forms, support meeting notes, IVCs, and ‘promoters of’ and ‘barriers to checklists.’

Participants included 15 fifth and eighth grade teachers in Grover Washington, USA. These teachers were not volunteers as all members of the learning community were expected to participate in the professional development and the study. Teachers participated in a two-day workshop that used pre- and posttesting of their research-based teaching strategies; teacher observations and focus group discussions.

Data were collected through small focus groups using a semi-structured interview methodology.

Teachers were overwhelmed with the many challenges when working in schools with large and varied student populations; Teaming is an effective model for promoting collaboration and planning; Time must be allocated for teachers to share their personal knowledge about their students

•

•

•

•

•

•

(Continued )

Intervention through targeted professional development at the school level can enhance their instruction in a short period of time; There is a direct connection between growth in teaching expertise and student academic outcomes; Professional development needs to be targeted and needs-based; Teachers need to understand and evaluate the extent to which their instructional strategies and attitudes are research-based.

•

•

Teachers understood how to better engage students in language teaching; Teachers were provided with opportunities to apply their new knowledge with sustained support.

•

Reference

Blanchard, M.R., LePrevost, C.E., Tolin, A.D. and Gutierrez, K.S. (2016). Investigating TechnologyEnhanced Teacher Professional Development in Rural, High-Poverty Middle Schools. Educational Researcher, 45:3,207– 220.

Telese, J. A. (2012). Middle School Mathematics Teachers’ Professional Development and Student Achievement. The Journal of Educational Research, 105:2, 102–111.

No

8

9

Table 16.2 (Cont).

Data were compiled using the 2005 National Association of Education Progress (NAEP) mathematics scale database and a multistage sampling design.

This study included 20 middle school teachers and 2,320 students in a south-eastern state in the United States. This was a longitudinal study over three years with teachers having a a week-long face-to-face inquirybased PD within their own classroom each year b supported by monthly online Blackboard Collaborate sessions. Data were collected through • Teacher reflections that were used to guide ongoing PD • Survey data around teachers’ beliefs, efficacy, and Reformed Teaching Observations • Video data

An investigation of teachers’ beliefs, practices, and reflections before and throughout a professional development program.

The purposes of the study were to determine the impact of middle school mathematics teachers’ content knowledge and teachers’ mathematics pedagogical knowledge

Participants, method, design, course & duration

Aim(s) of the study

Teachers’ mathematics content knowledge was a better predictor of student achievement than mathematics pedagogical knowledge;

•

•

•

Professional development showed improved student outcomes where the PD was conducted schoolwide and over an extended period of time; Students benefitted more from more experienced teachers (those that had more PD); Long-term, schoolwide teacher PD supports the development of teachers’ sense of efficacy.

•

•

•

and teaching and to receive guidance from experts; Teachers perceived middle school as the ‘last chance’ for struggling readers; Teachers need more and ongoing support to improve practice.

Findings/Outcome

on student achievement and (b) compare the effect of the degree to which teachers received reform-oriented professional development activities on student achievement.

•

•

The data set included 100,000 students • and their teachers resulting in a stratified national probability sample. Students’ results from National Center of Educational Statistics were merged with teacher survey results from NAEP. The teacher survey provided information on teacher characteristics • including educational background, preparation to teach specific content, participation in professional development activities, and use of teaching strategies.

Teachers who reported participating in fewer professional development activities had students with higher scores than those students whose teachers reported participating in more professional development; Certain topics for professional development activities were more effective than others in raising student achievement—training in content standards, the available curriculum materials, instructional methods for teaching mathematics, and effective use of calculators in mathematics instruction where found to be positively related to student achievement; Teachers who received a small extent of professional development in methods for assessing students performed at the same level as teachers receiving no training at all, whereas students whose teachers received more than a small extent of training were found to have lower achievement; Professional development in strategies for teaching mathematics to students from diverse backgrounds produced student achievement levels lower than if teachers received no training at all, regardless of the extent of the training they received.

Katherine Main and Donna Pendergast

and explore where the research was conducted; what approaches, methods, and technology were used; and the main research findings in each of the identified studies.

Research Generators: Where the Research Was Conducted Of the nine studies that met the inclusion criteria for this study, one was conducted in Australia and the remainder were conducted in the United States of America.

Nature of the Research: Approaches, Methods, and Technologies Table 16.2 provides a description of the methodology and the participant numbers involved in each of the studies we included. The nine studies varied in size and focus, ranging from smallscale studies with 10 teachers to large-scale studies with more than 100,000 participants. The studies covered a range of topics including specific teacher pedagogic skills (n = 2), mathematics teaching (n = 2); science teaching (n = 2); English teaching (n = 2); and technology-enhanced learning (n = 1). Seven of the nine studies reported the results of specific CPD programs. Of those seven studies, three examined the impact of the CPD through pre- and post-surveys or tests of students with all three studies reporting improved academic outcomes for students in the post-test results. Within the studies that focused on specific CPD programs, most found that teachers reported themselves as either “unprepared or underprepared,” “overwhelmed,” or having “struggled to implement” or “lacking a clear understanding” of practices within the middle years. However, after the targeted CPD program, all seven studies found teachers reported an increased sense of efficacy in relation to the particular CPD focus. Of the other two studies we reviewed, one study (Flowers et al., 2002) explored the perceived gap in teachers’ initial training to teach in the middle years and highlighted the need for CPD, and one largescale study (Telese, 2012) linked self-reported training background and participation in CPD activities with student outcomes on a standardized test. The study by Telese (2012) was the only study to report that higher levels of CPD potentially had a negative effect on student outcomes. However, the authors of this study cautioned that more research was needed to find the reasons underpinning this outcome.

Findings from the Research Studies The studies confirmed what the general CPD research has said about the effectiveness of sustained, contextually embedded CPD, stressing the importance of the classroom as the context of the professional development. Lakin and Wallace (2015) and Yost and Vogel (2007) stressed that professional development should involve teachers in identifying what they need to learn and in developing learning experiences in which they will be involved. Professional development must be regarded as a lifelong process, and it should be primarily school-based and built into the dayto-day work of teaching that ultimately helps all students achieve at high levels. Nevertheless, little is known about how the most effective PD influences teachers’ learning and how teachers perceive PD that goes beyond the typical PD session. The study of literature suggests that there is awareness that middle level students have the capacity to learn, grow, and achieve to their highest potential if they have competent and caring teachers to foster this growth. Well-articulated and authentic professional development is thus required to move teachers to higher performance levels and boost student achievement. However, one-size-fits-all solutions often fail to distinguish between the needs of different teachers and their teaching styles, between different schools’ or classrooms’ contexts, or between the needs of novice and experienced teachers. 230

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Flowers and colleagues (2002) noted that most middle grades teachers do not have middle grades credentials or receive specialized training as part of their pre-service education. They further highlighted that in a typical professional development session, most teachers would attend a two-hour session on some aspect of instruction during which the presenter described a variety of teaching strategies to be implemented. Teachers’ level of engagement within the session was limited and not active, and the usefulness of the session in terms of sustained effect on practice was not reviewed as, in general, there was no reporting post the professional development session on how teachers implemented what they learned. They reported that some teachers tried one or two activities that were suggested, but on the whole, in the day-to-day pressures of the classroom, teachers tended to revert back to their familiar practice. However, Flowers and colleagues (2002) stressed that the importance of CPD was clearly understood by teachers and the common scenario described above did not lead to the expansion of teaching capacity, increased discernment, escalating enthusiasm, or more complex wisdom. However, Hilton et al. (2016) pointed out that that if teachers are not well prepared to teach the content in appropriate ways, they may make the same mistakes and experience the same conceptual difficulties as their students. Their research addressed the effect of teacher professional development on mathematics students’ learning and outcomes revealing that teachers’ participation in professional development and subsequent targeted teaching could accelerate students’ development of proportional reasoning. The studies by Monet and Etkina (2008) and Lakin and Wallace (2015) suggested that inquiry-based teaching promotes students’ engagement in problem-solving and investigation as they learn science concepts. Lakin and Wallace (2015) argued that given the prominence of inquiry in professional development experiences, educational evaluators need strong tools to detect its intended use in the classroom. Current practice in science teacher education promotes the use of inquiry in the teaching of science. However, the literature suggests that many science teachers hold incomplete or incorrect conceptions of inquiry. Teachers, therefore, may believe they are providing more inquiry experiences than they are, reducing the positive impact of inquiry on science interest and skills. Monet and Etkina (2008) found that teachers have difficulties reflecting on their learning and posing meaningful questions. The teachers who could describe how they reasoned from evidence to understand a concept had the highest learning gains. In contrast, those teachers who seldom or never described learning a concept by reasoning from evidence showed the smallest learning gains. Green, Gonzalez, López-Velásquez, and Howard (2013) and Bryant, Linan-Thompson, Ugel, Hamff, and Hougen (2001) argued that some teachers in their study reported being exposed to teaching strategies and skills for academic reading and vocabulary teaching for the first time through the PD intervention. The teachers in the study expressed that their participation in the vocabulary curriculum intervention expanded their knowledge and that participating in such CPD provided them with an example of how his new knowledge of morphology transferred into some teachers’ lessons and helped his students unlock the meaning of scientific words. This analysis suggests that learning to reflect on one’s learning should be an integral part of teachers’ professional development experiences. Bryant et al.’s (2001) study involved extensive staff development in the Direct Instruction Reading Program, with follow-up training, practice sessions, coaching, observations, and immediate feedback. This study was conducted to determine whether teachers implemented the reading program appropriately, teachers’ instructional practices changed during the school year, and students’ reading achievement improved. Results indicated that the participants did implement the program as instructed, the teachers’ use of instructional practices improved over the school year in which the study was conducted, and all of the participating classes showed significant increases in student achievement on the post-test. 231

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Furthermore, Yost and Vogel (2007) pointed out a direct connection between growth in teaching expertise, as measured by Marzano’s Dimensions of Learning, and student academic achievement. Their study argued that personalized and needs-based CPD that focused on participants’ teaching skills based on Marzano’s Dimensions of Learning positively influenced their teaching behaviors and self-reported use of standards-based practices. The findings from their study clearly showed that intervention at the school level with teachers enhanced the instruction of participating teachers in a short period of time. Class scores of the participating teachers on the benchmark assessments were higher compared to non-participants’ class scores, with the exception of fifth grade reading. Similar findings were observed in the study conducted by Blanchard, LePrevost, Tolin, and Gutierrez (2016) that focused on a teacher technology-enhanced CPD project. They reported that teachers’ beliefs about teaching and comfort with using technologies changed significantly over the course of their participation in the CPD program, addressing calls in the literature for assisting teachers with their technology integration (Gerard, Varma, Corliss, & Linn, 2011; Sancho, 2010). However, there were no statistically significant findings overall for changes in teachers’ practices, for their pedagogical discontentment, or for their subject-specific self-efficacy. Indeed, the findings indicated that teachers were self-efficacious in their subject matter teaching and had teaching that was predominantly teacher centered, rather than having a focus on the learner, both before and during the CPD. Despite sustained teacher professional development that modeled and promoted reform-based teaching, the teachers in this rural, high-poverty setting were resistant to major changes in their instructional methods, in concert with findings by Goodpaster, Adedokun, & Weaver (2012) and consistent with, on average, their lack of pedagogical discontentment (Southerland, Sowell, Blanchard, & Granger, 2011). Interestingly, despite a lack of evidence for teachers’ adoption of more reform-based practices, students who were in the teachers’ classrooms benefited from the added technology resources, as evidenced by higher assessment scores in mathematics and science compared to students who were not in classrooms of teachers who undertook the CPD. This was further supported by the results of the study by Telese (2012) that indicated the mathematics content knowledge of teacher participants had a larger role in predicting student achievement than mathematics pedagogical knowledge. Also, teachers who reported participating in fewer professional development activities had students with higher scores than those students whose teachers reported participating in more professional development. The findings show that although content knowledge is important for teachers to possess, any more than a small extent of professional development in this area was associated with lower achievement when compared to teachers not receiving any training. However, a surprising result was students of teachers who received a small extent of professional development in methods for assessing students performed at the same level as teachers receiving no training at all, whereas students whose teachers received more than a small extent of training were found to have lower achievement. The authors raised questions regarding these reasons and potential validity of these findings and recommended further investigation into teachers’ beliefs and attitudes that were not part of the study.

Conclusion Through the rigorous search strategy, nine articles exploring the effectiveness of professional development targeting middle years teachers were reviewed to identify the types of professional development practices that have the most significant impact on outcomes for middle years learners. Within the reviewed studies, only three (33%) included student achievement data as a measure of the CPD’s effectiveness. With CPD accounting for a significant amount of time and money from a school’s yearly budget, measuring the effectiveness of CPD programs through changes in teachers’ attitudes and beliefs (sense of efficacy) or students’ improved outcomes 232

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(academic or affective) should be a key component of the CPD delivery. Where teachers report an increased sense of efficacy or improved student outcomes as a direct result of CPD, more effective CPD approaches can be designed and future programs will potentially lead to greater teacher efficacy and improved student outcomes. To determine what makes professional development effective in bringing about change in teacher learning and teacher practice, educational researchers should focus on measurable factors that can be taken into account while designing professional development to meet the needs of teachers delivering instruction. Many of the teachers currently working in middle years classrooms have not had specific training to prepare them to work with this age group and report being underprepared and overwhelmed by the day-to-day challenges of the classroom. Targeted CPD is key for teachers to continue to develop and enhance their pedagogical and content knowledge to meet the demands of the classroom and to improve student outcomes. However, the professional development activities offered must meet the current needs of teachers and be structured; focused on academic content, curriculum and skills; and have a culture of inquiry to support teachers’ skill development. Moreover, Coleman and Goldenberg (2011) asserted that “professional development cannot be of the one-shot workshop variety” but “must be embedded in the work lives of teachers and the routines of teaching” (p. 161). The studies included in this review that reported positive outcomes all described professional development programs that linked into the daily lives of teachers’ practice. It is concerning that with most teacher registration authorities mandating that teachers participate in at least 20 hours of CPD annually, so few studies have been reported specifically on CPD in the middle years. A key recommendation of this review is that research measuring the effectiveness of CPD becomes a rule rather than the exception in middle years education, and that this research informs and guides effective CPD for teachers working within the middle years of schooling.

References Antoniou, P., & Kyriakides, L. (2011). The impact of a dynamic approach to professional development on teacher instruction and student learning: Results from an experimental study. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 22(3), 291–311. Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. Bandura, A. (1993). Perceived self-efficacy in cognitive development and functioning. Educational Psychologist, 28(2), 117–148. Bandura, A. (1994). Self-efficacy. In V. S. Ramachaudran (Ed.), Encyclopedia of human behavior (Vol. 4, pp. 71– 81). New York, NY: Academic Press. Barber, M., & Mourshed, M. (2007). How the world‘s best-performing schools systems come out on top. London, UK: McKinsey & Company. Blanchard, M. R., LePrevost, C. E., Tolin, A. D., & Gutierrez, K. S. (2016). Investigating technology-enhanced teacher professional development in rural, high-poverty middle schools. Educational Researcher, 45(3), 207–220. Bryant, D. P., Linan-Thompson, S., Ugel, N., Hamff, A., & Hougen, M. (2001). The effects of professional development for middle school general and special education teachers on implementation of reading strategies in inclusive content area classes. Learning Disability Quarterly, 24, 251–264. Coleman, R., & Goldenberg, C. (2011). Promoting literacy development. The Education Digest, 76(6), 14. Dana, N. F. (2010). Teacher quality, job-embedded professional development, and school-university partnerships. Teacher Education and Practice, 23(3), 321–325. Darling-Hammond, L. (1999). Target time toward teachers. Journal of Staff Development, 20(2), 31–36. Darling-Hammond, L. (2008). Teacher learning that supports student learning. Teaching for intelligence, 2(1), 91–100. Darling-Hammond, L., Wei, R. C., Andree, A., Richardson, N., & Orphanos, S. (2009). Professional learning in the learning profession: A status report on teacher development in the United States and abroad. Dallas, TX: National Staff Development Council.

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Desimone, L. M. (2009). Improving impact studies of teachers’ professional development: Toward better conceptualizations and measures. Educational Researcher, 38(3), 181–199. Edwards, R., & Nicoll, K. (2006). Expertise, competence and reflection in the rhetoric of professional development. British Educational Research Journal, 32(1), 115–131. Flowers, N., Mertens, S. B., & Mulhall, P. F. (2002). Four important lessons about teacher professional development. Research on middle school renewal. Middle School Journal, 33(5), 57–61. Friedman, A., & Phillips, M. (2004). Continuing professional development: Developing a vision. Journal of Education and Work, 17(3), 361–376. Gerard, L. F., Varma, K., Corliss, S. B., & Linn, M. C. (2011). Professional development for technology-enhanced inquiry science. Review of Educational Research, 81(3), 408–448. Goe, L. (2007). The link between teacher quality and student outcomes: A research synthesis. Washington, DC: National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality. Retrieved February 27, 2018, from http:// www.ncctq.org/publications/LinkBetweenTQandStudentOutcomes.pdf. Goodpaster, K. P. S., Adedokun, O. A., & Weaver, G. C. (2012). Teachers’ perceptions of rural STEM teaching: Implications for rural teacher retention. Rural Educator, 33(3), 9–22. Retrieved from http://files .eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ987621.pdf. Green, J. D., Gonzalez, E. M., López-Velásquez, A. M., & Howard, E. R. (2013). Hands-on professional development: middle school teachers’ experiences with a curriculum intervention research project: This study explores the benefits of a university-school partnership that impacted 26 middle school teachers in four urban schools. Middle School Journal, 45(2), 27–32. Guskey, T. R. (2000). Evaluating professional development. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Guskey, T. R., & Sparks, D. (2004). Linking professional development to improvements in student learning. In E. M. Guyton & J. R. Dangel (Eds.), Teacher education yearbook XII: Research linking teacher preparation and student performance (pp. 11–22). Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company. Guskey, T. R., & Yoon, K. S. (2009). What works in professional development? Phi Delta Kappan, 90(7), 495–500. Hanushek, E. A., & Rivkin, S. G. (2006). Teacher quality. In A. Hanushek & F. Welch (Eds.), Handbook of the economics of education (pp. 1051–1078). Amsterdam: North Holland. Harris, D. N., & Sass, T. R. (2009). The effects of NBPTS-certified teachers on student achievement. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 28(1), 55–80. Hattie, J. (2012). Visible learning for teachers. New York, NY: Routledge. Hilton, A., Hilton, G., Dole, S., & Goos, M. (2016). Promoting middle school students’ proportional reasoning skills through an ongoing professional development programme for teachers. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 92(2), 193–219. Lakin, J. M., & Wallace, C. S. (2015). Assessing dimensions of inquiry practice by middle school science teachers engaged in a professional development program. Journal of Science Teacher Education, 26(2), 139–162. MacBeath, J. (2011). Education of teachers: The English experience. Journal of Education for Teaching, 37(4), 377–386. Main, K., & Pendergast, D. (2015). Core features of effective continuing professional development for the middle years: A tool for reflection. RMLE Online, 38(10), 1–18. Monet, J. A., & Etkina, E. (2008). Fostering self-reflection and meaningful learning: Earth science professional development for middle school science teachers. Journal of Science Teacher Education, 19(5), 455–475. National Staff Development Council. (2001). Standards for Staff Development (Revised). Oxford, OH: NSDC. Pendergast, D. (2017). Middle years education. In D. Pendergast, K. Main, & N. Bahr (Eds.), Teaching middle years: Rethinking curriculum, pedagogy and assessment (3rd ed., pp. 3–20). Sydney, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Pianta, R. C., Mashburn, A. J., Downer, J. T., Hamre, B. K., & Justice, L. (2008). Effects of web-mediated professional development resources on teacher–Child interactions in pre-kindergarten classrooms. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 23(4), 431–451. Pickering, C., & Byrne, J. (2014). The benefits of publishing systematic quantitative literature reviews for PhD candidates and other early-career researchers. Higher Education Research & Development, 33, 534–548. Pickering, C., Grignon, J., Steven, R., Guitart, D., & Byrne, J. (2015). Publishing not perishing: How research students transition from novice to knowledgeable using systematic quantitative literature reviews. Studies in Higher Education, 40, 1756–1769. Sancho, J. M. (2010). Digital technologies and educational change. In Hargreaves, A., Lieberman, A., Fullan, M. & Hopkins, D. (Eds.), Second international handbook of educational change (pp. 433–444). Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer

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Southerland, S. A., Sowell, S., Blanchard, M., & Granger, E. M. (2011). Exploring the construct of pedagogical discontentment: A tool to understand science teachers’ openness to reform. Research in Science Education, 41(3), 299–317. Stinson, M. (2009). ‘Drama is like reversing everything’: Intervention research as teacher professional development. RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 14(2), 225–243. Telese, J. A. (2012). Middle school mathematics teachers’ professional development and student achievement. The Journal of Educational Research. 105(2), 102–111. Tschannen-Moran, M., Hoy, A. W., & Hoy, W. K. (1998). Teacher efficacy: Its meaning and measure. Review of educational research, 68(2), 202–248. Tschannen-Moran, M., & Woolfolk-Hoy, A. (2007). The differential antecedents of self-efficacy beliefs of novice and experienced teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education, 23(6), 944–956. Wallace, M. R. (2009). Making sense of the links: Professional development, teacher practices, and student achievement. Teachers College Record, 111(2), 573–596. Yoon, K. S., Duncan, T., Lee, S. W.-Y., Scarloss, B., & Shapley, K. (2007). Reviewing the evidence on how teacher professional development affects student achievement (Issues & Answers Report, REL 2007–No. 033). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest. Retrieved from http:// ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs Yost, D. S., & Vogel, R. (2007). Urban professional development working to create successful teachers and achieving students. Middle School Journal, 38(3), 34–40.

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PART V

Microcontexts of Middle Level Education Praxis

17 LESS DOING, MORE BEING A Conceptual Framework for Cultural Responsiveness in Middle Grades Education Kimberly J. Stormer, Cory T. Brown, and Pamela Correll

As middle level education evolves, so will the definitions that provide structure for pre-service and in-service teachers who are in the field. These definitions should go beyond curriculum, instruction, and assessment (Brinegar, 2015) and be reflective of the heterogeneous mixture of middle grades students so middle level schools can truly be developmentally responsive, challenging, equitable, and empowering (National Middle School Association [NMSA], 2010). It is, therefore, necessary for the future of middle level education to build upon the current literature that advocates for the cultivation of culturally relevant dispositions and the implementation of culturally responsive practices (Gay, 2010a; Ladson-Billings, 1995b, 2009). Emanating from the review conducted by Kennedy, Brinegar, Hurd, and Harrison (2016), this chapter will deepen the understanding of cultural responsiveness by providing a foundation for a culturally responsive conceptual framework at the middle level. It will answer three questions: 1. What is cultural responsiveness in middle level education? 2. What does it mean to be an effective culturally responsive middle school? 3. What research methodologies and methods best capture middle level educators’ successes with marginalized students?

Opportunities and Challenges Shaping Middle Level Education The terms “culturally relevant” and “culturally responsive” have been used interchangeably to denote the use of cultural frames of reference in the education of students whose culture is not a part of the visible curriculum. As such, researchers, teacher educators, and in-service and preservice teachers use these terms to ensure that they include their students’ cultures in the curriculum. Upon closer examination, many use these terms incorrectly, often failing to include an understanding of the foundational work of scholars Ladson-Billings (1995a; 1995b, 2006, 2009), Gay (2002, 2010b), Irvine (2003, 2010), and others (e.g., Dodo Seriki & Brown, 2017). Gay 239

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(2002) defined culturally responsive teaching as “using the cultural characteristics, experiences, and perspectives of ethnically diverse students as conduits for teaching them more effectively” and noted that students find greater meaning in what they are learning when it is “situated within [their] lived experiences and frames of reference” (p.160). Ladson-Billings (2009) focused on pedagogy that “empowers students using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes” (p. 20). While these definitions are very similar, there are slight differences between the two: Geneva Gay focuses on teaching and primarily seeks to influence competency and methods, describing what a teacher should be doing in the classroom to be culturally responsive. Gloria Ladson-Billings focuses on pedagogy and primarily seeks to influence attitudes and dispositions, describing a posture a teacher might adopt that, when fully embodied, would determine planning, instruction, and assessment. Although many researchers use these terms interchangeably, it is important to differentiate the two for focusing on two separate, but complementary, types of outcomes: teaching affects competence and practice whereas pedagogy affects attitude and disposition. (Aronson & Laughter, 2016, p. 166) Education preparation providers (EPPs) must, therefore, differentiate these terms and understand the importance of developing a culturally relevant disposition. Irvine (2010) noted that culturally responsive teaching should not be relegated to a bag of tricks or a list of steps and strategies. Ladson-Billings (2006) supported this point, noting that doing culturally relevant teaching is less important than being culturally relevant, which creates a struggle for many educators. Often times, pre-service and in-service teachers want teacher educators and facilitators to provide an overview of how to do culturally relevant and responsive teaching; however, Ladson-Billings (1995b) noted that there are no definitive steps or strategies to become culturally relevant because it occurs based on the attitudes and beliefs the teacher develops. Milner (2017) posited that culturally relevant educators see culture as an asset as opposed to a detriment to their students’ educational achievement. Therefore, it is important to reiterate that educators must understand the foundation of culturally relevant and responsive teaching to engage P-12 students by developing learning experiences that reflect who they are as individuals.

Unsolved Problems in Middle Level Education According to the Association for Middle Level Education, two essential attributes of effective middle level education are “equitable” and “empowering” (NMSA, 2010). However, the dearth of literature in the field demonstrating effective ways to foster culturally relevant dispositions (LadsonBillings, 1995b, 2009) and implement culturally responsive practices (Gay, 2010b) amongst middle level practitioners remains an under-examined topic. Therefore, the lack of a consistent, shared conceptual framework of culturally responsiveness at the middle level continues (Kennedy, Brinegar, Hurd, & Harrison, 2016). Without moving the field to more intense critical self-reflection (Howard, 2003) in which teacher educators, in-service educators, and pre-service teachers address their personal biases as a method for changing their dispositions, middle level education has the propensity “to continue to relegate students to the school-to-prison-pipeline, or, at the very least, a life of unfulfilled promise” (Williams, 2018, p. 2). EPPs must begin to cultivate a culture of culturally relevant and culturally responsive teachers. The Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) expects EPPs to embed and demonstrate proficiency in diversity within all of the accreditation standards (CAEP, 2015). However, in its efforts to cultivate diversity through these embedded proficiencies, CAEP neglects to 240

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consider that teacher educators may not have addressed their biases. The population of university EPP faculty reflects the predominantly White teacher workforce demographic (Myer, 2016; National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2017), so faculty likely continue to engage preservice teachers in “few high quality opportunities for guided practice in self-reflection” (Gay & Kirkland, 2003, p. 182). Allen, Hancock, Starker-Glass, and Lewis (2017), noted the oversimplification of the definition of diversity in the CAEP standards, specifically in Standard 2, which addresses field and clinical experiences. They stated, “many teacher education programs cannot claim exemplary or even basic proficiency in CRP when teacher candidates’ mindsets, dispositions, and, ultimately, effectiveness in classrooms with diverse student populations demonstrate otherwise” (p. 7). While CAEP’s optimism is laudable, it is important to note that without stringent measures that assess more than the number of faculty of Color hired and the number of marginalized students recruited, these efforts do not dismantle implicit bias and the colorblind mindset. Howard (2003) contended that teacher educators must “help pre-service teachers critically analyze important issues such as race, ethnicity, and culture and recognize how these important concepts shape the learning experience for many students” (p. 195). This is an essential component of culturally responsiveness because it will not allow pre-service teachers the opportunity to perpetuate the “liberal oriented insights without truly engaging in the complex, arduous, self-reflection processes” that culturally relevant dispositions and culturally responsive practices demand (Bissonette, 2016, p. 10). For example, current literature taught in middle level education programs emphasizes traditional middle school concepts such as flexible scheduling, interdisciplinary planning, advisory, and teambuilding exercises to account for the interconnectedness of middle level students (Jackson & Davis, 2000; NMSA, 2010). Edwards, Kemp, and Page (2014) surveyed 144 university faculty about their implementation of the middle school philosophy and found that these faculty, “still believe strongly in the key concepts underlying the middle school concept” (p.19) and in the continuation of the middle school concept. Thus, university faculty may tend to “maintain the status quo” while neglecting to engage pre-service teachers in confronting the deeper issues of marginalization of minority students (Ladson-Billings, 2006; MacBain, Green, & Burtram, 2017; Williams, 2018). The process for culturally relevant dispositions and culturally responsive practices begins with university faculty engaging in critical self-reflection to address personal biases. This ensures that teacher educators prepare pre-service teachers who provide an equitable and empowered education, especially at the middle level because they will be able to guide pre-service teachers through their dispositional changes. In-service middle level teachers participate in professional development that promotes collaboration, relevance, shared decision making, and supportive school cultures (Bickmore, 2013). These concepts are understood to be the key components of high quality middle grades education, and they continue to support the dominant understanding in the field regarding developmentally responsive practice (Brighton, 2007; NMSA, 2010). However, professional development for in-service teachers centered on developmentally responsive instruction that looks at the student population as a whole does not adequately consider students’ individual cultural identities. Apple and Beane (2007) indicated their concern for education at the middle level is not teachers understanding the integration of subject areas, but the integration of subject areas that promote a democratic curriculum rooted in social justice.

Unanswered Questions in Middle Level Education One of the most pressing concerns for middle level practitioners, school administrators, and policy makers is the persistent opportunity gaps between middle class, White students and their culturally and linguistically diverse peers. For a number of years, scholars have advocated culturally responsive approaches to meet the learning needs of all students (Banks, 2008; Gay, 2002; 241

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Ladson-Billings, 1995a). Culturally responsive instruction (CRI) has been conceptualized as “instructional practices that connect learning to the cultural knowledge and experiences of students and that draws on students’ cultural and linguistic strengths and frames of reference in instruction, thereby resulting in higher levels of student achievement” (Powell, Cantrell, MaloJuvera, & Correll, 2016, p. 3). Researchers have investigated teachers’ implementation of CRI and confirmed benefits to student engagement and performance (Aronson & Laughter, 2016; Nykiel-Herbert, 2010; Sleeter, 2011). Powell and colleagues (2016) examined teachers’ implementation of CRI and found significant impacts on students’ reading and math scores on the Measures of Academic Progress assessment (Northwest Evaluation Association, 2013), with effects on math performance (p < .001; η2 = .12) more pronounced than effects on reading performance (p < .05, η2 = .02). When teachers utilize students’ cultural backgrounds within the curriculum, students become more engaged. However, implementation of CRI remains a challenge as middle level educators grapple with issues of standardization, prescribed curricula, and commercialization.

Cultural Responsiveness in Middle Grades Education Cultural Responsiveness and Interconnectedness Students in middle grades face unique challenges related to physical, socio-cognitive, and social factors. Learners benefit when teachers engage in culturally responsive practices and establish positive relationships with their students while acknowledging and respecting students’ cultural backgrounds and diverse experiences (Gay, 2002; Ladson-Billings, 2000). In culturally responsive classrooms, students support one another in learning (Berry, 2006), and respectful interactions among students are the norm (Ladson-Billings, 1994; Treisman, 1992). Creating welcoming, family-like classroom environments reduces anxiety and provides a comfortable space for all students to take risks as they engage in academic tasks. Thus, the middle school concept that advocates the use of heterogeneous, multi-age groupings to promote positive collaborative relationships among students is consistent with and furthered through culturally responsive approaches. Middle grades teachers need “thorough knowledge of the specific cultures of different ethnic groups, how they affect learning behaviors, and how classroom interactions and instruction can be changed to embrace these differences” (Gay, 2002, p. 114). Culturally responsive practitioners recognize and affirm students’ ethnic and racial identities, incorporate students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds into classroom conversations, and provide multicultural texts and other materials that include characters representing diverse cultures (Au, Caroll, & Scheu, 1997). Teachers who engage in CRI consistently hold high expectations for students for engagement in classroom events and achievement at high levels. In culturally responsive classrooms, teachers convey attitudes of care toward students that communicate: “This may be hard for you, but I know you can do it. Try. I’m here to help” (Rightmyer, 2011, p. 17). A core element of middle level education is family-community involvement (NMSA, 2010), a goal that is consistent with culturally responsive instruction. Culturally responsive approaches emphasize building home-school connections, thereby creating meaningful associations that support student learning. Collaborative relationships between families and teachers are linked to increased academic achievement (Hidalgo, Bright, Epstein, Siu, & Swap, 1995; Levine & Lezotte, 1995), positive attitudes toward learning (Grantham, Frazier, Roberts, & Bridges, 2005), longer time spent in school, and higher educational aspirations (Matuszny, Banda, & Coleman, 2007). Rather than viewing parents as sources of classroom support who help with classroom chores, volunteer at school events, or assist on field trips, culturally responsive teachers engage in conversations with parents to learn about the student and their family, parents’ skills and talents, and 242

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their thoughts about the most effective ways to help the student learn (Seitz, 2011). As they learn about families’ funds of knowledge, teachers recognize and affirm students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds and discover connections that build bridges between students’ classroom experiences and out-of-school practices (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005). Culturally responsive middle level teachers also recognize the value of incorporating frequent opportunities for students to participate in instructional conversations as part of their regular classroom instruction (Center for Research on Education, Diversity, & Excellence, 2013). Academic discourse has been connected with increased student motivation (Johnson, 2011), higher levels of engagement (Goldenberg, 1991; Robbins, 2001; Stovall, 2006), and opportunities for critical analysis (Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2002). Strategies for academic conversations include reducing the amount of teacher talk to encourage student conversations, listening to assess student learning, and prompting students to support their views with text and other forms of evidence. Students need to acquire knowledge about “the hegemonic system that privileges some languages and discourses over others” (Powers, 2011, p. 207), thereby prompting personal empowerment (Delpit, 1988). As students participate in extended conversations and critical dialogue with their peers, they develop linguistic competence by utilizing registers of language appropriate in various contexts (Delpit, 1988; Powell, Cantrell, Correll, & Malo-Juvera, 2017), thus fostering cognitive and social development of middle level learners.

Culturally Responsiveness and Critical Consciousness Culturally responsive practitioners seek to develop students’ critical consciousness and promote student success while empowering students to believe in their abilities to act upon real world problems (Gay, 2002). Aronson and Laughter (2016) synthesized principles espoused by Gay (2002) and Ladson-Billings (1994) and contended that teachers who engage in culturally relevant approaches seek to encourage “critical reflection” as students acquire understandings of their own cultural experiences and those from other cultures, to foster “cultural competence” as students gain knowledge of other cultures, and to provide opportunities for “critique of discourses of power” as students engage in authentic problem-solving as a means of social justice (p. 167). Culturally responsive teaching encompasses connecting instruction with students’ lived experiences and important issues within the school, community, and beyond. Teachers who practice CRI “facilitate student advocacy for their communities by providing opportunities to investigate and take action on issues students have identified as critical” (Carter, 2011, p. 248). In their research review, Aronson and Laughter (2016) investigated studies related to culturally relevant approaches and integrating issues of social justice. For example, Robbins (2001) found that middle level students who participated in academic conversations to critically analyze negative cultural images found in media demonstrated higher levels of engagement. Utilizing hip-hop music to connect with poetry genres enabled students to uncover links to political and social issues as they engaged in critical dialogue (Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2002). Social studies students who used hip-hop lyrics within a social studies thematic unit as a basis for discussions of social issues refined their abilities to conduct critical analyses (Stovall, 2006). In another study, addressing race and power in a history unit facilitated students’ understandings of institutional racism and power issues in political events (Epstein, Mayorga, & Nelson, 2011).

Culturally Responsiveness and Middle Level School Environments Drawing from the framework for multicultural education advocated by Banks (2008), an empowering school culture is evidenced through teachers who hold “high expectations for all students and attitudes toward them” and “respond to them in positive and caring ways” (p. 36). 243

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Culturally responsive middle level schools provide educational equality and foster empowerment for students from diverse racial backgrounds, ethnicities, languages, and social classes (Banks, 2008). School cultures that empower students provide curricula that reflect the “experiences, cultures, and perspectives of a range of cultural and ethnic groups as well as both genders” (Banks, 2008, p. 36). School administrators, teachers, and support staff hold high expectations for students from diverse ethnic and language groups (Ladson-Billings, 1994). Culturally responsive middle level schools encourage instructional practices that draw on students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds, prior learning experiences, and perspectives to make learning meaningful for all learners. They encourage student collaboration and value group achievement (Powell, 2011). Culturally responsive middle level school environments convey attitudes of respect and affirmation for students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Print materials in classrooms and throughout the school reflect diverse student cultures, races, and ethnicities (Au, Caroll, & Scheu, 1997). Assessment strategies are culturally sensitive and evaluate both content knowledge and academic language.

Research Methodologies and Methods Capturing Successes with Marginalized Students1 The cultural frame of reference to embrace culturally relevant dispositions and implementation of culturally relevant practices begins with critical self-reflection (Howard, 2003); an idea consistent with autobiographical and narrative research (Boyd & Noblit, 2015). Gay (2010a) contended that teacher educators should begin a program with pre-service teachers writing assignments that indicate their perceptions of students as an examination of pre-service teachers’ backgrounds and socialization. Although critical reflection may cause discomfort (McIntyre, 2002; Nieto, 2000), confronting one’s beliefs in diversity and achieving self-knowledge is a state of intellectual development (Britzman, 2000; hooks, 1994). Critical self-reflection helps pre-service teachers grapple with issues of beliefs about race (Cochran-Smith, 1995; Gay, 2010b), gender and sexuality (Vavrus, 2009), deconstruction of privilege (McIntyre, 1997; Milner, 2011), and classism (Causey, Thomas, & Armento, 1999). Kennedy, Brinegar, Hurd, and Harrison (2016) called for a conceptual framework for culturally responsiveness to further the effectiveness of culturally responsive teaching at the middle level. Since their call, Milner (2016) used a case study design to explore the perceptions of a Black male science teacher in order to study his culturally responsive teaching practices rather than studying him as just a Black male teacher. The findings “provided educators, pre-service and in-service, with examples of practices that might be analyzed, understood, and conceptualized as culturally responsive—an imperative that moves the theory of culturally responsive pedagogy into the actual practice of it” (Milner, 2016, p. 49). Additionally, Milner (2016) included three essentials needed for transformative classrooms: (a) teachers understanding the importance of individual identity in the classroom (to include their own); (b) teachers must place their work within a social context (i.e., the school, district, and community); (c) teachers should remember learning is intertwined with the cognitive and affective domains of students’ learning experience. Busey and Russell (2016) studied the experiences of Latino/a middle school students in a social studies classroom. Using a phenomenological design, the study found that middle school social studies classrooms rely on a banking system of education because “teachers rely on a nonconstructivist approach (note-taking and rote memorization),” and students identified the lack of cultural diversity and representation that was missing within their social studies classes (p. 8). Stormer (2017) used a case study method to explore the perceptions of African-American males and school writing at the middle level. Findings suggested the use of a writing model rooted in culturally responsive practices and the teacher’s culturally relevant disposition increased 244

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Black male writers academic achievement on standardized testing and their feelings of acceptance within the classroom community. Williams (2018) used a case study approach to hear the voices of four African-American teachers who partook in culturally relevant practices in order to provide a caring environment for students of Color. The study explored teachers’ culturally relevant dispositions through the manner in which they used their learning and community experiences within the Black community to undergird their connections with students of Color, especially Black males. Findings included a framework for middle level teachers to employ that will allow them to foster relationships without “sugarcoating” the curriculum and recognizing student identity as a part of the classroom (p. 11). Mackay and Strickland (2018) used a case study approach to explore the perceptions of a teacher and his students, all identified as struggling learners, and their interaction with assignments, some of which were technology based that explored their lives outside of school. Findings suggested that the teacher’s intentional implementation of culturally responsive practices with his students’ cultural backgrounds aided in building a bridge for students to feel comfortable sharing their experiences and identities with a teacher.

Conclusion: Unasked Questions at the Middle Level The looming question that remains unasked is: Why are middle level teachers not engaging in culturally relevant dispositions and culturally responsive practices? The simple answer is the lack of instruction, development, and emphasis placed upon critical self-reflection (Gay & Kirkland, 2003; Howard, 2003). EPPs continue to mandate multicultural education courses that are celebratory rather than critical (Banks, 1993), while professional development centers on instructional practices that are rooted in curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Gay (2010a) stated, “It is inconceivable that teachers who have negative beliefs about ethnically diverse students and do not use their cultural heritages as valid and viable educational resources can relate to them positively in personal and instructional interactions” (p.150). Thus, as pre-service and in-service teachers continue development that relates to developmentally responsive practices devoid of culturally responsive practices, middle level education has the propensity to remain stagnant because there has not been a shift in focus to developmentally responsive practices that foster group and ethnic cultural identity by means of culturally responsive practices (Busey & Russell, 2016). Although the middle level teaching standards mention that teachers should implement “culturally relevant practices” and “overcome stereotypes that are prevalent about young adolescents,” there are still gaps within the important publications in the field that guide the thinking and practices of middle level educators. This cannot remain ignored if the desire is to provide positive schooling experiences for every student (Brinegar, 2015; NMSA, 2012). The chapter answered the call from Kennedy et al. (2016) to outline a conceptual framework for culturally responsiveness at the middle level. A framework for culturally responsiveness starts with teacher educators who must confront their own biases before they can guide pre-service teachers through the process of a change in their teaching disposition. Likewise, the professional development that in-service teachers receive must move beyond the continued perpetuation of a developmentally responsive education that promotes educating every adolescent and include an emphasis on understanding the cultural identity that every adolescent brings with them to the classroom. This shift would alter middle level philosophy and the essential attributes of middle level education to include a separate heading for culturally responsive education. This will compliment one of the key theoretical frameworks, Erik Erikson’s psychosocial development, that undergirds the philosophy of middle level education. Middle level learners go through Erikson’s fifth stage, identity vs. role confusion, when they seek to construct their identity within their group of peers while acknowledging their 245

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uniqueness (Erikson, 1968). Thus, developmentally responsive practices foster group and cultural identity by means of culturally responsive pedagogy (Busey & Russell, 2016). Finally, those in the field should understand that there are no steps to developing a culturally relevant disposition. Readings and guided instruction can introduce any educator to the process, but the disposition can only be accomplished through critical self-reflection and confronting implicit biases (e.g., race, class, gender, etc.) in an effort to become a better educator for individual students. Without the confronting biases, teacher-student reaction at the middle level will continue to be predicated on teachers’ assumptions of teaching students from the stance of what is developmentally appropriate for every student and drawing on their essentialized conceptions of every students’ cultural backgrounds (Hynds et al., 2016). Ultimately, the conceptual framework for becoming culturally responsive at the middle level is understanding what it means to be culturally responsive. As a whole, the culturally responsive framework is not intended as a method to teach marginalized students; it is a theoretical framework designed to improve student learning, use education as a vehicle to maintain cultural integrity, and provide powerful tools to challenge the status quo in education. In essence, culturally responsiveness disrupts the need to be politically correct and replaces that with the goal that teachers must meet the needs of all students and move their instruction beyond biased perspectives with regard to race, class, gender, socioeconomic status, sexuality, among other things. As Ladson-Billings (2006) noted, “In a very real sense, the question is not how we do it but, rather, How can we not do it?” (p. 45).

Note 1 This heading is a direct reference to the question posed by Kennedy et al. (2016) in their article, Synthesizing Middle Grades on Cultural Responsiveness: The Importance of a Shared Conceptual Framework.

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Rightmyer, E. C. (2011). Classroom caring and teacher dispositions: The heart to teach all students. In R. Powell & E. C. Rightmyer (Eds.), Literacy for all students: An instructional framework for closing the gap (pp. 13–34). New York, NY: Routledge. Robbins, C. (2001). “Por que soy tonot?” Exposing “invisible” interactions in a(n) multiracial (American) classroom. Radical Teacher, 60, 22–26. Seitz, K. A. (2011). Parent collaboration: Developing partnerships with families and caregivers. In R. Powell & E. C. Rightmyer (Eds.), Literacy for all students: An instructional framework for closing the gap (pp. 57–85). New York, NY: Routledge. Sleeter, C. E. (2011). The academic and social value of ethnic studies: A research review (National Education Association). Retrieved from files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED521869.pdf Stormer, K. (2017). Why can’t Tyrone write: Reconceptualizing Flower and Hayes for African-American adolescent male writers, Middle Grades Review, 3(1). Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/mgre view/vol3/iss3/5 Stovall, D. (2006). We can relate: Hip-hop culture, critical pedagogy, and the secondary classroom. Urban Education, 41, 585–602. Treisman, P. U. (1992). Studying students studying calculus: A look at the lives of minority mathematics students in college. College Mathematics Journal, 23, 362–372. Vavrus, M. (2009). Sexuality, schooling, and teacher identity formation: A critcial pedagogy for teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 25(3), 383–390, doi: 10.1016/j.tate.2008.09.002. Williams, T. M. (2018). Do no harm: Strategies for culturally relevant caring in middle level classrooms from the community experiences and life histories of black middle level teachers. Research Middle Level Education Online, 41(6), 1–13, doi:10.1080/19404476.2018.1460232

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18 STARTING WITH THE STUDENTS An Assets-Based Model to Teaching Middle Grades Mathematics Torrey Kulow and Micki M. Caskey

Recommendations for academic programming in middle grades education (e.g., Jackson & Davis, 2000; National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, n.d.; National Middle School Association [NMSA], 2010) advocate that teachers develop and enact curriculum, instruction, and assessment that is responsive to students’ intellectual, social, and emotional developmental needs as well as reflective and inclusive of students’ assets, students’ cultural backgrounds, and discipline-based standards. Although teachers often learn about adolescent development, differentiated instruction, culturally relevant pedagogy, discipline-specific teaching methods, and other related topics in their professional education, many have difficulty developing and enacting academic programming that attends to students’ development, students’ assets, and discipline-based standards in the ways specified by these recommendations. These difficulties may be due to a variety of factors including contextual constraints (e.g., mandated curriculum, pacing guidelines, district- or school-level policies) and a teacher’s personal instructional preferences and beliefs about education. Disciplinary norms and standards also influence academic programming. For example, disciplines such as mathematics tend to emphasize “deficiencies” in students’ performance and classroom instruction (e.g., National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM], 2000, 2014), advocate that teachers implement curricular materials that build on students’ prior knowledge and experiences (e.g., NCTM, 2000), and include “real-world” connections (NCTM, 2000, 2014) without also specifying that prior knowledge, experiences, and “real-world” connections should connect to students’ backgrounds and assets. The current era of standards-based education and accountability prompts teachers to identify and remediate what students do not know as opposed to incorporating and leveraging students’ knowledge, skills, and strengths. In an effort to support middle grades teachers in developing and enacting academic programming (i.e., curriculum, instruction, assessment) that is attentive to students’ development, assets, and cultural background, as well as discipline-based standards, we offer a model suggesting one way that teachers can provide an “assets-based” approach to academic programming. We situate our model in the discipline of mathematics in the United States because it historically emphasized a deficit view of student knowledge and skills and adhered to a set of national content standards and recommendations for teaching. Although we situate our model in one discipline in a specific country, we invite and encourage educators in other disciplines and contexts to adapt our model

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to support the use of an assets-based approach to academic programming. In this chapter, we provide an overview of recommendations for academic programming of middle grades mathematics education and share our “assets-based” model for academic programming.

An Overview of Recommendations for Academic Programming in Middle Grades Mathematics Education in the United States In our view, academic programming of middle grades mathematics education in the United States needs to be informed by policy and recommendations in the fields of middle grades education and mathematics education. Thus, we share recommendations for academic programming in middle grades education and mathematics education put forth by leaders in each field and describe ways that academic programming in middle grades mathematics education reflects these recommendations.

Recommendations for Academic Programming in Middle Grades Education in the United States In 1989, the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development (CCAD) issued Turning Points: Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century—a foundational report that set the stage for focused dialogue about the nature of middle grades education and educating young adolescents (ages 10–14) (Mertens, Anfara, & Caskey, 2007). The Council asserted, “Young adolescents face significant turning points” (p. 8) and reported, “A volatile mismatch exists between the organization and curriculum of middle grade schools and the intellectual and emotional needs of young adolescents” (CCAD, 1989, pp. 8–9). The Council began their extensive work by identifying the qualities they envisioned in a 15-year-old who middle school served well and what they wanted every young adolescent to know, to feel, and to be able to do upon emerging from that educational and schoolrelated experience. They wrote, “Our 15-year-old will be an intellectually reflective person; a person in route to a lifetime of meaningful work; a good citizen; a caring and ethical individual; and a healthy person” (CCAD, 1989, p. 15). To reach this vision, the Council made eight recommendations for middle grades education1 including specific recommendations for academic programming: teaching a core academic program, ensuring success for all students, staffing the middle grades with teachers who are expert at teaching young adolescents, engaging families in the education of young adolescents, and connecting schools with communities. Subsequently, the authors of key middle grades publications promoted comparable recommendations (Jackson & Davis, 2000; National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, n.d.; NMSA, 2010). Following Turning Points (CCAD, 1989), the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform (n.d.) vision statement noted that middle grades youth—young adolescents—“are capable of learning and achieving at high levels” (Para. 1). The Forum’s vision statement also specified three interconnecting priorities that are essential for high performing and successful middle grades schools. Such schools are (a) academically excellent, (b) developmentally responsive, and (c) socially equitable (National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, n.d.). Academically excellent middle grades schools challenge young adolescents to use their minds well and align academic programming to standards that all students meet or exceed, and teachers in such schools use varied instructional practices to challenge and engage all students (Lipsitz & West, 2006). Schools also provide professional development opportunities for educators and time to collaborate with their colleagues to improve pedagogical practices. Educators in developmentally responsive schools are aware of the unique developmental characteristics of young adolescents (e.g., physical, intellectual, social-emotional) and respond to their needs and interests. Developmentally responsive middle grades schools provide access to 251

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programming that support young adolescents’ developmental characteristics and build positive connections with families as partners in their children’s education (Lipsitz & West, 2006). Socially equitable schools are democratic and fair; they provide all students with high-quality teachers, educative experiences, resources (e.g., adaptive technology), and supports (e.g., tutoring, mentoring). Such schools provide “equal access to valued knowledge in all classes and school activities” for all students (Lipsitz & West, 2006, p. 62). These central priorities help ensure that schools are vibrant learning places for young adolescents and the adults who work with them. In Turning Points 2000, Jackson and Davis (2000) echoed the recommendations of the original Turning Points (CCAD, 1989), then detailed ways to enact these recommendations in the middle grades. Notably, Jackson and Davis positioned “ensure success for every student” (p. 24) at the center of the components for middle grades education; they also added more emphasis regarding academic programming. During the years of middle grades reform, NMSA published their influential position statement: This We Believe (NMSA, 1982, 1992, 1995, 2003, 2010). NMSA articulated and advanced how middle grades schools need to be developmentally appropriate for young adolescents. In their latest version, NMSA articulated four essential attributes—developmentally responsive, challenging, empowering, and equitable—for effective middle grades schools (NMSA, 2010).

Recommendations for Academic Programming in Mathematics Education in the United States With the 1989 publication of the Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics, the NCTM ushered in a new era of mathematics curricula and instruction in the United States. This publication recommended a set of national content standards for school mathematics that were later revised in the Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (NCTM, 2000) and Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010). The Principles and Standards and CCSSM also identified mathematics practices in which students should engage when learning mathematics. The CCSSM Standards for Mathematical Practice include: (a) make sense of problems and persevere in solving them; (b) construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others; (c) reason abstractly and quantitatively; (d) model with mathematics; (e) attend to precision; (f) use appropriate tools strategically; (g) look for and make use of structure; and (h) look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning. Subsequently, NCTM released additional publications providing research-based guidelines for the learning and teaching of school mathematics. Their publications included Professional Standards for Teaching Mathematics (NCTM, 1991) and Principles to Action (NCTM, 2014). These publications, along with Principles and Standards, provided a description of mathematics learning and teaching based on constructivist (Piaget, 1977) and sociocultural (Vygotsky, 1978) theories of learning. They framed mathematics students as knowledge-producers and problem-solvers and teachers as facilitators of students’ mathematical investigations that build on students’ prior knowledge. They advocated that teachers support students in developing conceptual understanding and generating their own problem-solving strategies in which they use multiple approaches. Furthermore, students should have opportunities to work collaboratively on tasks and to publicly share, discuss, critique, and connect the strategies they generate. Professional Standards for Teaching Mathematics and Principles to Action specified certain instructional practices that teachers should implement during instruction. Principles to Action advocated teachers use the following practices: establish mathematics goals to focus learning, implement tasks that promote reasoning and problem solving, use and connect mathematical representations, facilitate meaningful mathematical discourse, pose purposeful questions, build procedural fluency from 252

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conceptual understanding, support productive struggle in learning mathematics, and elicit and use evidence of student thinking. NCTM’s publications recommended that mathematics curricula and instruction provide opportunities for students to learn about the mathematics relevant to their everyday lives. This included engaging in lessons that incorporate students’ out-of-school knowledge, skills, and experiences and that support students in using mathematics as a tool (Gutstein & Peterson, 2005) to analyze the world around them and understand how and why certain things happen. For more than 15 years, many scholars have advocated teaching mathematics for social justice (e.g., participants in the Diversity in Mathematics Education Center for Learning and Teaching program,2 Eric Gutstein, investigators on the TEACH Math project3). This type of teaching extends beyond making mathematics relevant for students because it aims to help students “understand, formulate, and address questions and develop analyses of their society,” particularly regarding injustice and inequity, so that they “develop sociopolitical consciousness, a sense of agency, and positive social and cultural identities” (Gutstein, 2003, p. 40).

Current Academic Programming in Middle Grades Mathematics Education in the United States Overall, recommendations for middle grades and mathematics education across the past 30 years have advocated that academic programming align with students’ academic and developmental needs, family- and community-based experiences, and cultural backgrounds as well as the national mathematics standards. While some middle grades teachers have the opportunity to develop the knowledge and skills needed to design and enact this type of academic programming (Howell, Faulkner, Jones, & Carpenter, 2018), many continue to struggle to provide a broad range of support and experiences for their students (Bishop et al., 2018; Cook, DiCicco, & Faulkner, 2018; Mertens, 2018). In mathematics education, the degrees to which teachers use standards-based curricula and instruction varies greatly (NCTM, 2014). The literature provides examples of community-based mathematics lessons (e.g., Gutstein & Peterson, 2005, 2013; RadicalMath, 2007; Stocker, 2006, 2017); however, they are often of limited use to teachers in other contexts as the curricular materials were developed in response to the students in a particular teacher’s class. Thus, new models of academic programming are needed that keep young adolescents’ academic and developmental needs, family- and community-based experiences, and cultural backgrounds as well as the mathematics standards as the central foci.

An Assets-Based Model for Academic Programming in Middle Grades Mathematics Education Given the recommendations detailed above for middle grades and mathematics education, we propose an assets-based model that keeps students’ academic and developmental needs, family- and community-based experiences, cultural backgrounds, and the mathematics standards as the central foci of academic programming. Currently, our model focuses on curriculum and instruction. We intend for the model to support an individual classroom teacher in developing and enacting what we term an assets-based approach to teaching middle school mathematics. The model identifies the student assets a teacher needs to attend to as well as how a teacher can design and enact curriculum and instruction that incorporates and reflects the student assets identified.

Defining an Assets-Based Approach Our lens for student assets is comprised of four components: (a) developmental characteristics of young adolescents, (b) developmental assets of young adolescents, (c) students’ cultural community 253

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wealth, and (d) discipline-specific student strengths. Our lens is distinct from the student-focused, developmentally-focused, and academically-focused lenses used by other scholars (e.g., Jackson & Davis, 2000; Lipsitz & West, 2016; National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, n.d.; NMSA, 2010) because we include and foreground students’ developmental assets and culture as well as discipline-specific strengths. Our lens also integrates and extends other “assets-based” approaches such as those proposed by NCTM Research Committee (2018) that consider students’ language and culture as intellectual resources for teaching and learning mathematics. Not only does our lens includes these intellectual resources, but it also incorporates concepts from the literature on the developmental characteristics and developmental assets of young adolescents.

Developmental Characteristics of Young Adolescents Our framing of student assets includes concepts from the literature on developmental characteristics of young adolescents. Middle grades teachers know that young adolescents—10- to 15-year-olds—possess unique developmental characteristics given the rapid and significant changes they experience. Yet, how can teachers address developmental characteristics? First, educators need to know about young adolescents’ developmental characteristics—physical, intellectual, moral, social-emotional, psychological (Caskey & Anfara, 2014; Scales, 2010). Second, educators need to recognize that the characteristics overlap and interrelate (Scales, 2010) and some categorize them differently. Third, educators need to be aware of tendencies to oversimplify or generalize these characteristics (Kellough & Kellough, 2008). PHYSICAL

Physical development in young adolescents is accelerated and uneven (Kellough & Kellough, 2008; Scales, 2010); it includes bodily growth, physiological maturity, and changes in the brain. These changes may cause young adolescents to feel uncomfortable about differences in their physical development (Simmons & Blyth, 2008). Changes in the brain also occur during the young adolescent—as well older adolescent—years. Significant changes include synaptic pruning that restructures the brain’s neural circuitry (Giedd, 2004) and development of the prefrontal cortex that is responsible for executive functions such as planning, reasoning, anticipating consequences, sustaining attention, and making decisions (Blakemore & Choudhury, 2006). Middle grades teachers need to understand and respond to these changes in young adolescents’ physical development. INTELLECTUAL

In young adolescents, intellectual development may not be as visible as physical development; yet, it is significant (Strahan, L’Esperance, & Van Hoose, 2009). Intellectual development is the increased ability to understand and reason and includes cognition and metacognition. Young adolescents display a wide range of intellectual development and individual interests (Kellough & Kellough, 2008; Scales, 2010); they are curious and interested in their world. When engaged in learning, they prefer topics that have personal relevance (Brighton, 2007), active experiences, and interactions with peers (Kellough & Kellough, 2008). Intellectually, young adolescents begin the transition to higher levels of cognitive function such as abstract reasoning (Flavell, 2011), though there is considerable variability among individuals. As they develop, young adolescents can think through ideological topics, argue their position, and challenge adult dictates (Brighton, 2007)—as they are keen observers of adult behavior (Scales, 2010). Not surprisingly, they show greater interest in authentic, real-world learning experiences than traditional, academic coursework; therefore, middle grades teachers should offer young adolescents opportunities to think independently, set goals, and anticipate their own needs (Kellough & Kellough, 2008). 254

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MORAL

Moral development is the ability for people to make principled choices about how to treat others. The attitudes, beliefs, values, and moral judgments that young adolescents develop often remain with them for life (Brighton, 2007). While they tend to be idealistic, young adolescents typically adopt the values of their parents (Scales, 2010) and possess a strong sense of fairness (Kellough & Kellough, 2008; Scales, 2010). As they transition to the interpersonal conformity stage of moral development (Kohlberg, 1983), they consider other people’s rights and feelings (Scales, 2010). Similarly, they broaden their perspectives and tend to view moral issues in shades of gray rather than in black and white (Caskey & Anfara, 2014). Yet, young adolescents still struggle to make sound ethical choices (Kellough & Kellough, 2008). To support their moral development, middle grades teachers need to guide young adolescents to examine moral dilemmas from multiple perspectives and to consider possible responses (Scales, 2010). SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL

Social-emotional development is a young person’s ability to experience, express, and manage emotions and to establish positive and rewarding relationships with others (Cohen, Onunaku, Clothier, & Poppe, 2005). For young adolescents, social-emotional development includes their desire to affiliate and belong to a peer group (Caskey & Anfara, 2014). Young adolescents become loyal to their peer group (Kellough & Kellough, 2008) and typically seek peer approval rather than adult approval—though they depend on trusted adults (e.g., parents, teachers) (Scales, 2010). According to Erikson (1968), positive social development is the “collective and intergenerational responsibility” of adolescents, parents, teachers, and community members (Roeser, Eccles, & Sameroff, 2000, p. 444). During these years, they tend to face conflicting desires: conformity with their peer group versus maintaining their individuality and unique identity (Brighton, 2007). They also experience both positive (e.g., friendships) and negative (e.g., bullying) peer interactions. When teachers address young adolescents’ social and emotional needs, they see improvements in their learning and academic achievement (Jagers, Harris, & Skoog, 2015; Raphael & Burke, 2012). PSYCHOLOGICAL

Psychological development for young adolescents is about their identity formation and desire for autonomy. According to Erikson (1968), this age group goes through two stages of identity formation: industry versus inferiority (ages 6–12), when youth define themselves by their abilities, and identity versus role confusion (ages 12–18), when youth explore and experiment with roles and experiences. During their quest for identity and autonomy, young adolescents may vacillate between feelings of inferiority and superiority (Kellough & Kellough, 2008; Scales, 2010). Young adolescents also tend to be self-conscious and sensitive to criticism, and they often believe that their feelings and experiences are unique (Scales, 2010). As young adolescents seek their own adult identity, they also seek their peers’ approval (Kellough & Kellough, 2008). To support young adolescents’ psychological growth, middle grades teachers need to remain cognizant of the complexities associated with identity formation and offer experiences that foster students’ need for autonomy.

Developmental Assets of Young Adolescents Our framing of student assets also includes the developmental assets framework developed by The Search Institute (Scales & Leffert, 2004). The Search Institute conducted large-scale studies of the relationship between developmental assets and positive outcomes for youth since 1989 and based the

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developmental assets framework on their research. In 1995, the institute conceptualized the 40 Developmental Assets—“the building blocks that all youth need to be healthy, caring, principled, and productive” (p. 5). These 40 assets consist of external assets—support, empowerment, boundaries and expectations, and constructive time use—and internal assets—commitment to learning, positive values, social competencies, and positive identity. The Search Institute reported that the more developmental assets youth possess, the more likely they are to engage in positive or “thriving” behaviors. Thriving behaviors include succeeding in school, helping others, valuing diversity, maintain good health, exhibiting leadership, resisting danger, delaying gratification, and overcoming adversity. Developmental assets “reflect primary socialization processes” and “represent the everyday acts of involvement and nurturing that are within the grasp of all caring adults” (Scales & Leffert, 2004, p. 13). Using an assets stance, we contend that middle grades teachers can provide educative experiences as well as opportunities for young adolescents to feel valued and self-sufficient through their ongoing communication, guidance, and care. EXTERNAL DEVELOPMENTAL ASSETS

External developmental assets include support, empowerment, boundaries and expectations, and constructive time use. Support External support assets include other adult relationships and caring school climate. Relationships with adults outside the family are associated with adolescent well-being (Scales & Leffert, 2004), and teachers are among these adults. Teacher-student relationships and teachers’ roles in creating a caring school climate are central to young adolescents’ success in school (CCAD, 1989) given the physical, cognitive, moral, psychological, and socialemotional changes that young adolescents experience (Caskey & Anfara, 2014; Scales, 2010). We agree with Scales and Leffert (2004) that the right kind of support (i.e., caring) be offered to youth unconditionally. Empowerment Teachers can play a key part in at least two empowerment assets: (a) viewing youth as resources and (b) safety. Youth need to feel that they play useful roles in the community; that they serve as resources to their classroom and school communities. According to Scales and Leffert (2004), adults need to “provide opportunities for leadership and participation in school and community life that are truly young people’s to direct” (p. 50), and they need to “empower youth by ensuring that they have a chance to add their voices to decisions that affect them” (p. 51). Empowerment also relates to how safe a young person feels. Middle grades teachers can help to ensure that their classrooms are places where young adolescents feel safe both physically and emotionally. Boundaries and expectations Teachers can attend to three boundaries and expectations assets: school boundaries, adult role models, and high expectations. Boundaries are the rules and regulations for youth behavior; expectations are the standards or social norms of behavior. While schools establish and adopt rules and regulations as well as consequences, teachers are typically responsible for communicating these boundaries clearly. Naturally, as youth mature, they seek greater autonomy and the freedom to set their own boundaries (Scales & Leffert, 2004). Early adolescence is an opportune time for young people to share responsibility for setting boundaries with adults such as parents and teachers. Young people need adult role models who “model healthy and constructive behaviors, particularly as adolescents begin to ‘try on’ adult roles themselves” (p. 75). Young people also need

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their parents and teachers to have high expectations for positive behaviors. Research indicates that teachers’ high expectations relate to students’ positive academic performance and academic achievement (Scales & Leffert, 2004). Middle grades teachers have tremendous power to advance classroom and school boundaries, to serve as positive role models, and to hold high expectations for their young adolescent learners. Constructive use of time The constructive use of time is a contributing factor in healthy adolescent development (CCAD, 1992), and middle grades teachers can promote this external asset by incorporating creative activities in their curriculum. Creative activities include experiences with the fine and performing arts as well as the humanities. Importantly, research links young people’s time involved with creative activities to higher self-esteem, higher achievement, and intrinsic motivation (Scales & Leffert, 2004). Importance of external developmental assets Given the research findings (Scales & Leffert, 2004) and the enormity of attending to young adolescents’ developmental assets, we call on middle grades teachers to use these as lenses for making pedagogical and curricular decisions. We maintain that middle grades teachers can make a difference in the lives of young adolescents by considering their developmental assets—each and every day—rather than focusing on their areas for improvement (i.e., deficits).

Students’ Cultural Community Wealth Our framing of student assets also draws on Yosso’s (2005) model of community cultural wealth, which she described as “an array of knowledge, skills, abilities and contacts possessed and utilized by communities of color to survive and resist macro and micro-forms of oppression” (p. 77). Yosso identified six forms of capital: aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational, and resistant. Aspirational capital refers to the ability to maintain hopes and dreams for the future, even in the face of real and perceived barriers. … Linguistic capital includes the intellectual and social skills attained through communication experiences in more than one language and/or style … [It] reflects that idea that Students of Color arrive at school with multiple languages and communication styles. … Familial capital refers to those cultural knowledges nurtured among familia that carry a sense of community history, memory, and cultural intuiting. This form of cultural wealth engages a commitment to community well-being and expands the concept of family to include a more broad understanding of kinship. … Social capital can be understood as networks of people and community resources. These peer and other social contacts can provide both instrumental and emotional support to navigate through society’s institutions [including educational institutions]. … Navigational capital refers to skills of maneuvering through social institutions including educational institutions … [and] resistant capital refers to knowledges and skills fostered through oppositional behavior that challenges inequality. (pp. 77–80) Yosso contested interpretations of Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital that frame “White, middle class culture as the standard” in schooling and asserted that school contexts should value the cultural knowledge of communities of color and look at the “total extent of an individual’s accumulated assets and resources” (p. 77). 257

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Discipline-Specific Student Strengths We use Featherstone and colleagues’ (2011) description of student “math smarts” and Moll, Amanti, Neff, and González’s (1992) description of funds of knowledge to frame disciplinespecific student strengths. Featherstone and colleagues pushed back against the notion that speed is the main asset of a successful mathematician and instead broadened the characteristics that make someone smart in math to include the myriad of skills necessary for engaging in the types of work described in the “Recommendations for Academic Programming in Mathematics Education in the United States” section on page 252. This alternative notion of math smarts included characteristics such as whether a student asks questions when stuck on a problem, clearly explains thinking to others, generates multiple solution strategies, creates a useful mathematical drawing, summarizes the method used by another student, and describes connections among multiple mathematical ideas. Overall, the concept of math smarts seeks to identify and validate the individual strengths for engaging in mathematical activities that each student brings to the classroom. Moll and colleagues (1992) defined of funds of knowledge4 as “historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and well-being” (p. 133). They asserted that in learning experiences situated within home-based contexts, “the ‘teacher’ … will know the child as a ‘whole’ person … taking into account or having knowledge about the multiple spheres of activity within which the child is enmeshed” and that “children … are not passive bystanders … but active participants in a broad range of activities mediated by … social relationships” (Moll et al., 1992, pp. 133–134). Furthermore, when learning in home-based contexts, people are connected to the “social worlds and resources of the community” and “much of teaching and learning is motivated by the children’s interests and questions” (Moll et al., 1992, p. 134). This tends not to be the case when children learn in school-based contexts. Drawing on this description, the concept of students’ funds of mathematical knowledge seeks to identify and validate the ways in which members of each student’s household use mathematics in their daily lives personally and professionally. In addition, it acknowledges the ways each student “actively” participates in mathematical activities in their household, how each student draws on their connections to the “social worlds and resources of the community” when engaging in these mathematical activities, and the interests and questions that underlie each student’s home-based learning experiences.

Our Assets-Based Model for Academic Programming in Middle Grades Mathematics Education Our model is unique because it foregrounds each individual student’s assets as opposed to other models that first start with disciplinary standards and then develop curricula and instruction that make the specified disciplinary standards “relevant” to the particular context—students, school, and community (e.g., Jackson & Davis, 2000; Krajcik, McNeill, & Reiser, 2008). Our Assetsbased Model for Academic Programming in Middle Grades Mathematics Education contains three parts (see Figure 18.1). The first part describes ways the teacher can identify student assets. The second part describes ways the teacher can develop curricular materials (e.g., resources, lessons, units) that integrate student assets and disciplinary standards. The third part describes ways the teacher can enact instruction incorporating and attending to student assets. We intend the model to effect curricula and instruction throughout the school year as opposed to the start or other particular points in the year because students experience rapid and frequent change during early adolescence. Therefore, we envision teachers continually and regularly engaging in all three parts of the model during their time working with each class of students.

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Figure 18.1 Assets-based model to teaching middle school mathematics

Part 1: Identify Student Assets The first part of our model is identifying student assets. Situating student assets at the center of academic programming in middle grades mathematics education means that teachers must know about who each student is as an individual social being, as a young adolescent, as a family and community member, and as a mathematician. It is important for the teacher to develop their knowledge of young adolescents’ physical, intellectual, moral, social-emotional, and psychological development so that they can better understand the characteristics that are particular and unique to this distinct period of human growth. It is equally important for the teacher to continue to develop their understanding of each student’s cultural community wealth, math smarts, and funds of mathematical knowledge so that they can find ways of identifying and validating the knowledge, skills, and strengths that each student brings to the mathematics classroom based on their unique background and life experiences. Relationship-building among the teacher, students, families, and community members is critical to this part of the model for it is through forming a positive relationship with the teacher that students, families, and community members more willingly share their assets and cultural community wealth. Furthermore, because young adolescents feel a tremendous need to belong to a group, it is critical for the teacher to assess the social dynamics at play in their classroom (e.g., friend networks, characteristics, patterns of student participation and group work) so they can keep these dynamics in mind when facilitating student group work. We recommend that the teacher identify student assets on a quarterly basis to ensure that they are aware of the students’ ongoing growth and development because students change rapidly and frequently during this period. We suggest that the teacher uses activities such as the following four to identify student assets throughout the school year. First, we advise that the teacher distribute a self-assessment survey to each student at the start of every quarter that has the students identify their (a) current interests, (b) curiosities and questions about their local context and the broader world, (c) social network in class, and (d) math smarts when working individually and collaboratively.

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Table 18.1 Assets-based Approach Part 1: Identify Students Assets Processes

Suggested Activities

•

•

•

Develop knowledge of young adolescents’ physical, intellectual, moral, social-emotional, and psychological development as well as each student’s cultural community wealth, math smarts, and funds of mathematical knowledge Build relationships with students, families, and community members

• •

•

At the start of every quarter, distribute a self-assessment survey to each student to collect information about students’ current interests, curiosities, and questions about their local context and the broader world, social network in class, and math smarts when working individually and collaboratively Each quarter, spend one lesson per class period documenting the math smarts exhibited by each student At the start of the year and mid-year, distribute a survey or questionnaire to students and their family members/guardians that has them describe aspects of the student’s cultural community wealth and funds of mathematical knowledge Each quarter, engage in informal activities and conversations with members of the students’ families and local community

Second, concurrent to administering each self-assessment survey, we advise that the teacher spend one session per class period documenting the math smarts they observe each student exhibit during the lesson. This might entail making a copy of the seating chart or class roster then writing a short note, code, or icon next to each name indicating the type of math smarts demonstrated by the student at different times during the session (i.e., engaging in independent, small group, and whole-class activities). The teacher can also create a list of identifiable math smarts and add to this list as they gain experience documenting their students’ smarts and spend more time thinking about the array of smarts that students might exhibit when working individually and collaboratively. Third, we advise that the teacher distribute a survey or questionnaire at the start of the year and mid-year for students and their family members/guardians to complete describing aspects of the student’s cultural community wealth and funds of mathematical knowledge. This survey/ questionnaire might include items about the “family structure, parental attitudes toward childrearing, labor history, household activities” (Civil, 1994, p. 4) as well as the child’s social network and family history. Fourth, we advise that the teacher engage in informal activities and conversations with members of their students’ families and local community. This might entail conducting a home visit (as described by González et al., 1995) with selected students (e.g., one student per class), doing a community walk (as described in the “Activity 1: Community Walk” section of “Community Exploration Module” by Turner et al., 2015) in places near the school or where the students spend a significant amount of time, or consulting community members or members of a school-based parent organization to find out about current or ongoing community initiatives and activities. In Table 18.1, we offer a summary of processes and suggested activities for identifying student assets.

Part 2: Develop Curricular Materials that Integrate Student Assets and Disciplinary Standards Situating student assets at the center of academic programming in middle grades mathematics education means that the teacher develops a dynamic curriculum that reflects the assets of

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the students in a given class. We advocate that teachers tailor the curricular materials to the student population with whom the teacher works rather than for a generic student population. In contrast to other curriculum development processes that start with (and privilege) disciplinary standards (e.g., the middle grades standards detailed in the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics), the curriculum development process we envision starts with both disciplinary standards and student assets and generates materials that attend equally to both throughout all lessons. This contrasts with other materials that have some lessons that focus on disciplinary standards and other lessons that focus on student assets. When beginning this type of curriculum design process, the teacher may develop isolated lessons that attend to both disciplinary standards and student assets, but the ultimate goal is for the teacher to consistently create materials and design lessons that integrate disciplinary standards and student assets on a regular basis. The teacher should engage in a curriculum development process that foregrounds students’ intellectual, moral, and social-emotional developmental characteristics as well as the developmental assets of empowerment and constructive use of time, community cultural wealth, and mathematics-specific strengths. The first curriculum design process we recommend is similar to one Eric Gutstein (2003) used when teaching mathematics for social justice in his seventh grade classroom. The teacher uses a standards-based curriculum that has students solve problems in real-life contexts and assigns projects that have students use mathematics to explore and understand topics relevant to their lives. Gutstein (2003) wrote, As a teacher, my larger goals were … to help develop students’ social and political consciousness, their sense of agency, and their social and cultural identities. But I was a mathematics teacher so I had mathematics-specific objectives that were related to these larger goals. (p. 42) He explained that his mathematics-related objectives were to have students “read the world using mathematics,” “develop mathematical power,” and “change dispositions toward mathematics” (Gutstein, 2003, p. 44). He used the phrase “read the world using mathematics” to mean that students understand and act on their surroundings (Gutstein, 2003, p. 44) and use mathematics to understand relations of power, resource inequities, and disparate opportunities between different social groups and to understand explicit discrimination based on race, class, gender, language, and other differences. Further, it means to dissect and deconstruct media and other forms of representation and to use mathematics to examine these various phenomena both in one’s immediate life and in the broader social world, and to identify relationships and make connections between them. (p. 45) He used the Principles and Standards (NCTM, 2000) to define “develop mathematical power.” Students confidently engage in complex mathematical tasks … draw on knowledge from a wide variety of mathematical topics, sometimes approaching the same problem from different mathematical perspectives or representing the mathematics in different ways until they find methods that enable them to make progress … are flexible and resourceful problem solvers … work productively and reflectively … communicate their ideas and results effectively … value mathematics and engage actively in learning it. (p. 3, quoted in Gutstein, 2003, p. 46) 261

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He used the phrase “change dispositions toward mathematics” to mean that he wants his students to “develop a profoundly different orientation toward mathematics than they had after years in public schools and … become more motivated to study and use it” (Gutstein, 2003, p. 46). Gutstein’s (2003) curriculum entailed Mathematics in Context,5 a standards-based curriculum for middle grades students, and a series of “real-world mathematics projects that connected to students’ lives and experiences” (p. 42). He explained that, while the lessons provided in Mathematics in Context used real-life contexts in the problems, the students in his class could not relate to those contexts. Thus, he developed projects that “related to and built on my students’ lived experiences as urban youth from immigrant, Latino, working-class families,” particularly focusing on injustices the students and their families faced (Gutstein, 2003, p. 47). The projects ranged in length from a few days to a few weeks and “all the projects included writing and interpreting data, graphs, pictures, maps or text (often newspaper articles)” (Gutstein, 2003, p. 47). Notably, the projects had students “[look] for relationships between various social issues we studied” (Gutstein, 2003, p. 49) and “make judgments about the complex social situations on the basis of data” (Gutstein, 2003, p. 51). The projects focused on topics including local housing prices and real estate development, the distribution of wealth across continents and within the United States, and trends in standardized test scores across demographic categories. The second curriculum design process we recommend is adapted from James Beane’s (1995) process of curriculum integration. This process entailed first identifying real-life topics relevant to students’ background and experiences, then matching the real-life topics and disciplinary standards to develop integrated curricular materials (e.g., resources, lessons, units). Beane (1995) wrote: Curriculum integration begins with the idea that the sources of curriculum ought to be problems, issues, and concerns posed by life itself … [young people] are engaged in seeking, acquiring, and using knowledge in an organic—not an artificial—way. That is knowledge is called forth in the context of problems, interests, issues, and concerns at hand. And since life itself does not know the boundaries or compartments of what we call disciplines of knowledge, such a context uses knowledge in ways that are integrated. (p. 616) He continued: In practice, curriculum integration begins with the identification of organizing themes or centers for learning experiences. As previously noted, the themes are drawn from real-life concerns, such as conflict; living in the future; cultures and identities; jobs, money, and careers; or the environment. In some cases, the themes are identified by the teachers; in the most sophisticated instances, they merge from collaborative planning with young people. Planning then proceeds directly to creating activities to address the theme and related issues. (Beane, 1995, p. 619) Beane (1995) advanced a radical view that the teacher not identify any disciplinary standards because “the goal is integrative activities that use knowledge without regard for subject or discipline lines … The disciplines of knowledge come into play as resources from which to draw within the context of the theme and related issues and activities” (p. 619). Because our model for academic programming is discipline-focused, and middle grades schools typically separate content areas, we advocate that the teacher match the real-life topics and disciplinary standards to develop integrated curricular materials. However, we encourage teachers to design lessons that draw on cross-disciplinary standards if they have the opportunity to do so. 262

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Table 18.2 Assets-based Approach Part 2: Develop Curricular Materials that Integrate Student Assets and Disciplinary Standards Processes

Suggested Curriculum Development Activities

•

•

•

•

Start with both disciplinary standards and student assets and then generate materials that attend equally to both in all lessons. Foreground the curriculum development process with students’ intellectual, moral, and social-emotional developmental characteristics as well as the developmental assets of empowerment, constructive use of time, community cultural wealth, and mathematics-specific strengths. Use criteria to select tasks for inclusion in the materials/ lessons. ○ Follow the recommendations for tasks specified in the NCTM publications (e.g., multiple starting points). ○ Support students in using and demonstrating a broad array of math smarts and in engaging in the Standards for Mathematical Practice. ○ Encourage the students to think and work independently to attend to students’ intellectual developmental characteristics.

•

Implement a standards-based curriculum that has students solve problems in real-life contexts (e.g., College Preparatory Mathematics Curriculum, Connected Mathematics Project Curriculum, Mathematics in Context Curriculum) and assign supplementary projects that have students use mathematics to explore and understand topics relevant to their lives. Identify real-life topics relevant to students’ background and experiences, then match the real-life topics and disciplinary standards to develop integrated curricular materials (e.g., resources, lessons, units).

We suggest that teachers consider the following three points of emphasis when developing tasks and instructional activities within the curricular materials. First, the tasks should follow the recommendations specified in the NCTM publications. These include designing problems with multiple starting points, supporting students in developing a conceptual understanding of the mathematics concepts, and having students generate multiple strategies for solving problems that make sense to them. In addition, the tasks need to support students in using and demonstrating a broad array of “math smarts” and in engaging in the Standards for Mathematical Practice. In particular, they should construct viable arguments, reason abstractly and quantitatively, model with mathematics, attend to precision, and look for and make use of structure. Finally, the tasks should tap into students’ intellectual developmental characteristic by encouraging the students to think and work independently. In Table 18.2, we list processes and suggested activities for developing curricular materials that integrate student assets and disciplinary standards.

Part 3: Enact Instruction that Incorporates and Attends to Student Assets In the third part of our model, the teacher enacts instruction that incorporates and attends to student assets. Situating student assets at the center of academic programming means the teacher implements instruction that provides opportunities for students to develop a positive identity as a mathematician, to “construct” individually and collectively a conceptual and procedural understanding of the content, and to publicly share and discuss the knowledge generated. Thus, we advocate that the teacher implements the instructional practices of recognizing and affirming students’ unique identity, knowledge, and skills; and supporting students in working collaboratively. 263

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We advise teachers to provide opportunities for both the teacher and students to recognize and affirm each students’ unique identity, knowledge, and skills. Given that young adolescents’ have a socio-emotional desire to maintain their individuality and unique identity, and that it takes them an extended period of time to form their identity, it is important for the teacher to regularly draw on and highlight students’ math smarts and proficiencies, and encourage the students to identify and acknowledge their own and their peers’ strengths and competencies. For example, the teacher can ask and discuss with each student what knowledge and skills the student feels they bring to class and demonstrate during individual and collaborative work time, and how the knowledge and skills identified relate to the student’s current identity and the identity the student wants to have or form in the future. In addition, the teacher should be strategic and thoughtful when grouping students for collaborative work so that the students can demonstrate and share their unique knowledge and skills with their peers in ways that are beneficial for all group members. In doing this, the teacher taps into students’ external asset of empowerment to have the students serve as resources to their classroom community. For example, the teacher might form a group that includes one student who always gets started on the problems and perseveres in finding a solution, a second student who asks questions about others’ work and reasoning, a third who clearly explains their thinking to others, and a fourth who creates useful mathematical drawings. Alternatively, the teacher can assign each student a role during small group activities, and have the students serve in different roles over time. For example, the College Preparatory Mathematics (CPM) curriculum advises that each group of four have the following student roles: • • • •

a resource manager who distributes and collects supplies and information for the team, a facilitator who helps the team get started and makes sure everyone understands the task and solution, a recorder/reporter who represents and shares the group’s work with the entire class, and a task manager who keeps the group on-task and talking about task at hand and asks their group members to explain their reasoning. (CPM, n.d.)

The teacher can also group students based on their linguistic capital. For example, the teacher could group students who speak the same language(s) together so that they can communicate in their preferred language and have the multiple languages they speak validated in the classroom environment, or group students who have different communication styles together so that the group can communicate their work in a variety of ways. When grouping students, teachers also must remain attuned to physical developmental differences that may cause young adolescents to feel uncomfortable about themselves. To this end, teachers need to avoid groupings that accentuate physical differences and invite comparisons among individual students. The second instructional practice we recommend is structuring and facilitating students’ interpersonal interactions intentionally and thoughtfully. Given that working collaboratively is essential to students’ learning (NCTM, 2014) and that young adolescents’ have a socio-emotional desire to affiliate and belong to a peer group and build relationships with others, it is critical for the teacher to facilitate relationship-building and interpersonal relationships among the students. Creating a caring climate is essential for the external asset of support. Therefore, having young adolescents set boundaries for their classroom environment and community with the teacher is important for the external asset of boundaries and expectation. One relationship-building activity that we advocate teachers do at the start of the school year is a norm-building activity during which the teacher and students collectively establish a list of guidelines for group work (an activity done by many teachers). The list of guidelines generated 264

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can be recorded (e.g., written down on a piece of chart paper) and publicly displayed for later reference. As a part of this process, the teacher makes sure that certain norms are included on the list. For example, the first author of this chapter (Torrey) often made sure that a version of the following four norms were included on the list of guidelines for mathematics lessons taught in her mathematics methods course: • • • •

Provide explanations about thinking and work. Make sense of other’s thinking. Question each other’s thinking. Make sense of and connect multiple representations. Similarly, the CPM curriculum provides a set of norms for team work:

• •

You are responsible for your own behavior. You must try to help anyone in your study team who asks.

Table 18.3 Assets-based Approach Part 3: Enact Instruction that Incorporates and Attends to Student Assets Processes

Suggested Instructional Practice

•

Practices that Recognize and Affirm Students’ Unique Identity, Knowledge and Skills

Recognize and affirm students’ unique identity, knowledge, and skills. ○ Draw on and highlight students’ math smarts and proficiencies, and encourage students to identify and acknowledge their own and their peers’ strengths and competencies. ○ Strategically and thoughtfully group students for collaborative work so that the students can demonstrate and share their unique knowledge and skills with their peers in ways that are beneficial for all group members.

•

Support students in working collaboratively. ○ Intentionally and thoughtfully structure and facilitate students’ interpersonal interactions. ○ Facilitate meaningful discourse among the students so that the students will communicate positively and productively when working together.

•

•

• •

Ask and discuss with each student what knowledge and skills the student brings to class and demonstrates during individual and collaborative work time, and ask how the knowledge and skills identified relate to the student’s identity. Group students with varied math smarts and based on their linguistic capital (e.g., students who speak the same language[s], students who have different communication styles). Assign each student a role during small group activities and have the students serve in different roles over time. Avoid groupings that accentuate physical differences and invite comparisons among individual students.

Practices that Support Students in Working Collaboratively •

•

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At the start of the school year, lead a normbuilding activity during which the teacher and students collectively establish and record a list of guidelines for group work then publicly display the guidelines in the classroom. Facilitate meaningful mathematical discourse by posing purposeful questions, anticipating student solutions, monitoring students’ work as they engage in the task individually and in small groups, and selecting, sequencing, and connecting students’ solutions in whole-class discussions.

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• •

Only when ALL study team members have the SAME question may you ask the teacher for help. You must use study team voices (CPM, n.d.).

The CPM curriculum also recommends that teachers put a printed copy of the responsibilities for each student roles on the table so that the students can reference this when working together. In addition, the teacher must facilitate meaningful discourse among the students so that the students will communicate positively and productively when working together (NCTM, 2014). This is particularly important for helping students feel comfortable sharing their mathematical reasoning and problem-solving strategies with each other, critiquing the reasoning of others, arguing and debating the multiple strategies generated by class members, and building consensus about solutions for the real-world topic explored in the task. The teacher facilitates meaningful mathematical discourse by posing purposeful questions, anticipating student solutions, monitoring students’ work as they engage in the task individually and in small groups, and selecting, sequencing, and connecting students’ solutions in whole-class discussions. In Table 18.3, we summarize the processes and suggested activities for enacting instruction that incorporates and attends to student assets.

Conclusion In closing, we intend for our assets-based model to teaching middle school mathematics to support mathematics teachers in situating students’ academic and developmental needs, family- and community-based experiences, and cultural backgrounds as well as the national mathematics standards as the central foci of academic programming. We think our model can be adapted to frame academic programming in other disciplines and contexts because our assets-based model includes discipline-specific student strengths that may be similar in other disciplines and contexts. In the next paragraphs, we disclose our ideas about how our model has the potential to inform research, educational policy, and teacher education. We end with a few final thoughts for middle grades teachers.

Research With regard to research, we assert that researchers, teacher educators, school leaders, and teachers need to stay abreast of research about academic programming in the disciplines. For example, those interested in mathematics could read and discuss findings from recent research reports from the NCTM (e.g., NCTM Research Committee, 2018) at school-based professional development opportunities. Those interested in science, social studies, science, and other disciplines could seek and read similar research or reports about academic programming (e.g., National Research Council, 2012; National Council for the Social Studies, 2013; Rush, Eakle, & Berger, 2007). Then, in subsequent meetings, each of the disciplinary groups could examine and consider the implementation of our Assets-based Model for Academic Programming in Middle Grades Mathematics Education. Given the recent nature of our model, we are eager to see its implementation and research about its effectiveness. Similarly, we think middle grades researchers could use the Middle Level Education Research Special Interest Group’s (MLER SIG) Research Agenda (Mertens et al., 2016) to guide research about young adolescents’ developmental characteristics, cultural responsiveness, curriculum, and other topics related to an assets-based approach to teaching and learning. Researchers and practitioners could also acquaint themselves with recent literature reviews (Mertens & Caskey, 2018) and research (e.g., Moulton, 2018) with implications for academic programming.

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Policy We acknowledge that recent conceptual or theoretical models (e.g., culturally responsive teaching (Gay, 2010), culturally relevant teaching (Ladson-Billings, 2009), culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017)) influence the way practitioners and higher education faculty may think about their own academic programs and consider using students’ assets as a starting point. Our Assets-based Model for Academic Programming in Middle Grades Mathematics Education outlines key components, processes, and suggested activities that could readily be used by teacher educators. We also caution educators and policy makers alike to reject the notion of developing an academic program for an “average” student—and focus instead on individual and varied needs of students (Rose, 2013). The more educators who understand and can explain how to use students’ individual assets, the more likely they are to be able to inform educational policy at the local and state level. Furthermore, disciplinary professional organization can inform policy by articulating and disseminating policy briefs and position statements (e.g., NCTM, 2016; The James R. Squire Office of Policy Research, 2013) about the critical importance of affirming and building upon students’ individual assets.

Teacher Education We suggest higher education faculty—teacher educators—integrate our Assets-based Model for Academic Programming in Middle Grades Mathematics Education in teacher education programs for preservice and in-service teachers alike. Because our model outlines three key components, related processes, and suggested activities, we contend that it could readily be used by teacher educators. Plus, inclusion of the model may enhance teacher candidates and teachers’ overall view and adoptions of an assets-based stance when teaching mathematics to their students. Moreover, we call on mathematics teacher educators to disperse our model to other disciplinary faculty and invite these teacher educators to adapt our model for their specific disciplines. To foster this type of collegial exchange, we encourage school-based or district-based personnel to incorporate workshops into their regularly scheduled professional development opportunities (e.g., early release days, late start days, in-service training days) along with ongoing support (e.g., team meetings, professional learning community meetings).

Final Thoughts We invite middle grades teachers to use our Assets-based Model for Academic Programming in Middle Grades Mathematics Education to support all the young adolescent learners in their classrooms. Implementation of this model will require teachers to invest their time and energy to identify and use students’ assets—developmental, family, cultural, and academic—to build an academic program that make a difference for those that matter most—the students.

Notes 1 The Council’s (1989) eight recommendations for middle grades education are: (a) creating small communities for learning, (b)teaching a core academic program, (c) ensuring success for all students, (d) empowering teachers and administrators to make decisions about the experiences of middle grade students, (e) staffing the middle grades with teachers who are expert at teaching young adolescents, (f) improving academic performance by promoting health and fitness, (g) engaging families in the education of young adolescents, and (h) connecting schools with communities. 2 Additional information about the Diversity in Mathematics Education Center for Learning and Teaching (DiME) program is found at www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0119732 3 Additional information about the TEACH Math project is found at https://teachmath.info/

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4 Yosso’s (2005) concept of familial capital includes the funds of knowledge work, however our framing of mathematics-specific student strengths highlights and draws on the concept of funds of knowledge because scholars in the field of mathematics education (e.g., Aguirre et al., 2013; Andrews, Yee, Greenhough, Hughes, & Winter, 2005; Civil, 1994, 2002, 2016; Gutstein, 2003; 2006; TEACH MATH project) have described how teachers can draw on students’ funds of mathematical knowledge as opposed to their familial capital. 5 Additional information about the Mathematics in Context curriculum is found at http://mathincontext.eb.com/ curriculum

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19 PLACE-BASED EDUCATION IN MIDDLE LEVEL EDUCATION Bringing in and Contributing to the Local Context Matthew J. Irvin, Jennifer Harrist, Dodie Limberg, George J. Roy, and Gina Kunz

Numerous pedagogies are grounded in and draw on local contexts including environmental education, service learning, civic education, and workplace education (Greenwood, 2013; Gruenewald, 2003a; Johnson, Thompson, & Naugle, 2009; Smith & Sobel, 2010). Place-based education can, at times, be considered an overarching framework for these contextual and constructivist pedagogies as place-based education focuses on integrating local people, places, environment, culture, history, business, and/or industry into instructional activities (Demarest, 2015; Gruenewald, 2003b; Smith & Sobel, 2010). Furthermore, as Sobel (2004) noted, place-based education can serve as the foundation from which to teach key concepts throughout all subjects and the entire curriculum. Place-based education originated and is a prominent topic within environmental and rural education (Gruenewald & Smith, 2008; Smith, 2017). In addition, place-based education has been used in urban settings (Borgelt, Brooks, Innes, Seelander, & Paige, 2009; Gruenewald & Smith, 2008; Howley, Howley, Camper, & Perko, 2011a). For example, place-based education has been applied to and implemented with youth in urban settings, such as at the Sustainability Academy in Vermont (Lalli, 1992; Senechal, 2007). However, the number of studies and articles on place-based education in rural schools far outnumber those on place-based education in urban schools, suggesting that though the use of place-based education has widened to other locales, the prominent school setting is still rural (Howley et al., 2011a). Moreover, though there have been many studies on place-based education, only a small portion have been undertaken in middle level grades settings. Most studies of place-based education have focused on postsecondary educational levels (undergraduate students and pre-service teachers), with other studies focused on high school and elementary grade levels. Accordingly, one goal of this chapter is to describe place-based education including how place-based education can, at times, be viewed as an overarching framework for several contextual and constructivist pedagogies. A second goal is to provide a review of the extant research literature on place-based education in middle level education, including identifying limitations of existing research and future research directions. A third and final goal is to present our place-based education framework for middle level career development, which we see as an important future direction in the place-based education literature.

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Description of Place-Based Education Place-based education is a pedagogical method that explicitly and purposefully incorporates local people, places, culture, history, business, industry, and/or environment into the school and classroom. Place-based education is sometimes considered an overarching framework for several contextual pedagogies or instructional strategies that often employ constructivist approaches, such as project-based learning, inquiry-based learning, and culturally relevant pedagogy (Demarest, 2015). However, while place-based education has several features common to many other current contextual educational and constructivist approaches (e.g., service learning, environmental education, workplace education), place-based education is a broader pedagogical framework distinguished by an explicit valuing of and efforts for bringing in the local context as part of instructional activities that also involves students contributing to their community (Smith & Sobel, 2010). Thus, when these two key elements of place-based education are explicitly combined with several contextual and constructivist educational approaches, it can take on new forms as evident in, for example, the Community Works Institute’s place-based service learning. In addition, place-based education can often be further distinguished by attention to human and natural environments as well as social and environmental equity and justice (Smith, 2017). It is this dual focus on environment and community that has led others to alternatively label and sometimes consider related educational approaches as synonymous with place-based education. These other labels and educational approaches include place-conscious education (e.g., Gruenewald, 2003b), place-based stewardship education (e.g., Gallay, Marckini-Polk, Schroeder, & Flanagan, 2016), community-based education (e.g., Yoder, 2012), environmental education (e.g., Bartosh, Tudor, Ferguson, & Taylor, 2010; Lieberman & Hoody, 1998), and outdoor education (e.g., Greenwood, 2013). As a majority of studies and writings on place-based education focus on rural schools (Howley et al., 2011b) and place-based education was heavily developed by rural educators (Smith & Sobel, 2010), the focus of this section will primarily draw on the rural perspective on place-based education. Indeed, some rural education researchers view placed-based education as culturally responsive pedagogy for rural students (Howley et al., 2011a). Though place-based education seems to be a contemporary and burgeoning form of education, there is nothing new about place-based education. It is an attempt to reclaim elements of the learning processes most children encountered before the invention of schools. Throughout most of humanity’s tenancy on this planet, children learned directly from their own experience in the places and communities where they lived. They explored their world with peers, imitated the activities of adults, participated in cultural and religious ceremonies, and listened to the conversations and stories of their families and neighbors. Most of this learning was informal, although at important transition points such as puberty, initiation rites provided them with more direct forms of instruction about community understandings regarding the world and adult responsibilities. In this way, children grew into competent and contributing members of their society, able to care for themselves and for others in ways that sustained the community of which they were a part. This outcome with its focus on both individual and social sustainability is also the goal of place-based education. (Smith, 2017, p. 1) Contemporary formal notions of place-based education initially evolved from environmental education, but they were quickly adopted and further developed by the rural education community (Smith, 2007). Early on, place-based education became a central focus of a $50 million 272

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national program in the 1990s that sought to enhance rural school and community connections, initially known as the Annenberg Rural Challenge and later the Rural School and Community Trust (Smith, 2017). This initial national program catapulted place-based education to the forefront for many rural schools and rural education researchers across the country and around the world. One overarching goal for the use of place-based education in rural schools is to retain current students and attract new people to the community in order to sustain, rebuild, and revitalize the local area and economy (Smith, 2007). That is, by incorporating local people, places, business, industry, environment, culture, and history into the classroom, place-based education may further develop rural students’ commitment to and interest in sustaining their local community rather than solely educating youth to seek opportunities elsewhere and pursue more modern goals and forms of success (e.g., obtaining advanced degrees, making a lot of money; Carr & Kefalas, 2009; Corbett, 2007; Howley et al., 2011a). This is important to rural communities because youth outmigration is a longstanding problem, with young adults that are more educated and highly trained often leaving rural areas at higher rates than young adults with less education and fewer skills (Brown & Schafft, 2011; Cushing, 1999; Gibbs & Cromartie, 1994; Mills & Hazarika, 2001). While qualitative studies have found that schooling and instructional practices can contribute to this outmigration (e.g., Carr & Kefalas, 2009; Corbett, 2007), quantitative analyses with largescale national data on rural high school students have shown that there are high achievers who want to stay in their rural communities while others plan on leaving (Petrin, Schafft, & Meece, 2014). Moreover, perceptions of future local economic opportunities (e.g., there are jobs in the area for people like me) were the strongest predictor of whether high achieving rural youth plan on staying or leaving. In addition, rural youth with multiple interpersonal adjustment difficulties have been found to want to leave at higher rate than well-adjusted rural youth (Petrin, Farmer, Meece, & Byun, 2011). Thus, rural adolescents’ postsecondary aspirations and plans, including their decision to stay in or leave their community, likely involve a complex set of factors that not only include their schooling experiences but also several contextual factors such as the local economic conditions and connections to their family as well as their own adjustment and wellbeing (Irvin, Byun, Meece, Reed, & Farmer, 2016; Petrin et al., 2011, 2014) Place-based education is also likely relevant to rural education because it has a strong fit with the values and aspirations that are more important to rural residents (Irvin, Byun, Smiley, & Hutchins, 2017). For example, rural people and cultures often tend to value connections to place and people instead of individual and material success (Elder & Conger, 2000; Howley, 2006; Howley & Gunn, 2003). That is, rural youth may have a greater desire to maintain connections to their families, friends, communities, and place more so than obtaining high status degrees, jobs, and material objects. Thus, place-based education may be more effective in rural areas where school and community connections tend to be deep and strong as the use of place-based education can build on and may further strengthen those ties (Barley & Beesley, 2007). Nonetheless, as discussed in the following section, the research base on the effectiveness of place-based education in the middle grades seems, in our view, rather scant.

Extant Research on Place-Based Education in Middle Level Education Overall, fewer studies on place-based education have involved teachers and students in the middle level grades than other grade levels. Several studies have been undertaken at the postsecondary level, which includes research with undergraduate students (e.g., Bauerle & Park, 2012; Brandt, 2004; Semken et al., 2009) and pre-service teachers (e.g., Adams, Miller, Saul, & Pegg, 2014; Molyneux & Tyler, 2014; White & Reid, 2008). Some work has also focused on high school (e.g., Athman & Monroe, 2004; Showalter, 2013) and elementary grades (e.g., Blizard & Schuster, 2007; 273

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Sorin & Brooks, 2012). The limited focus on and use of place-based education in the middle grades is noteworthy in several respects, especially given the numerous significant developmental changes that occur during early adolescence. Furthermore, we contend using place-based education might not only help with community revitalization but it might also improve early adolescent motivation and learning. This is because from our perspective, place-based education fits with and addresses several key developmental changes during early adolescence. First, in terms of cognitive skills, early adolescence is the developmental period during which youth acquire more abstract and complex thinking (Anderman, 2012). These cognitive advancements often prompt middle grades students to begin to more deeply think about and have concern for important topics such as the possibilities and limitations of science, the environment and issues such as climate change, social justice and inequities, and historical patterns and culture. Though middle level students increasingly acquire the cognitive ability to understand and ponder the larger world around them, young adolescents are still largely cognitively grounded in and familiar with their local place (Sobel, 2004). Thus, the local community, history, and culture provide the pre-existing knowledge and mental schema that early adolescents have and, to better facilitate learning, these should be cognitively activated and utilized during instructional activities (Gruenewald, 2003b). Second, numerous studies have shown that student achievement and motivation and, in particular, interest in, value of, and perceived competence for learning begin a precipitous decline during the middle grades that persists into high school (Anderman, 2012). Furthermore, this disconcerting trend in decreasing motivation and learning seems to be further magnified for young adolescents who are underperforming and from low SES, minority, and immigrant backgrounds (Eccles & Roeser, 2010). Yet, it has also been shown that this drop in motivation can be ameliorated (Anderman, 2012). While early research viewed the root of middle grades declines in motivation and learning as the stress of moving to a new school (compared to students in K-12 or K-8 configurations with no middle school transition) combined with other developmental changes (e.g., onset of puberty, increasing concerns about self-image; Simmons & Blyth, 1987), subsequent research by Eccles, Midgley, and colleagues (e.g., Eccles & Midgley, 1989; Eccles, Wigfield, & Schiefele, 1998; Midgley, Anderman, & Hicks, 1995; Wigfield, Byrnes, & Eccles, 2006) demonstrated that a stageenvironment fit perspective better explained the early adolescent drops in motivation and learning. According to the stage-environment fit perspective, the mismatch between the typical middle level school context and young adolescents’ developmental needs (e.g., have fewer opportunities to make choices, engage in cognitively challenging work, interact with peers when learning, and teachers use more classroom control when early adolescents have increasing autonomy needs, cognitive skills, and desire to connect and interact with others) results in lower motivation, engagement, and learning (Eccles & Midgley, 1989; Eccles et al., 1998). In contrast, the declines in motivation and learning are offset when middle level schools are more mastery- or taskfocused and provide students more choices and autonomy and when teachers connect with students and use instructional activities that are more cognitively demanding, interesting, valuable, and authentic (Anderman, 2012; Anderman, Maehr, & Midgley, 1999). Consistent with the above, many have argued that the potential benefits of place-based education in large part stem from engaging students’ unique lived experiences and resultant perspectives of the world (Goralnik, Millenbah, Nelson, & Thorp, 2012; Gruenewald 2003b; Johnson et al., 2009). These benefits may derive from the fact that students’ lived experiences and perspectives reflect their mental schema and pre-existing knowledge that, when activated, can strongly impact learning. Moreover, place-based education employs active engagement in cognitively complex learning activities that require consideration of multiple perspectives or factors and their interrelationships as well as critical thinking and problem-solving (Brandt, 2004; Gruenewald, 2003b; Johnson et al., 2009; Smith, 2007). Last, place-based education may also improve motivation because students should find the learning activities more meaningful, relevant, authentic, interesting, and 274

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valuable in the short- and long-term (Athman & Monroe, 2004; Emekauwa & Williams, 2004; Goralnik et al., 2012; Howley et al., 2011a). The limited research base on place-based education in the middle grades provides some initial support for many of these assertions. Several have found that place-based education at the middle level can improve motivation via increasing relevance, utility, and interest. For example, Howley, Showalter, and colleagues (2011b) conducted a cross-case analysis of rural mathematics education gathering data from interviews, classroom observations, and field notes in seven regionally and ethnically diverse elementary, middle, and high schools across the U.S. This study found middle level math teachers reported that the motivational aspect of place-based education (i.e., increased interest and relevance) was so apparent and important that they were willing to sacrifice other instructional priorities to use it. Another primarily qualitative study of forty K-12 schools by Lieberman and Hoody (1998) used student, teacher, and administrator interviews coupled with quantitative analyses of survey and achievement data and found that motivation (i.e., value of and enthusiasm for subject) in all core subjects (i.e., math, science, language arts, social studies) improved among middle grades students who were engaged in environmental education. However, it is also important to acknowledge that not all students may find a specific place-based education instructional activity equally motivating. For example, Howley, Showalter, and colleagues (2011b) indicated that even though a place-based education approach to math was motivating for many, there were some students who did not see the relevance of or have interest for a particular topic. Likewise, Lim and Barton (2006) reported that the degree students in an urban middle level school found a particular local setting used in place-based science learning (i.e., neighborhood playground) motivating depended on their relationship to and constructed meaning for that setting. To us, these findings suggest a need for students to have some input in and choice about the topic or theme used in place-based education, which reflects early adolescent’s increasing need for autonomy. In addition, other factors that may be especially relevant to the early adolescent developmental period have been shown to improve with the use of place-based education. These include better peer relationships and problem-solving ability as well as other soft skills that are increasingly necessary for being successful in the workforce (i.e., conflict resolution and cooperation; American Institutes for Research, 2005). Likewise, Lieberman and Hoody (1998) reported that middle grades students immersed in environmental education had better leadership, communication, and collaboration with others as well as improved critical, higher-order, and creative thinking. Furthermore, Lieberman and Hoody (1998) contended that the benefits of environmental education were partly due to making complex concepts concrete and also making learning more significant given potential contribution to students’ community. Consistent with this, recent changes in preand post-test data following the implementation of an environmental focus place-based education initiative in a middle level school revealed increases in community attachment and civic competencies as well as environmental sensitivity and behaviors (Gallay et al., 2016). As initial evidence indicates that place-based learning improves motivation and other cognitive skills important for learning (e.g., creativity, critical thinking), place-based education may also result in improved learning and achievement. Indeed, some evidence along these lines has begun to emerge. For example, Lieberman and Hoody (1998) undertook descriptive analyses of standardized test scores and grade point averages comparing students in environmental education programs and students in traditional education programs; they also gathered teacher surveys of improvements in achievement. These descriptive results and survey data consistently demonstrated that students in environmental educations programs had better learning outcomes. In addition, a qualitative study of a place-based education class in a middle level school indicated that student writing samples, self-evaluations, and adult evaluations consistently demonstrated that students had improved their learning of how various environmental landscapes function (Santelmann, Gosnell, & Meyers, 2011). Furthermore, Donovan (2016) conducted a case study which 275

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revealed that rural seventh grade students’ writing skills were enhanced via a place-based education language arts class designed to improve their understanding of their communities, their place in it, and their changing identities. To sum, the existing research on place-based education in the middle grades is limited, but it does provide some initial support for the benefits of place-based education with young adolescents, and it may help reduce some of the troubling declines that often begin during the middle grades (i.e., reduced motivation and learning). However, in our view, more research on place-based education in middle level school settings is needed. Moreover, we believe research studies that may be able to more definitively determine whether place-based education impacts learning and motivation could substantially further the foundation for and widespread adoption of this important instructional approach. Furthermore, the use of place-based education in rural settings (e.g., community development) may be driven by different reasons from or involve distinct factors than urban settings (e.g., social justice; Smith, 2017). It could be important to understand such differences in order to effectively employ place-based education in various middle level school settings. Last, though some educators and studies have included future work-related topics and themes in place-based education learning activities (e.g., Howley et al., 2011b; Smith & Sobel, 2010), in our view a more comprehensive approach to integrating career development into place-based education at the middle level is needed and could be quite potent.

A Place-Based Education Framework for Middle Level Career Development An individual’s career is a journey of professional life roles in which one engages over a lifetime, and career development includes developing the skills necessary to select, implement, and transition through these roles (Erford, 2018; NCDA, 2018). The middle grades are vital as this is the time when career development begins in the form of career exploration. Middle level schools provide students an opportunity to explore career opportunities, but also to start understanding their own interests and character traits and how they connect with careers (Coogan, 2016). Middle level students should start to think more seriously about their educational, career, and life goals and how the goals they set influence their course selection in middle and high school (Erford, 2018). The middle grades is an important time to help students understand the importance and seriousness of career development. During young adolescence, students should be encouraged to use personal agency (i.e., initiate and undertake actions that can fulfill one’s goals) to become career ready in order to recognize their responsibility in career development (Lapan et al., 2016; Lent & Brown, 2013). Along these lines, schools and communities can, in our view, play a crucial role in supporting student’s career identity and future vocational goals (Lapan et al., 2016). That is, everyone in a school setting and community should be working together and responsibility for students’ career development including teachers, school counselors, career specialists, administrators, parents, industry leaders, and students themselves. However, typically teachers are only responsible for their content areas and schools rely on counselors and career specialists to address career development. This approach is not effective; it is more beneficial if everyone is invested and understands ways they can collaborate (Hines et al., 2017). Integrating career development within a standards-based, place-based curriculum is a promising approach to provide career exposure opportunity to all students (Lapan et al., 2016). Lack of collaboration among all stakeholders is often due to role confusion and the assumption that the other person is taking care of it. In addition, it is important for everyone within the school system to acknowledge that each professional brings to the table a wealth of knowledge from their various personal and professional perspectives and experiences. 276

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Yet, the expertise and training of two school personnel who are key to students’ career development are often underutilized in middle level education: school counselors and career specialists. According to the American School Counseling Association (2018), school counselors are certified/licensed educators with a minimum of a master’s degree in school counseling, making them uniquely qualified to address all students’ academic, career and social/emotional development needs by designing, implementing, evaluating and enhancing a comprehensive school counseling program that promotes and enhances student success. (p. 1) The term guidance counselor is outdated, and implies someone sitting in an office making schedule changes for students or waiting for a problem to occur. The term school counselor signifies a change in professional identity and suggests a proactive role in which the school counselor addresses the needs of all students. Many schools have a career specialist or a career service provider, and the background and training of these professionals could be very helpful for connecting with local workforce topics and stakeholders as part of place-based approach. A career specialist focuses on career awareness, exploration, and job skills training (NCDA, 2018). Career specialists are required to complete 120 hours of training that is specific to career development, and they may be assigned to several schools within a district or be based at one school (NCDA, 2018). In many schools the role of a career specialist is to focus on career awareness and exploration and to provide guidance services to students (NCDA, 2018). Together, school counselors and career specialists are responsible for implementing a comprehensive, developmental school counseling program that includes a school-wide curriculum designed to enhance all students’ academic achievement, personal/social wellness, and career development (Gysbers & Henderson, 2012). The framework of a comprehensive, developmental school counseling program is grounded in its foundation, implemented by delivery of services (direct and indirect), sustained through effective management, and evaluated and improved by accountability measures (ASCA, 2012). Career development is a major component of a comprehensive school counseling model and the main focus of career specialists.

Conclusion In conclusion, we contend that teachers, school counselors, and career specialists should work together using several strategies to address career development; strategies that are likely to be more effective when they draw on and are consistent with place-based education. First, school counselors and career specialist must educate teachers about what they do, what services they can provide, and how they can help support the teacher’s instructional time (and not take away from it). School counselors and career specialists should also collaborate with teachers to gain a better understanding of the concepts being covered in the classroom and how those concepts can be linked to students’ career development. As an example, school counselors and career specialists could attend curriculum planning meetings, department meetings, team meetings, and professional learning community meeting to get a clear understanding of what teachers will be covering throughout the semester and/or year. School counselors or career specialists can better prepare their own intentional career curriculum that can be infused within the classroom and can connect with specific units and concepts if they know what the teacher is planning to teach. All school counselors and career specialists should be conducting classroom guidance lessons. The school counselor or career specials should meet with the teacher prior to the lesson to collaborate on

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how both of their goals can be addressed. From the teacher’s perspective, it is important that the teacher reaches out to the school counselor and invites them to come to their classroom. The collaboration among a teacher, school counselor, and career specialist is crucial to beginning to meet student career development needs, but we believe much more could be accomplished. Toward that end, school counselors and career specialists could draw on tenets of place-based education and, in particular, explicitly and purposefully integrate local people, business, and industry into their school activities and classroom instruction. School counselors and career specialists are a natural bridge to local workforce opportunities, issues, and trends in their area. Moreover, school counselors and career specialists should seek to establish educational partnerships with local workforce stakeholders that also involve teachers, school administrators, students, and, when possible, parents. Such partnerships could provide an outstanding opportunity to identify local workforce opportunities and not only allow middle level students to explore careers available in their area but also infuse many types of jobs and school subjects with content that youth would find more relevant, authentic, and interesting. For example, teachers could design lessons and units around topics that fit with jobs in their area and/or local workforce stakeholders could provide real-world challenges they have to address in those jobs or otherwise that could also be incorporated into classroom and/or guidance lessons. In doing so, such school-community partnerships would embody place-based education notions of explicitly valuing and making efforts for bringing in the local context, especially local workforce stakeholders and resources, as part of instructional activities that could also have the strong potential to result in students contributing to their community (Smith & Sobel, 2010).

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20 MAKING THE SHIFT Consciously Preparing Clinically-Minded Middle Grades Teacher Educators Melissa Baker, Katherine F. Thompson, Ashley S. Nylin, and Janna Dresden

Clinically-Intensive Teacher Preparation Clinically-intensive teacher preparation programs have become more common and highly regarded during the last two decades; and with the 2010 publication of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) report of the Blue Ribbon Panel on Clinical Preparation and Partnerships (NCATE, 2010), this pedagogical approach has become widely accepted as a “best practice.” The perceived value of clinically-intensive programs of teacher education was further strengthened by the report A Pivot Toward Clinical Practice (American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education Clinical Practice Commission, 2018). Situating teacher preparation programs in the day-to-day life of schools fosters the development of exemplary teachers because pre-service teachers have more frequent and substantive interactions with students and practicing teachers, and, thus, have the opportunity to flesh out the one-dimensional pedagogical strategies they have studied and apply the theories they have learned (DarlingHammond, 2005; Rust & Clift, 2015). Participation in clinically-intensive settings requires teacher candidates to move beyond academic knowledge to active engagement with young adolescents, their teachers and the rich and multi-faceted world of a middle school. Scholars have frequently noted the complexity of the teaching and learning process (Ball & Forzani, 2009; Cochran-Smith, Ell, Ludlow, Grudnoff, & Aitken, 2014; Grossman et al., 2009; Hollins, 2011; Stairs, 2011), so a second advantage of clinically-intensive programs of teacher preparation is that they embrace this complexity which can be neither ignored nor avoided. The complexities that result from factors such as varying personalities, temperaments, cultural backgrounds, physical settings, and subject matter are readily apparent in settings that enable pre-service teachers to have ongoing interactions with young adolescents and teachers. When those interactions are facilitated and interrogated by university faculty, teacher candidates are able to organize and appreciate these complexities that might otherwise be hidden from the view of a novice. Another benefit of clinically-intensive teacher preparation programs is that they serve as fertile ground for the development of reflective practitioners. Increasing competence as a teacher is the result of engaging in and reflecting on practice (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Darling-Hammond, 2006; Zeichner & Liston, 2014), thus teachers must be trained within a practical, clinically-intensive

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context. It is simply not possible to reflect on experiences one has not had, so active engagement is a necessary prerequisite for becoming a reflective practitioner (Schon, 1983).

Clinically-Intensive Teacher Educator Preparation If middle grades teacher candidates ought to be prepared to teach in clinically-intensive settings, then doctoral students who are preparing to become middle grades teacher educators should also be prepared in clinically-intensive settings. If practice is to be at the center of teacher preparation, as suggested by the NCATE 2010 report, then future teacher educators must be at the heart of this endeavor. Likewise, if the goal of middle level education is to prepare teachers who “value young adolescents and are prepared to teach them” (National Middle School Association, 2010), then university doctoral programs must be committed to preparing future teacher educators who can expertly guide teacher candidates in becoming exceptional middle grades educators. Like teacher candidates, early career teacher educators learn by doing. Active engagement within clinically-intensive settings enables early career teacher educators to participate in a community of practice and begin to craft an identity as a teacher educator, scholar, and researcher. Future teacher educators who work intensively with local middle level schools through school-university partnerships develop first-hand knowledge of the issues facing middle grades practitioners, students, and families, and, as a result, are uniquely positioned to develop research agendas that respond to these most pressing issues in middle level education. Clinically-intensive settings provide rich, authentic contexts for prospective teacher educators to engage in research critical to the field of middle level education. According to The MLER SIG Research Agenda (Mertens et al., 2016), these areas of scholarship include, but are not limited to, young adolescent development, marginalized students, middle school organizational structures, interdisciplinary teaming, teaching practices, professional learning, and middle grades community partnerships. Participation in communities of practice and the construction of an identity as a teacher educator are mutually constitutive activities. That is, communities of practice are sites for the social construction of identity (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Dinkelman, 2011) and communities of practice are created through the gathering of individuals with shared purpose and common experiences (Dinkelman, 2011). In addition, communities of practice are fundamental to the enactment of reflective teaching practice and the preparation of thoughtful teachers and teacher educators (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). An identity as a teacher educator results from interactions with peers in a community of practice and from the quality of interactions one has with teacher candidates (Dinkelman, 2011). This identity grows from a sense of confidence about one’s ability to teach teacher candidates effectively and is strengthened by the credibility derived from years of experience as a classroom teacher (Murray & Male, 2005). It would, therefore, appear that doctoral students are likely to develop stronger identities as teacher educators when they have sustained opportunities to interact with teacher candidates in settings of practice such as those found in clinically-intensive programs of teacher preparation. The formation of identity as a teacher educator is supported by the communities of practice within which people work, but it is also challenged by the perceived tension between the demands of teacher preparation and the exigencies of a productive research agenda (Murray & Male, 2005). In their interviews with teacher educators, Murray and Male found that most could not conceive of ways in which teaching and research might be productively connected. This construction of research and practice as separate and distinct aspects of the work of teacher educators is potentially threatening to the quality of teacher preparation because it inhibits the crucial interplay of ideas, actions, questions, and goals (Dinkelman, 2011; Zeichner, 1999). Future teacher educators prepared in clinically-intensive setting are likely to benefit from the many and varied activities with which they are engaged. In addition, their interactions with peers 282

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and professors place them within a community of practice and give them space to craft their identities as teacher educators.

A Theoretical Framework Our work is grounded in the belief that complexity is not only unavoidable, but intellectually sustaining and ultimately useful. As Duckworth (2006) noted, acknowledging and affirming the complexity of an enterprise or subject or set of concepts make it “more accessible by opening a multiplicity of paths into it” (p. 135). When ideas are articulated with all their rich, and sometimes messy, complications and complexities, they are often easier to understand. Complexity theory guides us to collectively consider alternatives to traditional teacher education and options that move us towards a richer and more nuanced understanding about the world of teaching and learning rather than searching for simple answers and definitive “best practices.” Complexity theorists might suggest that clinically-intensive programs are beneficial because they are dependent upon relationships, highlight the variety and unpredictability of the teaching and learning processes, make evident the lack of linear mechanisms of change, and still enable us to learn from and support one another (Dresden, Thompson, Baker, Nylin, & Sinha, in press).

Our Context In response to the call for clinically-intensive experiences in teacher education (e.g. NCATE, 2010), the University of Georgia and the Clarke County School District established a professional development school (PDS) district partnership beginning in 2009. In 2011, the partnership expanded to additional schools in the district, including the middle school featured in this chapter. There are varying degrees to which these schools are involved in the partnership, but the middle school that serves as the context for the work described here is considered a “Model 4 School,” which means that, in addition to other components, a university professor spends 50% of his/her assigned time in that particular school. The university faculty in these positions are referred to as “professors-in-residence” (Dresden, Gilbertson, & Tavernier, 2016). Our PDS partnership has naturally centered on the experiences of middle grades education teacher candidates, teachers, and students, but our university middle grades education faculty have consciously created opportunities for doctoral students who are preparing to become middle grades teacher educators. We provide opportunities to participate in PDS-related teaching, scholarship, program innovation, and professional learning as well as many other activities associated with the partnership. While the tasks and responsibilities of these graduate students are not distinctly different from those found in a more traditional, university-based approach to teacher educator preparation, the ways that our middle grades doctoral students experience teacher education in a middle grades school PDS context are significantly and qualitatively different. Teacher educator preparation in an on-site clinically-intensive setting (i.e., a real middle grades school) provides graduate students with experiences that cannot easily be replicated on a university campus. Middle grades professors working within a PDS partnership are able to provide doctoral students with more enriched teacher educator preparation experiences, such as shared learning between teachers and teacher candidates and collaborative scholarship rooted in genuine practices, issues, and wonderings of a local middle grades school.

Perspectives on one Clinically-Intensive Middle Grades Teacher Educator Preparation Program In this section we share three narratives, each of which exemplifies a unique perspective on providing clinically-intensive experiences for prospective middle grades teacher educators. Appreciating 283

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the complexity of preparing middle grades teacher educators within a clinically-intensive environment requires that middle grades teacher educators and scholars listen to multiple voices and examine problems from varying perspectives. In the first narrative, a middle level education university faculty member, serving as a professor-in-residence in a local middle school, describes how she consciously prepares clinically-minded teacher educators in the context of a middle grades PDS. Next, a current doctoral student in a middle level teacher education program describes her experiences living in the center of practice and discusses how the PDS model of teacher education is influencing her identity as a teacher educator, her level of understanding and confidence, and her perceptions about how she benefits from a middle grades PDS context. In the third narrative, a first-year as middle level education university faculty member shares her perspective on the middle grades teacher educator preparation she experienced as a doctoral student in the PDS and how her experiences impacted her development as an early career teacher educator.

Perspective of a Clinically-Minded Veteran Middle Grades Education University Professor (Kathy) As a veteran middle grades teacher educator, I have had numerous opportunities to prepare doctoral students for a future in middle level teacher education. These opportunities have typically centered on mentoring graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) in developing and teaching coursework, supervising middle grades teacher candidates during field experiences, and developing scholarship for publication and presentation in national and international contexts. This approach to teacher educator preparation is a common one in higher education. However, as attention continues to focus on the benefits of clinically-intensive experiences for middle grades teacher candidates (Andrews & Thompson, 2016; Williams, Virtue, & Smith, 2016), we argue that a new model for preparing the teacher educators responsible for providing clinicallyintensive experiences for teacher candidates in school-based settings is critical to the success and sustainability of clinically-intensive teacher education. Preparing prospective teacher educators in a clinically-intensive setting also ensures the seamless integration of our land grant university’s three-part mission: teaching, scholarship, and service. As a PDS professor-in-residence in a local middle school, I provide middle grades education doctoral students with clinically-intensive teacher educator experiences within a PDS setting. These opportunities include teaching on-site middle grades methods courses, collaborating with middle grades practitioners to enhance teacher preparation, facilitating professional learning experiences for in-service teachers and teacher candidates, and developing a scholarship agenda that aligns with the genuine needs of the school. Not surprisingly, teaching or co-teaching middle grades initial methods courses is a key component of teacher educator preparation for GTAs in our doctoral program. When these opportunities occur in the context of a real middle school, however, GTAs encounter experiences they are not likely to have while teaching undergraduate courses on a university campus. When teaching on-site courses in a middle grades PDS, our doctoral students have numerous opportunities to engage with middle grades faculty and involve them in course activities. For example, when our teacher candidates are exploring a concept or investigating a classroom practice, we walk down the hallway to the teacher’s classroom to observe him teaching or invite a practitioner to teach her model lesson of that concept to our teacher candidates in our on-site PDS classroom. Afterward, GTAs assist in bringing teacher candidates and middle grades practitioners together in the PDS classroom to debrief their experiences and share their varying perspectives. By helping teacher candidates make connections and identify possible tensions between theory and practice, our doctoral students facilitate “‘real time’ teacher education” (Dresden et al., in press). As members of a school-based PDS community of practice, our GTAs learn how to connect educational research to classroom practice, collaborate with 284

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middle grades PDS teachers to enhance teacher preparation and student learning, and negotiate the details associated with providing clinically-intensive experiences for middle grades teacher candidates. A key component of the professional development school model of clinically-intensive teacher preparation is professional learning for both in-service teachers and teacher candidates (NAPDS, 2008). In our PDS work with a local middle school, we have created opportunities for these two groups to experience professional learning together, and our doctoral students are integrally involved in facilitating these opportunities. One way we have teachers and teacher candidates learn from and with each other is by hosting professional learning “fairs” (Andrews & Thompson, 2016; Andrews, Thompson, Naughton, & Waters, 2017). In the on-site middle grades methods courses we teach, we structure assignments so that they have a genuine purpose and are designed to be shared with an authentic audience. During the professional learning fairs, which take place during teachers’ planning periods, teacher candidates share these course assignments (e.g., instructional resources, digital tools, lesson plans, inquiry projects) with the school staff while engaging in lively discussions with teachers and administrators about research, classroom practice, and issues in middle level education. By assisting in the implementation of these professional learning experiences, our on-site GTAs learn how to develop course assignments for middle grades teacher candidates that have a professional purpose and are intended for an authentic audience. Another component of the GTA experience in our PDS partnership is the opportunity for prospective teacher educators to be involved in the life of the school beyond the classroom. GTAs and on-site course instructors work with school staff to identify school-community opportunities (e.g., curriculum nights, carnivals, academic competitions, book fairs, school dances, and sporting events) for which we all can volunteer. These school-based student and family engagement activities provide opportunities for GTAs to facilitate teacher candidate interaction with students and their families in a variety of contexts beyond the four walls of classroom for the purpose of seeing young adolescents not only as students in a particular period or class, but as multidimensional young people with interests, talents, and families who care about them. These insights regarding the complexities of students’ lives are less likely to happen for our prospective teacher educators when teacher education is restricted to the university campus. Being a professor-in-residence in a PDS allows me to provide doctoral students with research opportunities related to professional development schools. For example, doctoral students have collected and analyzed on-site course data, conducted research projects for doctoral coursework that connects their research interests to the needs of the school, and facilitated teacher candidate focus groups regarding their experiences in the PDS. First-hand experiences with PDS-related research immerse middle grades doctoral students in the field of professional development schools and prompt them to consider the impact that clinically-intensive PDS experiences can have on middle level teacher education. According to This We Believe (National Middle School Association, 2010), successful middle level schools have leaders who are committed to research related to middle level education. Therefore, one of the primary responsibilities of a middle grades teacher educator is guiding doctoral students in the development of a scholarship agenda focused on the field of middle level education. When doctoral students are also integrally involved in a middle grades PDS, they have organic opportunities to align their research interests with the vision and genuine needs of a middle level school. For example, Melissa—a former doctoral student, an early career teacher educator, and a coauthor of this chapter—got to know the middle school’s sixth grade teachers through her involvement in the PDS. They shared with her their desire to strengthen connections to students’ families, which aligned with Melissa’s interests in elementary-to-middle school transitions. To assist these teachers in improving their relationships with incoming families and to meet her own 285

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doctoral coursework expectations, Melissa developed a needs assessment that was administered to sixth grade students, families, and teachers. The results of the needs assessment and subsequent conversations with the teachers and administration led to the development of her dissertation study on parents’ perceptions of their students’ transitions from elementary school to a middle level school. Melissa’s familiarity and involvement with the PDS middle school helped her develop trusting relationships with key school faculty, which opened lines of communication to teachers and parents while she collected dissertation data. Her work was developed in response to a genuine school need; it was perceived as research done for and with the school rather than to the school. Through our PDS partnership, we also create opportunities for prospective middle grades teacher educators to participate in the dissemination of our PDS efforts. In collaboration with middle grades teachers and teacher candidates, we present at national and regional conferences and publish in journals and books devoted to middle level education and school-university partnerships. These scholarly endeavors give voice to a variety of PDS experiences and perspectives and demonstrate to middle grades doctoral students how university and school partners can collaboratively engage in intellectual work. Another way I provide mentoring for doctoral students in a clinically-intensive setting is to model for them a commitment to clinical service in the field of middle level education. As a professor-in-residence in a PDS middle school, my duties extend well beyond teaching courses and engaging in collaborative scholarship to include a variety of service-oriented leadership roles. I am a member of the school improvement leadership team and the administrative instructional team. I participate in faculty meetings, professional learning, extracurricular activities, open house, family engagement activities, special events, and much more. In essence, I am not just a university professor visiting the school; I am a member of the school faculty. As evidence of my member status, I have been in the official faculty photograph for the past seven years! An additional service role I have taken on at the school is that of liaison, or “broker,” between university faculty interested in getting involved in the school and members of the school community. For example, when an English professor told me of her expertise in Shakespeare and interest in getting middle grades students excited about the relevance of Shakespeare in today’s world, I brought together the professor and the school’s eighth grade teachers, which led to an innovative collaboration now entering its fifth year. Preparing prospective middle grades teacher educators in a clinically-intensive context has fundamentally changed the way doctoral students in our middle grades PhD program experience teacher education. Doctoral students involved with the PDS are immersed in the complexities of an actual middle school rather than in the disconnected context of a university classroom. They come to realize that teacher preparation—and by extension, their own teacher educator preparation—is more meaningful when university coursework and school-based experiences are purposefully and intentionally connected via a clinically-intensive model teacher education program. In a PDS setting, these GTAs learn how to provide clinically rich experiences for teacher candidates and facilitate on-site professional learning for teachers and teacher candidates “that reflects best educational practices” (National Middle School Association, 2010). Doctoral students in our PDS develop scholarship that responds to the genuine needs of school partners and see their professors engaged in clinical service to middle schools and middle level education. From these experiences, doctoral students acquire a deep understanding of the interconnectedness of the primary responsibilities—teaching, scholarship, and service—of a middle grades teacher educator and how these can have meaningful impact on middle grades teachers, students, and schools. 286

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Perspective of a Clinically-Minded Middle Grades Graduate Student (Ashley) Like many middle grades teacher candidates, my teacher preparation was not clinically-intensive; placements were across contexts and grade levels culminating in a semester-long student teaching experience, with all my coursework on the university campus. Now as a doctoral student preparing to become a middle grades teacher educator, I am immersed in a program that is clinically-intensive by design in which I co-teach middle grades methods courses on-site at a local middle school. The middle school, part of a broader district-university partnership, provides me with greater exposure to undergraduate teaching than I ever imagined possible for my teacher educator preparation. As teacher candidates are prepared in a clinically-intensive setting, it is only logical to prepare teacher educators similarly. Being in a doctoral program engaged in PDS work has, among many things, provided me the opportunity to assist middle grades faculty with courses taught on-site. The realities of being in a public school, where middle grades students, practitioners, teacher candidates, and university professors share common spaces, require immediate attention, rather than as one-dimensional, hypothetical situations in a standard on-campus course. Instead of engaging in classroom discussions about potential obstacles one might encounter, co-teaching in a PDS middle school provided both the obstacles as well as opportunities to address them. Clinical preparation thrust me into a situation in which the complexity of teaching and teacher education could not be glossed over; it meant negotiating the school’s bell schedule, district and state testing calendars, and even the weather—we sat through an extended tornado warning as a class, right next to the sixth graders. These were authentic school experiences that impacted not only the teacher candidates I worked with, but me as well. Clinical preparation highlighted both the challenges and benefits of working in a school and helped me to see more clearly the intersection of practice and research. Much like the teacher candidates who want to know how to handle every situation before entering their classrooms, doctoral students also want reassurances. Sometimes, however, the best way to learn how to be an effective teacher [educator] is simply “to do,” and being in a clinical space afforded me opportunities time and again to experience teacher education in action. Being clinically prepared to be a teacher educator provides an organic integration of theory into practice with relative ease, at least as compared to the alternative. Spending time over multiple semesters on-site made for a richer, more intimate environment. More experience meant more confidence, as I had the opportunity to collaborate with middle grades faculty to develop course assignments for the teacher candidates with both a professional purpose with an authentic audience, the teachers in the middle school. The more time I spent on-site, the more familiar my face became to the faculty and staff, as well as to the middle school students. By continuing my clinical work over time, I had become woven into the fabric of the school community. I felt like I belonged. My fears of leaving the K-12 space and becoming disconnected from students and teachers were suddenly dissolving. The dream of having the best of both worlds was presented to me as a reality; it is possible to be a middle grades teacher educator and be closely connected with a school, its teachers, and its students. Although working with teacher candidates as part of an on-site course was meaningful, my identity as a middle grades teacher educator interested in clinically-intensive teacher preparation was first defined in my work with a summer learning program that grew from the partnership work of the university and the school district. Prior to this, I was unaware of the term professional development school. However, agreeing to support the program that summer was a bit of baptism by fire. I learned, much like when I was a classroom teacher, that great flexibility and creativity were required for the success of the program. Working with the camp thrust me into an environment in which I worked with university faculty across many programs, elementary and middle school

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teachers, teacher candidates, university personnel, vendors, and camp parents. I existed within the experience completely; there was no class time for me to step aside and process. Being in this environment all the time required constant decision-making, much like I would soon experience co-teaching on-site. It was exhausting, and it was exhilarating. Existing within the clinical space made obvious the direction of my dissertation study—I would situate it within the specific context of our PDS. My immersion in this space felt so natural that it was almost as if my research topic materialized as a result of my clinical immersion. This work also provided me with a clear vision for my career. I know my desire as a future middle grades teacher educator is to work where a professional development school partnership either exists or is desired. Through my engagement with clinical work, I am surrounded by people committed to working with P-12 and university students on an ongoing basis. The skills developed and sharpened through these experiences deepened my understanding of the importance of clinical preparation and the work necessary to support it. Without my varied responsibilities as a graduate assistant, I would enter the field of clinically-intensive teacher education as naïvely as a first-year teacher who enters the teaching profession with little to no field experience. Unlike those suffering from the anxiety that comes with imposter syndrome, my experiences in the field learning to be a teacher educator help to ameliorate those fears (Murray & Male, 2005). Additionally, I have gleaned an appreciation for professional organizations that champion clinical partnership work (e.g., NAPDS, PDS SERVE). The middle grades program emphasizes the importance and necessity of professional learning, development, and networking with other clinically-minded educators, and it assimilates its teacher candidates and future teacher educators into the larger community. Being part of a community implies working to uphold it, and my mentors have modeled service through their roles as clinical faculty. I see the necessity for a serviceminded attitude to both the university and to one’s affiliated school or school district. Clinical work requires both a commitment and a desire to serve beyond what is contracted or expected, whether participating in the middle school leadership or additional university programs to help best prepare our teacher candidates. Thanks to my own clinical preparation as a middle grades teacher educator, I am better prepared to provide purposeful, clinically-intensive experiences for my future teacher candidates and to engage in research. I also have a community of colleagues on whom I can rely for advice and support along the way.

Perspective of a Recent Graduate and Early Career Middle Grades Teacher Educator (Melissa) My path to becoming a middle grades teacher educator began, like many who think to pursue a doctorate, with researching where well known middle grades education faculty researchers were located and their doctoral programs. During my research, I became aware of one middle grades education program that centered on clinically-intensive practices in a sustained school district-university partnership. Having the opportunity to be a part of a PDS partnership as a doctoral student and graduate assistant greatly influenced who I have become as a middle grades teacher educator. Like Ashley, I served as a graduate assistant in the Middle Grades Education program and later in the College of Education’s Office of School Engagement. The first assistantship provided opportunities to teach undergraduate Middle Grades Education courses, observe undergraduate courses taught on-site at a local middle school, and support research being conducted about middle grades teacher candidates’ experiences, comparing experiences in both PDS and non-PDS middle schools. The combined middle grades education school-university partnership focused

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experiences from my assistantships and coursework fostered a strong belief that clinically-intensive experiences are vital for pre-service teacher education. The PDS opportunities I experienced as a doctoral student showed me how sustained partnerships with middle level schools can strengthen middle grades teacher education programs. I took multiple doctoral level courses on-site at a local middle school. One course allowed me to work with middle grades teachers to develop interdisciplinary curriculum, and a service-learning course eventually led to my dissertation research. Taking courses on-site allowed me to grow relationships with local middle school administrators and faculty while opening the door to research, writing, and conference presentation opportunities with members of the school community. While taking one on-site doctoral service-learning course, I met with the middle school’s principal and sixth grade teachers to determine whether the school’s needs aligned with my research interests. From these discussions, I learned that the teachers had been struggling to engage students’ families. The teachers believed there was a disconnect between school personnel and parents, and they expressed a need to improve relations. As a result, I conducted a needs assessment about family engagement related to the transition to middle school. I constructed, collected, and analyzed quantitative data related to perspectives and experiences of students, parents, and teachers. The data were used to assess the school’s current family engagement activities for students and parents transitioning from fifth to sixth grade and make changes to family engagement activities based on the needs, wants, and concerns of students, parents, and teachers. Follow-up conversations with the faculty and administration resulted in my further research on family engagement across the school transition from elementary school to middle school. Taking graduate courses on-site at a local middle school as part of the PDS helped me to form stronger relationships with the school, thereby allowing me easier access to a research site where my dissertation research was supported and valued and utilized to create change at the middle school by the school’s faculty and administration. This understanding of what middle level teacher education could and should look like ultimately led me to focus my job search on university postings that focused on building and sustaining school-university partnerships. By focusing on calls with a school-university partnership component, I knew I would set myself up professionally to teach and conduct middle level teacher education research using an approach in which I believed. During each interview, I specifically targeted what I envisioned my role in the partnership to be and identified work I could do within each partnership based on where each school-university partnership was in its development. While my goal had always been to be a middle grades teacher educator who established partnerships with local middle level schools, I was able to speak expertly and confidently during interviews as to how long it could take to develop a successful and sustainable partnership, the steps involved in developing partnerships, and ways to enhance existing partnerships. Without being a part of a PDS partnership during my doctoral program, I would not have had a clear vision of what it takes to work in different stages of a partnership as a teacher educator. By beginning my career at a university that supports its faculty in partnering with local schools, I am able to teach on-site middle grades education courses, conduct research with middle school faculty and administration, and provide service-learning experiences at a middle school that support both undergraduates and the middle school with which we partner. Professionally, this is a fulfilling experience for me. I am able to conduct my teaching, scholarship, and service in one space. Particularly, I find value in conducting research on-site at a middle school in my community where there can be immediate impact like I experienced in my doctoral program with different PDS research projects and dissertation. While being an early career teacher educator at any university comes with many challenges, PDS tenets helps me structure the middle grades education courses I teach and provides structure 289

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for my scholarship and service. For example, during my first year I organized a middle grades education classroom management course be taught on-site at a local middle school. Teaching the course on-site fundamentally altered the course for the better. Students were able to see the theory they read about put into practice weekly, opposed to visualizing what it may look like in a university classroom setting. Middle school teachers welcomed small groups of middle grades education students into their classrooms to observe their teaching and classroom management strategies and volunteered to speak to and work with our students about classroom management strategies and experiences with young adolescents. At the same time, I was able to write multiple micro-grants for the same students to attend and present at the regional South Carolina Association for Middle Level Education conference. Students presented with fellow students, me, or my faculty colleagues. While grant writing fulfilled a part of my scholarship requirements, having my entire class present at a conference fell under my service requirements. After one year as a clinically-focused middle grades teacher educator, I appreciate even more the coursework, assistantships, and relationship-building I experienced as a doctoral student. Being a part of a PDS allowed me to hit the ground running as a teacher educator, facilitating the development of equitable school-university partnerships, and teaching on-site courses at a local middle school while capitalizing on the assets of the site and school community members. As an early career teacher educator, I would not be able to do what I am doing now if I had not been exposed to the many rich, meaningful school-university partnership experiences purposefully put in place by faculty in my doctoral program.

Preparing Clinically-Minded Middle Grades Teacher Educators We used complexity theory (Cochran-Smith et al., 2014) to frame our combined experiences as veteran and novice teacher educators and, thus, were able to see the power and potential of PDS settings in middle grades teacher educator preparation to move the field forward. When we immerse our middle grades education doctoral students in school-university partnerships, we model an appreciation for the complexity of the daily work of middle school teachers and, more importantly, we create situations in which they, like all engaged learners, gain new understanding through action (Dresden et al., in press). Thus, the rich variety of clinicallyintensive experiences inherent in PDS partnerships enables veteran middle grades teacher educators to consciously structure and facilitate more authentic teacher educator preparation opportunities for doctoral students. Middle grades professors involved in a PDS can provide doctoral students with a wider array of teaching experiences than are possible in more traditional teacher education programs. For example, Kathy described how she models for GTAs how to connect theory and practice by integrating the expertise of middle grades teachers into course curriculum and activities. Ashley, a GTA in on-site courses, told of working with middle grades teachers to create authentic assignments for teacher candidates, a process that allowed her to “experience teacher education in action.” Just as middle grades teacher candidates in a PDS experience greater integration into the “life of the school” (Walters & Pritchard, 1999), so, too, do middle grades doctoral students who participate in clinically-intensive programs. Ashley explained that her on-site PDS experiences placed her at the center of practice and prepared her for the complexity of the teaching responsibilities of a middle grades teacher educator as a result of feeling “woven into the fabric of the school community.” Melissa, an early career teacher educator, stated that teaching a classroom management course on-site “fundamentally altered the course for the better” in part because “teachers welcomed [her] students into their classrooms to observe their … classroom management strategies.” Melissa shared that 290

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teaching on-site helps her teacher candidates “see the theory they read about put into practice weekly.” A fundamental aspect of developing one’s identity as a teacher educator is cultivating scholarship. This is why Kathy, and other middle grades education professors who have worked with a PDS partnership, are intentional about helping doctoral students make meaningful connections between their research interests and the school’s needs. Melissa found that her experiences in the PDS focused middle grades program had a profound impact on her development as a middle grades teacher educator. During Melissa’s years as a doctoral student, she was able to work and present on scholarly activities with undergraduate students she taught. This led her, as an early middle grades education faculty member, to build in opportunities for her undergraduates to present together, with her, or with their middle school mentor teachers on their work at regional conferences. University professors often struggle to connect seamlessly their teaching, scholarship, and service (Murray & Male, 2005), but Kathy described how, through her role as a professor-inresidence, she directly ties her service responsibilities to her PDS work. By intentionally weaving service obligations into her PDS efforts, Kathy models for prospective middle grades teacher educators a “commitment to clinical service in the field of middle level education,” a commitment that Melissa had numerous opportunities to observe during her doctoral program. As a result, Melissa described how working within the PDS in her current role as an early career teacher educator provides “structure for my scholarship and service.” One overall experience that blurred the lines between scholarship and service for example, was that she wrote multiple micro-grants to fund her undergraduate students to present with her and others at a regional conference. She created an opportunity for junior and senior level middle grades education students at her university to work together to present on multiple topics ranging from school-wide student led conferencing to integrating curriculum at the middle level.

Final Thoughts For middle grades education faculty to move the field forward, middle grades teacher educators and scholars must become consciously clinically-minded in their practices and their approach to structuring middle grades education programs, from initial certification to graduate studies. Middle grades teacher educators and scholars must prepare doctoral students in clinically-intensive settings so that they become clinically-minded middle grades teacher educators and scholars. Preparing prospective middle grades teacher educators within clinically-intensive settings can, through effort and intention, make it possible to avoid the trap posed by viewing scholarship and practice as opposing activities. Instead, by understanding the complex interactions and collaborative nature of clinically-intensive work, teacher educators can better structure middle grades teacher educator preparation around the clinically-minded interconnectedness of teaching, scholarship and service.

References American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education Clinical Practice Commission. (2018). A pivot toward clinical practice, its lexicon, and the renewal of educator preparation. Washington, DC: Author. Retrieved from https://aacte.org/professional-developmentand-events/clinical-practice-commission-press-conference Andrews, G., & Thompson, K. F. (2016). Relationships and context matter: Tales from a middle school/university partnership. In P. Howell, J. Carpenter, & J. Jones (Eds.), Clinical preparation at the middle level: Practices and possibilities (pp. 5–32). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Andrews, G., Thompson, K. F., Naughton, C., & Waters, M. (2017). Genius hour inquiry initiative: Ongoing, innovative, reciprocal, professional learning for teacher and teacher candidates. School-University Partnerships, 10(4), 83–94.

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Ball, D. L., & Forzani, F. M. (2009). The work of teaching and the challenge for teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 60(5), 497–511. Cochran-Smith, M., Ell, F., Ludlow, L., Grudnoff, L., & Aitken, G. (2014). The challenge and promise of complexity theory for teacher education research. Teachers College Record, 116(5), 1–38. Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. L. (2009). Inquiry as stance: Practitioner research for the next generation. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Darling-Hammond, L. (2005). Professional development schools: Schools for developing a profession. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Darling-Hammond, L. (2006). Constructing 21st-century teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 57(3), 300–314. Dinkelman, T. (2011). Forming a teacher educator identity: Uncertain standards, practice and relationships. Journal of Education for Teaching, 37(3), 309–323. Dresden, J., Gilbertson, E., & Tavernier, M. (2016). University of Georgia and Clarke County School District: Creating a dynamic and sustainable district-wide partnership. School University Partnerships, 9(1), 3–6. Dresden, J., Thompson, K. F., Baker, M. A., Nylin, A. S., & Sinha, K. (in press). The pattern emerges: Novice teacher educators learn from complexity. In D. Yendol-Hoppey, N. Fitchman Dana, & D. T. Hoppey (Eds.), Preparing the next generation of teacher educators for clinically-intensive teacher preparation. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Duckworth, E. R. (2006). “The having of wonderful ideas” and other essays on teaching and learning. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Grossman, P., Compton, C., Igra, D., Ronfeldt, M., Shahan, E., & Williamson, P. (2009). Teaching practice: A cross-professional perspective. Teachers College Record, 111(9), 2055–2100. Hollins, E. (2011). Teacher preparation for quality teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 62(4), 395–407. Mertens, S. B., Caskey, M. M., Bishop, P., Flowers, N., Strahan, D., Andrews, G., & Daniel, L. (Eds.). The MLER SIG research agenda. Retrieved from http://mlersig.net/mler-sigresearch-agendaproject/ Murray, J., & Male, T. (2005). Becoming a teacher educator: Evidence from the field. Teaching and Teacher Education, 21(1), 125–142. National Association for Professional Development Schools. (2008). What it means to be a professional development school. Retrieved from NAPDS website https://napds.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Nine-Essentials.pdf National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. (2010). Transforming teacher education through clinical practice: A national strategy to prepare effective teachers. Washington, DC: Author. National Middle School Association. (2010). This we believe: Keys to educating young adolescents. Westerville, OH: National Middle School Association. Rust, F. O., & Clift, R. T. (2015). Moving from recommendations to action in preparing professional educators. In E. R. Hollins (Ed.), Rethinking field experience in preservice teacher preparation: Meeting new challenges for accountability (pp. 47–69). New York, NY: Routledge. Schon, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York, NY: Basic Books, Inc. Stairs, A. J. (2011). Preservice teacher learning in a PDS. In J. L. Nath, I. N. Guadarrama, & J. Ramsey (Eds.), Investigating university-school partnerships (pp. 95–118). Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Walters, S., & Pritchard, F. (1999). The complexity of partnering: A case study of two middle school professional development schools. Peabody Journal of Education, 74(3–4), 58–70. Williams, T. M., Virtue, D. C., & Smith, D. E. (2016). Working hand-in-hand to strengthen preservice teacher education: The development of a middle level PDS partnership in South Carolina. In P. Howell, J. Carpenter, & J. Jones (Eds.), Clinical preparation at the middle level: Practices and possibilities (pp. 119–134). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Zeichner, K. (1999). The new scholarship in teacher education. Educational Researcher, 28(9), 4–15. Zeichner, K. M., & Liston, D. P. (2014). Reflective teaching: An introduction (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

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21 MIDDLE GRADES ETHNOGRAPHIES IN THEORY AND PRACTICE Boni Wozolek and Walter S. Gershon

Ethnography tends to mirror the paradoxes of its intended purposes, the study of relations between people, ecologies, and understandings in order to better conceptualize how individuals and groups make sense as well as the kinds of things they find sensible (e.g., Geertz, 1973; Rosaldo, 1989; Stewart, 2007; Stoller, 1997). It is a method that has split into many subdivisions (e.g., Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007) that at once reflect the history of qualitative research methodologies and the blossoming of its possibilities over at least the last 60 years (e.g., Given, 2008). In light of this multitude of complexities and directions, our focus in this chapter is on two central trajectories: (a) a discussion of key methodological markers for ethnography and (b) tracing the contours of ethnographic studies in middle grades education.

Of Ethnography Qualitative research methodologies can be conceptualized not only as practical pathways for study—from gathering information through to the expression of what researchers came to understand throughout those processes—but also as imbricated attention to questions of, for example, ethics, power, ontology, and epistemology and the transparent presentation of a scholar’s intentions throughout. This raises a significant question that is the focus of this chapter: What are the methodological patterns and possibilities that distinguish ethnography from other forms of qualitative research? Rather than trace these characteristics chronologically, we have elected to speak to contemporary ethnographic practices while naming their roots, a tacking back and forth that in many ways performatively enacts the method we present. Given the variety and depth of ethnographic conceptualizations, it is important to again assert here at the outset that our generally shared take on ethnography neither represents the whole of what ethnography can be nor seeks to make such claims. Rather, our purpose is to outline how we understand ethnography, discuss the advantages it can provide those who wish to study middle grades education, and articulate how this potential comes to fruition in the following section that explicates these understandings in practical examples. To these ends, we begin with a discussion about the centrality of questions about power in contemporary ethnographies that, in turn, leads us to considering understandings of criticality within and outside of what are often referred to as school ethnographies. 293

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Power and Criticality As noted above, ethnography, at its core, has a doubled central purpose: to discern (a) what makes sense to people at a local level and (b) how those understandings speak to increasingly less local nested, layered sociocultural norms and values. Such considerations are possible because the methodology describes the ways in which people live by and recreate ways of what Walter calls beingknowingdoing (Gershon, 2017a)—the interrelated patterns and understandings about how they can be, what they can know, and the kinds of interactions those ways of being and doing can practically engender. By studying how individuals and groups interact with their ecologies, ideals, ideas, things, and each other, one can better understand why particular choices are more likely and possible than others. These tendencies, in turn, not only relate to increasingly less local understandings of what is normal and valued, but also help explicate those pathways of understanding. What perhaps is the most significant aspect of ethnography—the explication of sociocultural understandings—is also its greatest danger. This is because the process of conceptualizing what people’s interactions can tell us about ourselves and our patterns of beingknowingdoing can also do great harm. Instead of care-fully and respectfully working with people whose lives become the information that drive our scholarship, ethnographers can reduce the complexity of people’s sensemaking to overly easily digestible pieces, at once essentializing and marginalizing people, their contexts, and their understandings. In so doing, ethnographers move from better understanding each other and ourselves to bettering ourselves at the expense of others. It was in large part due to this tendency throughout much of ethnography through, roughly, the late 1960s, that, following broader social and cultural trends in the 1970s and 80s, ethnographers began to foreground attention to how power operates in research contexts (e.g., Rosaldo, 1989; Wolcott, 1990). In the introduction to the second edition of his now classic book on ethnography, The Professional Stranger, Michael Agar (1996) argued that perhaps the most significant difference in the fifteen years since its first publication is the addition and significance of considerations about power. Now, some twenty years later, this position seems nearly quaint. For how might one discuss relations between environments, norms, values, and people without the consideration of who has more wiggle room to enact their available agency?1 More concretely, how could one possibly claim to study classroom understandings without attending to such basic differences as power imbalances between teachers and students or administrators and teachers (e.g., Nespor, 1997; Page, 1991)? Following trends across social sciences, scholars of educational ethnographies that foreground questions of power often referred to their work as “critical” (e.g., Foley, 2010; Levinson, Foley, & Holland, 1996). Critical signaled a neo-Marxist read of contexts that intentionally attended to power as it relates to social class and forms of capital—monetary, cultural, and otherwise. While there is not the space here to detail differences and disagreements between scholars whose work foregrounded class vs. race vs. gender (for example), it is important to note that, mirroring such debates in education outside of research—bell hook’s (1989) loving critique of Paulo Freire (1970) is but one example—this critical tradition was itself critiqued for its lack of attention to male-ness, white-ness, straight-ness, and the like. For our purposes here, however, we wish to note that critical has also undergone a broadening transformation so that it now indicates any works that specifically attend to notions of power while retaining its original more Marxist designation. This creates a context in which one can claim criticality without being expressly Marxist. We, for example, understand ourselves as critical in that our work does indeed foreground questions of power-in-relations of all kinds but are very much not Marxists, although we do agree with some central tenets of Marx’s scholarship. It is this kind of nuance and transparency that are also hallmarks of contemporary ethnography to which we return momentarily below.

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Yet, since the turn of the last century, there is a lingering split between educational ethnographies and ethnographies in fields outside of education. Specifically, where educational ethnographies that focus on questions of power often elect to retain a “critical” designation, the overwhelming majority of ethnographies in non-educational disciplines do not (e.g., Simpson, 2015; Tsing, 2005, 2015). This is in no small part because, where critical primarily remains a Marxist designation in fields such as critical geography (e.g., Massey, 1995) and sociology (e.g., Manza & McCarthy, 2011), education has been influenced by critical traditions such as critical race theory (e.g., Yosso, 2002) and critical feminisms (e.g., St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000) in which critical designates power rather than Marxisms. There is yet another central aspect of how power functions in ethnographic research; its relation to ethical practices in conducting and reporting research.

Research Ethics in Practice Traditionally, discussions of research often divide practices into three overarching sections: data collection, analysis, and reporting. In keeping with contemporary conceptualizations of ethnographic practice and our own questions about continuing use of quantitative language to describe qualitative processes, we tend to discuss these aspects as information gathering, analysis, and expression. For example, with human participants/co-researchers, the only thing that changes to make their lives “data” is the presence of a researcher. However, for our discussion in this section, regardless of how these stages are conceptualized or named, overarching ethical responsibilities remain generally consistent across ethnographic practices. At the outset, one must have a readily understood research plan and question so that those whose lives become the evidence for your study can make a clear decision about their desire to participate, regardless of their level of participation. It is this description of one’s study that also serves as a key means for participants to withdraw from the study: this study is no longer doing what I thought it might or I am no longer comfortable with the terms to which we agreed. Over the course of analysis, one must work to treat information in a systemic and systematic fashion, applying a particular pathway to considering multiple forms of information from a variety of sources in an equally transparent and consistent manner. One should not cherry pick only the information that best suits one’s biases or seek to place events as outliers when they do not fit one’s current frame of understanding (e.g., Agar, 1996; Geertz, 1973; Ortner, 2006). This should also be the case for how one expresses what one has learned over the course of a study regardless of media or how that media is mediated.

Doing Ethnographies Before continuing, it is again important to reiterate that ethnography is in actuality ethnographies. Conducting ethnographic work in practice has many trajectories, none necessarily more significant than another; critical, participant-driven, and multi-sited ethnographies, as but three examples.2 For this and other reasons, we have elected to keep our discussion in this section to the more salient features of ethnography with a recognition that practitioners may well quibble with or reject our claims. As noted above, central purposes of ethnographic work are to more deeply understand how people make sense, their relations to the ecologies that inform their sense-making, and what those local understandings explicate about much less local sociocultural norms and values (e.g., Ortner, 2006; Visweswaran, 2010). Gaining such understandings requires attention to a particular ecology, one that is necessarily interrelated with other ecologies, over time in order to better discern sociocultural patterns that are no less significant for their ordinariness to participating peoples. That participating researchers necessarily impact ecologies studied is similarly a key 295

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feature of ethnographic work and it is for this reason we are referred to as participant-observers. Such recognition is also ethical in nature, an acknowledgement of the impossibility of separating one’s self, ideas, ideals, biases all, from one’s scholarly work. Ethnographies in practice generally involve writing some kinds of notes (i.e., fieldnotes); collecting documents and other material things that are central to a context; conducting open-ended interviews that are more conversational in tone, moving according to the interviewee’s directionalities at least as much as the interviewer’s intended pathways; audio and/or video recordings, whether recorded by researchers or participants/co-researchers; and various forms of mapping and charting, from notes at the end of a day to drawings of where students sit in rooms for example. Generally speaking, ethnographers do not code, although there are certainly forms of ethnography that engage in this practice. Instead, ethnographers constantly engage with the information they gather, formatively throughout the study and summatively as analysis after the information gathering phase of the study is complete. We read and reread our notes, watch and rewatch videos and listen to audio recordings over and again. All the while, we seek to find sociocultural patterns that explicate the locally sensible as much as they deepen our understandings of nested and layered broader sociocultural norms and values in which local sense-making is situated. It is this complicated coming together and falling apart across multiple information sources that in many ways provides ethnographies the strength of the practice and is simultaneously often the most challenging aspect of ethnographic work.

Middle Grades Ethnographies Ethnographic work focusing on the middle grades shares the central purposes of ethnography described above in the ʻof ethnograhiesʼ section. More concretely, when schools and schooling are the focus of an ethnographic study, their fundamental role is to build understandings of sociocultural norms and values as they operate in and between the classrooms, corridors, and communities that impact young people’s ways of beingknowingdoing. It is a scope that includes all school actors—students, teachers, administrators, aides, office managers—and their intersecting roles with communities and community actors. Given this complexity it is not unusual for school actors to hold multiple roles that also impact their daily lives in schools. Students are also people’s children and teachers can be parents, for example. Intentionally mirroring our discussion above that articulated the contours of what ethnography can be, this section is dedicated to providing a deeper understanding of what it means to do ethnography (Agar, 1996; Spindler & Spindler, 1982) in middle grades contexts. Here we have elected to focus on grades 4–9 as there remains some slight debate about the outside parameters for what might be called “middle grades,” and this grade range reflects the majority of states that offer middle grades licensures. Because middle grade students’ ages range from middle childhood to adolescence (i.e., 10–15 years), ethnographic inquiry of this group tends to be as diverse as its participants’ identities. What makes middle grades ethnographic work unique is the construction of primary, middle, and secondary education in the United States and similar Western nations that provide the opportunity for the researcher to observe multiple developmental categories at once. In an elementary school there are usually both primary (grades 1–3) and middle grades students (grades 4–5) in one building. The same is often true of high schools, which contain the end of middle grades (grade 9) along with secondary grades (grades 10–12). This provides an opportunity to understand how policies, practices, and interactions impact students across stages of development. However, it also raises several significant ideas to unpack in this grouping of developmental categories from an ethnographic perspective. As with every other aspect of education, from curriculum to assessment and sociocultural markers to graduating numbers, “middle grades” education is a construction. That it is a construction does not make it any less impactful on the lives of people in schools, nor does its 296

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nature lessen the consequences of everyday schooling. For example, what is now often referred to as middle grades education has been called both junior high school and middle school in the not too recent past, if not in our contemporary moment. Second, the notion of primary, middle, and secondary groupings is an idea built on a foundation that stems from psychological traditions. This is important because educators pay less attention to sociocultural markers than we do to psychological markings. Our understanding of middle level education is largely grounded in our understanding of psychological development. Should this relationship between education and psychological traditions somehow not be clear, one only needs to attend to the fact that the majority of educational scholarship uses American Psychological Association citations, including this book. As the focus of this chapter is ethnography, the study of sociocultural norms and values rooted in social theory rather than the psychoanalytic, this potential tension for those used to conceptualizing education primarily in terms of the psychological is important to note. Finally, while ethnography often focuses on the intricacies of very local, daily interactions, its purpose is to also speak to broader sociocultural norms and values that contextualize and impact people’s everyday lives. For example, Jan Nespor’s (1997) work frames school as a “knot in a web of practices that stretch into complex systems beginning and ending outside the school” (p. xiii). Nespor therefore focuses on the experiences of students across grades, moving back and forth between norms and values from classrooms to corridors and communities. Strong ethnographic inquiry in the middle grades follows longstanding traditions that attend to the “webs of significance that [people] have spun” (Geertz, 1973, p. 5), seeking to untangle knots while attending to questions of power and agency within interrelated spaces, places, norms, and values. Like all strong school ethnographies, middle grades ethnographies analyze cultures across foregrounding questions of race (e.g. Duncan, 2006), gender (e.g., Canaan, 1990), queerness (e.g., Youdell, 2010), class (e.g., McLaren, 1989), home language (e.g., Martínez, 2010), and ability (e.g, Varenne & McDermott, 1998), among other sociocultural precepts that impact people and groups separately (race vs. gender vs. class vs. home language) and simultaneously at their intersections (race and gender and class and home language) (e.g., Gershon, 2017b; Heath, 1983). While it would be difficult to name all ethnographic work from this particular age grouping, this section acknowledges how middle grades ethnographic inquiry functions to contextualize school interactions within broader cultures as they are translated to ethnographic accounts (Wolcott, 1973). To explicate ethnographic work as it relates to middle grades education, this section focuses on a particular set of authors. This is because, on one hand, there are not many middle grades ethnographies and, on the other, middle grades is a fairly recent construction in comparison to ethnographic scholarship as a field, which began with scholars like Boas (1888) and Malinowski (1922). School ethnographies are also a recent anthropological turn in the United States, beginning around the late 1960s with scholars like Wolcott (1967) and Cusick (1973). To be clear, there are many strong examples of middle grades ethnographic scholarship. However, an emphasis on elementary and high school levels in educational anthropology rather than directly on middle grades contexts remains.

Systems, Relations, and Power Schools, like all systems that maintain sociocultural norms and values, are imbued with power. As social theorists like Ortner (2006), Foucault (1977), and Bourdieu (1993) and educational theorists like Cooper (1892), Jackson (1968), and Watkins (2001) have argued, schools stick and preserve (Ahmed, 2010) sociopolitical, historical, and cultural ideas and ideals onto the beingknowingdoing of youth, faculty, administration, families, and communities that interact (Schwab, 1969) with the system of schooling. Because middle grades are a time when identities tend to fluctuate in ways that 297

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are particular to youth developmental milestones, the ways that power is played out can be particular to this age grouping and rather dynamic in its clashes and conformations. On one hand, because of the sustained time that an ethnographer spends with participants and, on the other, because of the purpose of ethnographic work, the ethnographer is uniquely situated to observe, analyze, and report on these systems—of power and otherwise—at play in schools. Ethnographies have studied systems of tracking (Oakes, 1985; Page, 1991), young people’s geographies (Nespor, 1997), and language acquisition in and out of school (Heath, 1983), for example. Strong middle grades ethnographic work has continually demonstrated the significance of making such systems of power familiar and, in its cultural iterations and recursions, the familiar strange again (Spindler & Spindler, 1982) as a strong tool for analyzing power in schools. In a neoliberal time when power continues to be shifted away from teachers and further away from students, when black lives continue to be relegated to limited textbooks, and economically disenfranchised communities are constantly on the losing side of school reform, the strong study of these systems becomes increasingly timely and significant. As identities are changing, being challenged, forming, falling apart, and reforming during the middle grades, ethnographic work that contextualizes these processes within sociocultural understandings is significant (Kinney, 1993). Nespor (1997) wrote, “Bodies are inscribed with complex social markers like gender, race, and social class, and the meanings of such inscriptions often change as bodies age, and also affect how bodies age” (p. 119). Tangled in the complex webs of significance (Geertz, 1973) where young identities in relation to schools and schooling are often spun, ethnographic work situates this notoriously challenging time of adolescence in ways that renders sensible what can be understood as an ordinary, yet complex, set of nested and layered bodies, histories, cultures, and politics. Young lives are explored through the details and depths of observation that is specific to ethnographic work. For example, Evans and Eder’s (1993) exploration of social isolation through a middle school lunchroom built an informal rapport between researcher and student that allowed for conversations that ranged from the teachers they disliked to the students’ deep-seated concerns about feelings of isolation in school. As Evans and Eder argued, through this methodology they were able to analyze and report on a complex social issue that has been explored across qualitative disciplines, particularly in school psychology, but is elucidated in important ways through their sustained interaction with students. Such sustained interactions are not only one of the hallmarks of ethnography, as we have presented in this chapter, they are also methodologically significant in that they engender the ability to more closely examine complex interactions within and between systems that often remain hidden from both local actors and researchers. To document how this combination of sustained study, interconnected systems, sociocultural norms and values, and everyday interactions afford a range of possibilities for considering middle level schools and processes of schooling, we provide the following example of emerging work about questions of youth, harm, and care. As studies have documented, middle grades students in general, and adolescents across ages 12–15 in specific, have increased rates of self-harm and suicide (Hawton, Saunders, & O’Connor, 2012; Hinduja & Patchin, 2010; Wozolek, Wootton, & Demlow 2016). Ethnographic work in these school spaces that attend to the intricacies of identities, to what “doing well means for students” (Gershon, 2017b, p. x), remain important points of access to our understandings of schooling. Although ethnographic scholarship on middle grades has paid little attention overall to marginalized identities, a point we will return to later in this chapter, there is a growing body of ethnographic scholarship that foregrounds the clashes, imbrications, shifts, and trajectories of identities, bodies, and systems (e.g., Adler & Adler, 2007; Elder, Evans, & Parker, 1997). 298

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It is difficult to study everyday interactions without sustained observation. Questions of self-harm are most often studied through tools like surveys and statistics. This is indeed important work that provides real, material help for young people at a time of deep need. However, what sets ethnographic scholarship apart from other forms of qualitative and quantitative research is what can be gained by attending to the small, important details of young people’s lives over a significant stretch of time. What is often missed in conversations about how “participants” are impacted in ethnographic work is how the researcher herself too is changed, sometimes rather significantly, over the course of a study (e.g., Gershon, 2017a, 2017b; Wozolek, 2018). This impact is part and parcel of what Ruth Behar (1996) famously described as forms of vulnerability. One possible example of how such vulnerability functions in ethnographic practice is Boni’s ethnographic work with LGBTQ+ youth on the topic of self-harm (Wozolek, 2018). Drawing attention to this intimate connection between bodies and beings as a researcher thinking about self-harm with middle grades and high school students, she wrote: Sometimes I catch it before it starts, but those fortunate moments of clairvoyance will never outweigh the guilt of the cases I’ve missed. … Usually it starts with a phone call. “Dr. Wozolek … Caleb3 is talking about killing himself, again, and I’m scared.” I can hear the shaky, breaking emotion in the child’s voice on the other side of the phone. I steady my own voice, pulling my own adrenaline aside, to ask the pertinent questions before moving on to make about a half a dozen phone calls to the necessary authorities like the police, parents, and the school. … The student, the person who decided to have an outcry has the authority over his life right now, the rest of us are just along for the ride, hoping that he doesn’t enact his available authority over his body to end his life. (Wozolek, 2018, p. 6) This journal entry demonstrates the intimacy to people, places, and spaces that is drawn through the ethnographic methodologies. It also reflects the complexities of doing ethnographic work, one’s responsibilities as an educator and person outside of that role, the knowledge one can gain from doing sustained local work and how those aspects always, in some fashion, turn in ways that deeply impact researchers’ vulnerabilities. Middle grades ethnographic scholarship untangles knots of relations and ecologies that are at once related to youth at a particular time in their lives as well as the other people and things that intersect with middle grades schools, including teachers, administrators, parents, and custodians. For example, Wolcott’s (1973) ethnographic work focusing on a school administrator and the administrator’s multiple sociocultural roles as a mediator, authority figure, and, in some cases, a father figure to some children, is another example of how middle grades ethnographies can tease out the interrelated nature of the role that people and groups play in a context. Shifting to another layer of scale, Angers and Machtmes’ (2005) study of the implementation of educational technology in a middle level school explored the tension between employing technology in the classroom with the constraints of time and finances as they met student benefits and challenges with using technology in the classroom. From the principal’s office to the technology in the classroom, strong ethnographic work of middle grades contexts can untangle the intricate knots that are woven between bodies in, through, and around schools and schooling.

Conclusion: Possible Directions in Middle Grades Ethnography Ethnographic work not only analyzes normalized sociocultural ways of beingknowingdoing but also purposefully engages people in a local context in the ways that they make sense of their everyday understandings, ideas, and ideals. In school ethnographies, attention to entangled relations among 299

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classrooms, corridors, and communities (Metz, 1978) is a strong tool for engendering what Varenne and McDermott (1998) discussed as the “discovering, taming, and transforming of our humanity” (p. 154) in and through school research. Middle grades ethnographies are no exception to this attention and, as argued above, although relatively limited in number, have made strong contributions toward these ends. We would also like to suggest some possible future directions of study for middle grades ethnographies. As we read and reread in preparation for this chapter, we found the following areas of study generally less represented in middle grades ethnographies in relation to P-12 school ethnographies. In general, we recommend a greater attention to marginalized and vulnerable youth in general and, more specifically, those that foreground race, gender identity and expression, and questions of queerness. The first majority students of color graduating class is now the national group of students in fifth grade, the national population is more female than male, and young people in many ways remain the most comfortable and aware of the fluidity of queerness. As these demographic and sociocultural trends continue, terms such as “minority” have already all but lost their current status as identifiers for either any or all peoples who are not Anglo. Ethnography not only has a long tradition of attending to such concerns but also has an equally long continuing reckoning for errors in the categorization and analysis of peoples. In short, more middle level school ethnographies in general and about such matters, please. More concretely, in terms of gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation, as Gilbert (2014) argued, sexuality has been demonized in schools in general but, aside from the cis-hetero patriarchal sterilized curricular points, tends to be largely left out of middle grades in specific. On one hand, queer ways of being are absent in school with the exception of their presence in suicide and self-harm statistics. Additionally, ethnographic attention to youth suicide and queerness tends to be an issue taken up by researchers in secondary schools. Although there is an emphasis on bullying in schools through ethnographic inquiry (e.g., Adler & Adler, 2007; Akiba, 2004), sexuality and gender identities are often not central in these dialogues. While youth often express feelings of sexual orientation and gender identities at a fairly young age, researchers tend to shy away from thinking about these topics with young adolescents. We suggest that ethnographic tools are used proactively to think about questions of marginalization and middle grades youth rather than allowing patterns of harm to continue largely unabated or to consider injustices reactively with these tools. Finally, we would like to encourage teachers and teacher educators towards continuing work in complex qualitative methods that move beyond teachers’ examining their own teaching practices and are inclusive of other local actors, such as students. While the work by no means need be ethnographic, there are important aspects that contextualize the sociocultural patterns and pathways in middle grades classrooms that are more often missed when educators focus primarily on their own teaching practices. To be clear, we have taught and are in favor of action research and other forms of practitioner research, and we appreciate what these practices can bring to educators. We seek to suggest that methodologies that move beyond questions of practice and content delivery as both method and focus would be valuable for the field, especially in our contemporary educational moment. For, how can one begin to make claims about justice without deeper attention to the nested and layered systems and contexts that strongly inform how daily practice can function?

Notes 1 For more on this discussion, see (Ortner, 2006), especially Chapters 5 and 6. 2 For those with deeper interest in these multiplicities, see, for example (Atkinson, Delamont, Coffey, Lofland, and Lofland, 2007). 3 All proper nouns, except for mine, are pseudonyms.

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PART VI

Macrocontexts of Middle Level Education Policy and Praxis

22 REFORMING MIDDLE YEARS’ EDUCATION IN AUSTRALIA Challenges, Implications, and Opportunities Rebecca Seward-Linger

In Australia, the past three decades have seen a steady rise in research and reform for the education of adolescents in the middle years of schooling—students aged 10–15, spanning grades 5 to 9. The middle years’ movement in Australia has not only produced a significant body of research on education for adolescents, it has also seen the development of an Australian philosophy of middle years’ education and various reforms designed to improve educational practice in the middle years. Middle years’ reform in Australia has largely taken place at the grassroots level whereby individual schools, predominantly private schools, have initiated school-based changes with little government intervention or support. In recent years, however, significant state government initiated changes to middle years’ education have commenced, signaling a new era of middle years’ reform in Australia. This chapter explores the history and major influences of the middle years’ reform movement in the Australian context. It outlines six key factors that currently challenge middle years’ reform in Australia. These six factors include: schools working in isolation; a lack of government or systemic involvement in middle years’ reform; a gap between research and practice; differing motivations for middle years’ reform; ambiguity surrounding teacher identity in the middle years; and global trends toward the standardization of educational practices. The chapter then explores research on capacity building for school improvement and considers how this field of inquiry might provide future direction for middle years’ reform in Australia. The chapter ends with a discussion on the implications of building capacity amidst current challenges to middle years’ reform and provides recommendations for future research.

The Middle Years’ Movement in Australia The 1990s saw the beginning of significant research into adolescent learners and middle years’ education in Australia. Early works such as Barratt (1998), Braggett (1997), and Cormack and Cumming (1996) mapped the learning needs of adolescents and published concerns regarding high levels of student disengagement from learning in the middle years. Adolescents were recognized as having distinctive learning needs, whilst patterns of student disengagement from learning and student absenteeism provided an impetus for middle years’ reform (Barratt, 1998; Braggett, 1997; Cormack & Cumming, 1996). By 2001, the middle years of schooling had emerged as a key field of research and a legitimate educational movement (Chadbourne, 2001). Further significant publications (see Bahr & Pendergast,

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2007; Carrington, 2006; Luke et al., 2003; Pendergast et al., 2005) helped validate understandings of adolescent learning needs and strengthened calls for reform in the middle years. At a policy level, support for enhancing middle years’ education was evident in the Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians (Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs [MCEETYA], 2008) in which the middle years were named as an “important period of learning” (p. 12). The declaration also called for student engagement and learning to be improved by “tailoring approaches to teaching, with learning activities and learning environments that specifically consider the needs of middle years students” (MCEETYA, 2008, p. 12). Influenced by the This We Believe statements of the National Middle School Association (1995, 2003) in the USA, an Australian philosophy of education for the middle years began to emerge in the late 1990s. Two significant publications, The National Middle Schooling Project (see Cumming, 1998) and the Middle Years of Schooling Association’s [MYSA] (2008) Position Paper, presented discussion on what middle years’ education in Australia should look like. Middle schooling was defined as “an intentional approach to teaching and learning that is responsive and appropriate to the full range of needs, interests and achievements of middle years students in formal and informal school contexts” (MYSA, 2008, p. 1). It was thought that middle years’ education should be learner-centered, outcomes-based, and collaboratively organized (Cumming, 1998). Further, the middle years needed “signature practices designed to engage young adolescents in relevant, meaningful and challenging learning” and “evidence-based approach[es] with clearly articulated outcomes” (MYSA, 2008, p. 1). Middle years’ reform in Australia has predominantly occurred in private schools as the result of grassroots, individual school-based initiatives (Bahr & Crosswell, 2011; Chadbourne, 2001). Reform has largely taken a top-down approach whereby school leaders have established organizational structures (e.g., teaching teams, block timetabling, small communities) and expected middle schooling to occur (Pendergast, 2017). An assortment of educational models and approaches for the middle years have been seen across Australia. School variables such as single gender and coeducational structures; academically streamed or heterogeneous groupings; and different structures for organizing timetables, staffing and curriculum have added further complexity and variability to the long list of middle years’ approaches adopted in Australia (Dinham & Rowe, 2008). With such a wide range of approaches and little intervention at a systemic or government level, grassroots middle years’ reform has been criticized for being ad hoc in nature, fragmented, undocumented, and unevaluated (Dinham & Rowe, 2008). The effectiveness of individual, school-based reforms have therefore been difficult to ascertain. Aspland and Nicholson (2003) discussed four types of middle years’ reform that have been found in Australia: holistic, superficial, engaging and non-engaging reform (see Table 22.1). Whilst holistic reform could be seen as the most desirable, financial, and resourcing restraints mean that this type of reform is not achievable for all schools. Engaging reform, however, shows that middle years’ philosophy and practices are achievable even within traditional primary and secondary school structures in Australia. One important theme found in both holistic and engaging reform is that middle years’ philosophy is well-understood and strongly embedded within practice. A second important theme is that teacher professional learning and development [PLD] is acknowledged as a central, pivotal component of middle years’ reform. Recently, the state of Queensland in Australia provided the first example of government-led wide-scale reform in the middle years. Two middle years’ reform projects have been implemented: The Flying Start for Queensland Children (Queensland Government Department of Education [QGDE], 2018) in which year 7 students were moved from primary schools into secondary schools and the Junior Secondary initiative to refocus and enhance teaching and learning from years 7 to 9 (Australian Council for Educational Research [ACER], 2012). The Junior Secondary reform of Queensland is centered on six key principles as outlined in Table 22.2. 306

Table 22.1 Four Types of Middle Years’ Reform Holistic Reform Most often found in new schools that have been purpose-built for middle years’ learners. These schools have adopted middle years’ philosophy and are committed to capacity building for sustainable change. Classrooms are flexible (including different groupings), student-centered, and collaborative. Teachers continually engage in professional development and are cognizant of and committed to middle years’ philosophy. Superficial Reform This reform shows an overt commitment to becoming a middle school, however changes have only been at an organizational level. Middle years’ philosophy is neither well-understood nor embedded into practice. Little consideration has gone into reforming pedagogy or curriculum. Often schools in this category have undertaken middle years’ reform as a marketing strategy. Engaging Reform These schools have little or no recognition as a middle school and instead engage in quality educational practices within traditional organizational structures. In most cases, resourcing for major structural changes is not available. Students and teachers are central to school practice and development. Classrooms are active, innovative, and deeply embedded with middle years’ practices. Non-engaging Reform These schools display little to no understanding or commitment to the developmental needs of adolescents and middle years’ philosophy. Classrooms are characterized by traditional, didactic teaching and discipline based subjects and curriculum. Practices are non-responsive to current educational research on middle years’ education. Note. Adapted from Aspland, T., & Nicholson, E. (2003). Windows into the middle years: A Queensland perspective. Australian Journal of Middle Schooling, 3(1), 36–38.

Table 22.2 Junior Secondary Principles Principles

Elaborations

Distinct Identity

Students feel a sense of belonging, connectedness, safety, and confidence within their school. Group identity as lower secondary school students is recognized.

Quality Teaching

Teachers have good interpersonal, communication, problem solving, decisionmaking, organizational, time-management, and classroom management skills. They also have specific skills needed in the middle years such as the ability to: forge a middle school identity; design integrated curriculum; work collaboratively; in-depth understandings of adolescents; and sustain middle years’ reform.

Student Wellbeing

Schools maintain supportive, caring, and inclusive communities. Physical and emotional safety of students is paramount. Curriculum includes social, emotional, and values education. Strengths-based approaches used, which identify and build on students’ strengths.

Parent and Community Involvement

Parents stay connected with students’ learning. Parents are encouraged to take part in assemblies, special events, award ceremonies, and leadership presentations. The importance of learning in the community and at home is recognized.

Leadership

Junior secondary education led by dedicated and experienced middle years’ teachers. Students have genuine opportunities to experience leadership roles.

Local Decision-Making

Schools are empowered to make decisions on policy and practice in accordance with their own unique contexts.

Note. Adapted from Australian Council for Educational Research. (2012). Junior secondary: Theory and practice. Queensland Department of Education and Training. Brisbane, QLD: Author.

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Whilst Queensland’s Junior Secondary is still in its infancy, early reports suggest that the investment has been welcomed and is showing evidence of having a positive impact on student learning (Pendergast, 2016). The next decade will be interesting in showing whether or not other states will replicate this model and take leading steps in promoting middle years’ philosophy and practices in secondary classrooms across the nation.

Current Challenges Reform at any level is complex and requires careful management and investment in building capacity for sustainable change. The following six factors are identified as key and current challenges for the middle years’ reform movement in Australia. The six factors are also likely to continue to influence middle years’ reform in future decades. They include: • • • • • •

schools working in isolation; a lack of government or systemic involvement in reform; a gap between research and practice; differing motivations for reform; ambiguity surrounding teacher identity in the middle years; and global trends toward the standardization of educational practice.

An explanation of the six factors follows.

Schools Working in Isolation The fact that the majority of middle years’ reforms in Australia have occurred at the grassroots, individual school level (Bahr & Crosswell, 2011; Chadbourne, 2001) means that many schools are working in isolation when instigating change. The grassroots style of reform has resulted in various structural and educational approaches that have been difficult to evaluate in terms of effectiveness (Dinham & Rowe, 2008). It is clear that not all attempts of grassroots middle years’ reform have been meaningful, especially those that have been instigated from the top-down and those that have been overly focused on the organizational elements of schooling rather than teaching and learning (Aspland & Nicholson, 2003; Pendergast, 2017). When change is planned and managed by individual schools alone, the potential to learn from other schools and to share understandings, knowledge, resources, and experiences about middle years’ reform becomes lost. A key challenge for the middle years’ reform movement is to uncover ways in which individual schools can gain opportunities to network with one another and learn from one another about middle years’ approaches and reform.

A Lack of Government or Systemic Involvement in Reform Government and systemic (e.g., Catholic and Independent Schools Council) support and involvement in Australian middle years’ reform have been inconsistent. Whilst the middle years have been identified as a critical period of learning in policy (MCEETYA, 2008) and state governments have sponsored various research initiatives into middle years’ learning (e.g., ACER, 2012; Department of Education and Early Childhood Development Victoria, 2009; Department of Education and Training Western Australia, 2008; New South Wales Department of Education and Training, 2006; O’Sullivan, 2006), funding, direction, and assistance for schools wanting to engage in middle years’ reform have been slow to follow. Explicit direction for schools wanting to adopt middle years’ practices is considered rare (Bahr & Crosswell, 2011). Further, appropriate curriculum designs in the middle years in Australia are still under-developed and in need of attention (Dowden, 2014). 308

Reforming Middle Years’ Education in Australia

In 2017, the Adolescent Success organization held a research symposium in Brisbane, Australia, where 11 middle years researchers were invited to discuss the current state of their field. With regard to middle years’ reform, the group identified the “need to build the collective strength through research and school collaboration as too much is happening that is random, ad hoc and piecemeal” (Main, 2017, p. 47). They also felt that the sustainability of reform was paramount and that such reform needed to “be mediated by government education policies” (Main, 2017, p. 47). As mentioned previously, the Queensland government’s Junior Secondary reforms are the first example of state-led, wide-scale middle years’ reform. Whilst these reforms are still being implemented, researchers are praising this change as pedagogical reform that is guided by middle years’ philosophy and actively responds to the needs, interests, and achievements of adolescents (Pendergast, 2016). The Queensland example shows how government involvement has the potential to create far-reaching, positive impacts on middle years’ reform. A state-led approach also has the ability to bring schools and teachers together to combat the challenge of schools working in isolation.

A Gap between Research and Practice In Australia, the intellectual investment and subsequent body of literature on education for the middle years of schooling has expanded significantly over the past three decades (Pendergast, 2017). There have been concerns, however, that this research is not reaching everyday school practice (Prosser, 2008) or is being overlooked by governments and school systems (Bahr & Crosswell, 2011). There are also concerns that schools are initiating middle years’ reform without sufficient engagement with research, placing themselves at risk of producing ill-informed, ambiguous goals and programs that are unlikely to have a meaningful impact on student learning (Seward-Linger, 2016). Middle years researchers are faced with two challenges: firstly, how to ensure that research is accessible to schools, especially those that embark on middle years’ reform; and secondly, how to ensure that the type of research being produced is pragmatic and addresses current needs within the field. Pendergast and Main (2017) highlighted the paucity of evidence bases used to better understand which facets of middle years’ pedagogy are most valuable and how to effectively combine different pedagogies. They argued that both large, system-scale evidence as well as small, individual classroom and student-level evidence is required to deepen understandings of pedagogical application in middle years’ classrooms (Pendergast & Main, 2017). Prosser (2008) stated, “It’s important to provide tangible examples of new pedagogies and explore what they might look like in schools” (p. 159). He argued that teacher-centered approaches to PLD and action research are key strategies that can enhance teacher practice whilst introducing research into classrooms (Prosser, 2008).

Differing Motivations for Reform As Aspland and Nicholson’s (2003) research explained, the motivations for middle years’ reform have varied across different schools in Australia. Whilst many schools are motivated by middle years’ philosophy and the need to deliver developmentally appropriate programs that actively meet the needs of adolescents (MYSA, 2008), some schools have engaged in superficial middle years’ reform as a branding or marketing strategy for their institutions (Aspland & Nicholson, 2003). Superficial reform can involve establishing new buildings and organizational structures rather than engaging with middle years’ philosophy and enhancing teaching and learning (Aspland & Nicholson, 2003). On the outside, such schools may boast impressive physical facilities, but internally, the curriculum, pedagogy, and pastoral care processes are still mainly influenced by 309

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traditional, didactic secondary school ideals that are not sympathetic to the learning needs of today’s adolescents. Superficial reform that uses the name “middle school” presents a difficult challenge for the actual middle years’ reform movement as it has the potential to generate misunderstandings about what middle schooling, middle years’ philosophy, and middle years’ education actually is. Middle years’ education is more than just an organizational term. It is a “thoughtful adoption of intentional approaches to learning and teaching that takes account of, and responds to, young adolescent learners in formal and informal contexts” (Pendergast, 2017, p. 20). The damage potential is for the wider community to view middle schooling as an organizational measure rather than a philosophical or educational one. Superficial middle schools also have the ability to create negative community perceptions of middle years’ education when such schools have failed to have a positive impact on students’ learning.

Ambiguity Surrounding Teacher Identity in the Middle Years Several Australian researchers have argued that middle years teachers are distinct from primary and senior secondary school teachers and subsequently need specialized skills and knowledge to equip them for working with adolescents (MYSA, 2008; Pendergast, 2015; Rumble & Aspland, 2010). Navigating a middle years’ teacher identity, however, has proven to be challenging with “considerable ambiguity around the professional identity of [middle years’] teachers” (Pendergast, 2015, p. 214). This ambiguity first appears with the lack of consistency found within teacher training programs. Currently, the majority of teacher training programs offered in Australian universities qualify graduates to teach in the age-grouped contexts of early-childhood, primary, or secondary education (Knipe, 2015). Whilst several universities have established distinct middle years’ teacher preparation programs (Pendergast, 2010), in states such as Tasmania, explicit middle years’ specializations are non-existent (University of Tasmania, 2018). Research on middle years’ teachers’ work and their identities is yet to be fully developed in Australia. Works such as Rumble and Aspland (2010) and ACER (2012) have created useful reference points for identity formation and discussion on the work of middle years’ teachers in the Australian context. More of such work is needed, however, to create better understandings of how middle years’ teachers navigate their professional identities; how teachers build capacity to sustain middle years’ practices; and the pragmatics of working with adolescents in middle years’ classrooms.

Global Trends toward the Standardization of Educational Practice The middle years’ movement in Australia has been driven by a philosophy that promotes constructivism and developmentally appropriate programs that meet the learning needs of adolescents (MYSA, 2008; Pendergast, 2017). The middle years have also been considered a site for “innovation, creativity and learning” within the Australian context (Mockler, 2015, p. 254). Recent trends towards the standardization of educational practice, including curriculum, assessment, and pedagogy, however, pose a threat to innovative, creative, and constructivist practices that have formed the basis of middle years’ philosophy (Mockler, 2015). The standardization of education has been a contentious discussion point in recent years. The introduction of the prescriptive Australian Curriculum (see Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2018) during the last decade has prompted the development of standardized curriculum. Accompanying this is the spread of low-risk pedagogies, including direct and explicit instruction, that have been “championed by recent governments in Australia” (Mockler, 2015, p. 259). Such pedagogy positions students as passive recipients in the learning process rather than active agents of knowledge construction (Mockler, 2015). This is contrary to constructivist beliefs 310

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that learners are active, constructors of knowledge. The question of whether or not a standardized curriculum and pedagogy are appropriate for all learners and their individual learning needs remains pertinent (Sparapani & Callejo Perez, 2015). If Australian teachers are expected to differentiate programs and “design and implement teaching strategies that are responsive to the learning strengths and needs of students from diverse linguistic, cultural, religious and socioeconomic backgrounds” (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2011, p. 10), their work becomes increasingly complicated by a standardized curriculum and pedagogy. Indeed the practicalities of how teachers can meet the needs of individual learners, as well as the demands of policy-makers, remains a complex and unsolved issue when examining the impact of standardized education on teaching and learning (Sparapani & Callejo Perez, 2015). The question of whether middle years’ philosophy and approaches could co-exist with standardized practices within Australian education is also one that has not been fully explored.

The Role of Capacity Building in Reform School improvement research has continued to acknowledge the importance of capacity building in sustaining meaningful reform within schools (Crowther, 2011; Harris, 2011; Hopkins & Jackson, 2003; Stringer, 2013). Schools develop their abilities to shape and sustain improvements by focusing on capacity building (Hopkins & Jackson, 2003) and having clear implementation strategies for reform (Harris, 2011). Without attention on capacity building, reform can be superficial, short-lived, and likely to fail (Fullan, 2010; Harris, 2011). Understanding capacity and how it is built is important for the sustainability and authenticity of the middle years’ reform movement in Australia. Without attention to building all aspects of capacity, middle years reform in Australia is at risk of being superficial or non-effective (Seward-Linger, 2016). Capacity building is described as a school’s competency to collectively bring about effective change (Hopkins & Jackson, 2003). Capacity building is a “crafted activity” undertaken by school stakeholders; shaped by context and time; and driven by vision for improvement (Stringer, 2013, p. 18). Capacity building will therefore look different in different school contexts. It needs to be managed with deliberate, purposeful, and carefully crafted implementation strategies so that it embeds itself as a central and ongoing part of school life. Mitchell and Sackney (2011) theorize capacity by separating it into three highly interrelated categories including: personal capacity, interpersonal capacity, and organizational capacity. The three categories are influential of one another and boundaries between the categories are often permeable and expandable (Mitchell & Sackney, 2011). Table 22.3 provides a summary of the key characteristics of each category of capacity and key strategies used to build each area of capacity.

Building Capacity for Future Middle Years’ Reform Theory and works such as Mitchell and Sackney (2011), Crowther (2011), and Hargreaves and Fullan (2012) provide opportunities for schools, governments, and school systems to increase understandings of capacity building for sustainable middle years’ reform. Such research also provides a structure from within which schools can devise capacity-building action plans to build capacity across personal, interpersonal, and organizational domains. By taking a capacity-building view of reform and carefully considering how and where each category of capacity needs to develop, Australian schools will be better placed to implement successful middle years’ change in the future. The challenges outlined earlier in this chapter construct a unique socio-cultural context within which capacity building for middle years’ 311

Table 22.3 Personal, Interpersonal and Organizational Capacity Building

Personal Capacity

Characteristics

Capacity Building Strategies

Focus is on individual teachers and their personal capacities. This refers to teachers’:

• •

• •

•

Beliefs, values, and assumptions. Knowledge, skills, and expertise.

(Mitchell & Sackney, 2011)

• •

Deep, critical self-reflection. Teacher networking to access external knowledge and information. Establishing supportive environments with trusting relationships. Targeted feedback on teaching from trusted colleagues. Facilitating teacher agency and decisional capital where teachers are able to make discretionary judgements that affect practice.

(Hall & Simeral, 2008; Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012; Mitchell & Sackney, 2011) Interpersonal Capacity

Focus is on groups, communities, and relationships. This category is highly influenced by school culture, including: • •

• •

Affective culture, which refers to the way people feel within groups. Cognitive Culture, which refers a school’s • ability to collectively engage people in collaborative cognition and learning.

(Mitchell & Sackney, 2011)

•

Addressing affective elements of culture before cognitive elements. Establishing a strong affective culture, which includes characteristics of trust, mutual respect, listening to others’ opinions, and the valuing of others’ contributions. Developing cognitive culture through collective reflection; professional conversations about specific professional issues, problems, concerns, perplexities, and mysteries; and the creation and maintenance of shared understandings and vision. Supportive organizational structures that allow affective and cognitive culture to grow.

(Bryk, 2010; Crowther, Fergusson, & Hann, 2009; Handford & Leithwood, 2012; Mitchell & Sackney, 2011) Organizational Capacity

Focus is on socio-cultural conditions, structures, • and communication. This includes:

Supportive structures that develop strong affective and cognitive cultures. Collegial discourse. Leadership structures that support other areas of capacity building, especially personal capacity.

• Socio-cultural conditions where people learn the correct ways to think, feel, act, • and interact with others. • Structures such as: groupings, timetables, meetings, facilities, and leadership models. (Mitchell & Sackney, 2011) (Mitchell & Sackney, 2011) •

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education in Australia needs to occur. The following sub-sections consider these challenges and the implications they have on building each area of capacity for future middle years’ reform.

Implications for Building Personal Capacity Building the personal capacities of future middle years’ teachers in Australia begins with tertiary teacher training programs. It is the responsibility of Australian universities to ensure that teachers are properly prepared for work as middle years’ teachers. Perhaps the easiest pathway to achieving this is through targeted middle years’ teacher preparation programs at the tertiary level. Ongoing teacher PLD also remains a fundamental element of building the personal capacities of teachers in the middle years (ACER, 2012; MYSA, 2008). Effective, ongoing PLD is considered a key tool in increasing teachers’ confidence, sense of efficacy, and capacity to enact quality, evidence-based teaching that improves student learning (Main & Pendergast, 2015). The current state of ambiguity surrounding Australian teacher identity in the middle years creates challenge for future personal capacity building. Personal capacity is concerned with the beliefs, values, and assumptions of teachers (Mitchell & Sackney, 2011). Without a clear vision for teacher identity in the middle years, critical examinations of beliefs, values, and assumptions can be difficult. Works such as Rumble and Aspland (2010) and ACER (2012) have started to define the key characteristics of Australian middle years’ teachers and their classroom work. Research such as this needs to continue, combined with empirical studies into the pragmatic work of middle years’ teachers in order to consolidate this professional identity in the future. Finally, trends towards the standardization of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment present significant challenges for current and future middle years’ teachers and their quests to build personal capacity. Middle years’ teachers are caught in a philosophical debate with constructivist middle years’ approaches on one side and less-flexible, less-creative standardized approaches on the other. The standardization of curriculum and pedagogy can weaken teacher agency, especially when implemented with top-down approaches. This means that teachers’ abilities to critically examine and make discretionary judgements on their teaching practice also becomes limited. The importance of teacher agency in building personal capacity needs to be recognized and acknowledged by policy-makers of the future. Policy-makers also need to consolidate vision for middle years’ reform, considering the place of both constructivism and standardized practices in middle years’ education for future decades.

Implications for Building Interpersonal Capacity If not addressed soon, the gap between research and practice will have a noticeable impact on schools’ abilities to build interpersonal capacity in the future. Whilst there are several examples of research on trust and strategies to build affective culture in schools (for example: Bryk, 2010; Kochanek, 2005; Mitchell & Sackney, 2011), without reference to such research, building interpersonal capacity is at risk of being fragmented, experimental, and ineffective. Reform of any type is about cultural change and so it is therefore important that both affective and cognitive cultures within schools are assessed and strategically developed (Mitchell & Sackney, 2011). There have been many calls for middle years’ teachers in Australia to work in collaboration with other teachers (ACER, 2012; Chadbourne, 2004; MYSA, 2008). It is also important to note however, that teachers need formal guidance and training on how to work effectively in teams in order for collaborative work to be successful (Main, 2010). As Chadbourne (2004) warns, not all collaboration is effective, with some types of collaboration even being counterproductive to educational reform (Chadbourne, 2004). Teachers need supportive structures and environments to explore effective means of collaborative work such as “joint classroom based work”, team-teaching, peer coaching 313

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and collaborative action learning (Chadbourne, 2004, p. 11). Stronger government and systemic support in the future has the potential to create more networking opportunities for teachers where collective action learning can take place. Also, engagement with research on collaboration and team building is likely to have a positive effect on building interpersonal capacity in the future.

Implications for Building Organizational Capacity Grassroots approaches to middle years’ reform and the lack of government or systemic involvement in this reform continues to present significant challenges for capacity building. Without government or systemic involvement, future reform efforts are likely to continue in the ad hoc fashion that has ensued, making reform difficult to assess in terms of effectiveness (Dinham & Rowe, 2008). It is also likely that schools will continue to hold differing motivations for reform, which will in turn impact on the type of reform that is achieved. With more government and/or systemic support in the future, middle years’ reform has the potential to become more strategic and effective. Government and systemic support has the potential to create networking opportunities for teachers so that schools can learn from one another in terms of middle years’ reform, middle years’ approaches, and the organizational structures that best support these. The question of what effective leadership looks like in the Australian middle years’ context is also relevant when assessing organizational capacity and how it may be built in the future. The gap between research and practice is one that weighs heavily on building all areas of capacity, including organizational capacity. Without access to research on best practices in the middle years, reform efforts are at risk of being ambiguous and piecemeal (Seward-Linger, 2016). A future challenge for the research community is to find ways to increase access to contemporary research on middle years’ practice for schools. Prosser (2008) also highlighted the need for more school-based teacher pedagogical inquiry to build teacher PLD in the middle years.

Conclusion and Recommendations for Future Research The past three decades have seen an interesting mix of grassroots and government-sponsored reforms for improving middle years’ education across Australia. The challenges presented in this chapter are substantial and are likely to continue to influence middle years’ reform over future decades in Australia. However, acknowledgement of these challenges and careful consideration of how they impact capacity building for sustainable middle years’ reform, can pave the way for more successful change strategies in future years. Whilst theory and research on capacity building provide useful opportunities for the future shaping of Australian middle years’ reform, more research in this area is needed. In particular, empirical research that gives insight into capacity building in action is needed in order to uncover pragmatic capacity-building strategies for middle years’ reform in the Australian context. The following questions are presented as important topics of inquiry for future research. • • • •

What strategies could Australian schools use to build personal, interpersonal, and organizational capacities in the middle years? What will effective leadership in the middle years look like? What will define the identity of Australian middle years’ teachers of the future? How will Australian middle years’ teachers construct their professional identities and build personal capacity for meaningful middle years’ reform?

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It will be interesting to see if the next decade of middle years’ reforms will result in more government-led initiates such as the Queensland’s Junior Secondary, or whether grassroots style reform will continue to dominate the movement. It will also be interesting to see how schools and school systems respond to the challenges outlined in this chapter and the ongoing task of building capacity for meaningful and sustainable change.

References Aspland, T., & Nicholson, E. (2003). Windows into the middle years: A Queensland perspective. Australian Journal of Middle Schooling, 3(1), 34–38. Australian Council for Educational Research. (2012). Junior secondary: Theory and practice. Queensland Department of Education and Training. Brisbane, QLD: Author. Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. (2018). Australian Curriculum. Retrieved July 28, 2018 from www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/ Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. (2011). Australian professional standards for teachers. Retrieved from https://www.aitsl.edu.au/docs/default-source/teach-documents/australian-professionalstandards-for-teachers.pdf. Date accessed: June, 9, 2019. Bahr, N., & Crosswell, L. (2011). Contesting lost ground for the middle years in Australia: Using the case of Queensland. Australian Journal of Middle Schooling, 11(2), 12–19. Bahr, N., & Pendergast, D. (2007). The millennial adolescent. Camberwell, VIC: Australian Council of Educational Research Press. Barratt, R. (1998). Shaping middle schooling in Australia: A report of the national middle schooling project. Deakin West, ACT: Australian Curriculum Studies Association. Braggett, E. (1997). The middle years of schooling - an Australian perspective. Cheltenham, VIC: Hawker Brownlow Education. Bryk, A. (2010). Organizing schools for improvement. Phi Delta Kappan, 91(7), 23–30. Carrington, V. (2006). Rethinking middle years: Early adolescents, schooling and digital culture. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Chadbourne, R. (2001). Middle schooling for the middle years: What might the jury be considering? Southbank, VIC: Australian Education Union. Chadbourne, R. (2004). A typology of teacher collaboration in middle schools. Australian Journal of Middle Schooling, 4(1), 9–16. Cormack, P., & Cumming, J. (1996). From alienation to engagement: Opportunities for reform of the middle years, Volume 1–Key recommendations and findings. Belconnen, ACT: Australian Curriculum Studies Association. Crowther, F. (2011). From school improvement to sustained capacity. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Crowther, F., Fergusson, M., & Hann, L. (2009). Developing teacher leaders (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Cumming, J. (1998). Principles and directions: A collaboratively developed statement on middle schooling. In J. Cumming (Ed.), Extending reform in the middle years of schooling (pp. 5–13). Deakin, West, ACT: Australian Curriculum Studies Association. Department of Education and Early Childhood Development Victoria. (2009). Understanding year 9 students forum report. Retrieved from www.eduweb.vic.gov.au/edulibrary/public/publ/research/publ/understandingyear9-students-forum-report.pdf. Date accessed: January, 29, 2012. Department of Education and Training Western Australia. (2008). Middle schooling in Western Australian public schools: What‘s working, what‘s not and why? East Perth, WA, Australia: Author. Dinham, R., & Rowe, K. (2008). Fantasy, fashion and fact: Middle schools, middle schooling and student achievement. Retrieved from http://research.acer.edu.au/tll_misc/6. Date accessed: December, 21, 2012. Dowden, T. (2014). Challenging, integrated, negotiated and exploratory curriculum in the middle years of schooling: Designing and implementing high quality curriculum integration. Australian Journal of Middle Schooling, 14(1), 16–27. Fullan, M. (2010). Motion leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Hall, P., & Simeral, A. (2008). Building teachers‘capacity for success. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Handford, V., & Leithwood, K. (2012). Why teachers trust school leaders. Journal of Educational Administration, 51(2), 194–212. Hargreaves, A., & Fullan, M. (2012). Professional capital: Transforming teaching in every school. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

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Harris, A. (2011). System improvement through collective capacity building. Journal of Educational Administration, 49(6), 624–636. Hopkins, D., & Jackson, D. (2003). School improvement in an era of change. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Knipe, S. (2015). A generic teacher education program that meets contemporary schools‘needs. In S. Groundwater-Smith & N. Mockler (Eds.), Big fish, little fish: Teaching and learning in the middle years (pp. 223–235). Port Melbourne, VIC: Cambridge University Press. Kochanek, J. R. (2005). Building trust for better schools: Research-based practices. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Luke, A., Elkins, J., Weir, K., Land, R., Carrington, V., Dole, S., Pendergast, D., Kapitzke, C., Van Kraayenoord, C., Moni, K., McIntosh, A., Mayer, D., Bahr, M., Hunter, L., Chadbourne, R., Bean, T., Alverman, D., & Stevens, L. (2003). Beyond the middle: A report about literacy and numeracy development of target group students in the middle years of schooling, Volume 1. Canberra, ACT: Commonwealth Department of Education, Training and Science. Main, K. (2010). Jumping the hurdles: Establishing middle school teams. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 5 (2), 118–129. Main, K. (2017). Adolescent Success conference: Research roundtable report. Australian Journal of Middle Years of Schooling, 17(2), 46–48. Main, K., & Pendergast, D. (2015). Core features of effective continuing professional development for the middle years: A tool for reflection. Research in Middle Level Education Online, 38(10), 1–18. Middle Years of Schooling Association. (2008). Position paper: Middle schooling; people, practices and places. Brisbane: Middle Years of Schooling Associaiton. Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs. (2008). Melbourne declaration on the educational gaols for young Australians. Retrieved from http://www.curriculum.edu.au/verve/ _resources/National_Declaration_on_the_Educational_Goals_for_Young_Australians.pdf. Date accessed: June, 9, 2019. Mitchell, C., & Sackney, L. (2011). Profound improvement: Building capacity for a learning community (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Mockler, N. (2015). The middle years as a site for reform: From local to global. In S. Groundwater-Smith & N. Mockler (Eds.), Big fish, little fish: Teaching and learning in the middle years (pp. 253–267). Port Melbourne, VIC: Cambridge University Press. National Middle School Association. (1995). This we believe: Developmentally responsive middle level schools. Columbus, OH: Author. National Middle School Association. (2003). This we believe: Successful schools for young adolescents. Westerville, OH: National Middle School Association. New South Wales Department of Education and Training. (2006). Our middle years learners – engaged, resilient, successful. Retrieved from http://www.dec.nsw.gov.au/detresources/Our_Middle_Years_gANxIHEeuA. pdf. Date accessed: November, 13, 2012. O’Sullivan, S. (2006). Making the most of the middle years: Implementing the middle years, Stage 2 - consultation report. Retrieved from http://www.education.nt.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/4529/Mid dleYearsStage2Report.pdf. Date accessed: November, 17, 2012. Pendergast, D. (2010). Middle schooling. In D. Pendergast & N. Bahr (Eds.) Teaching middle years: Rethinking curriculum, pedagogy and assessment (2nd ed., pp. 3–22). Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Pendergast, D. (2015). Teacher identity in the middle years. In S. Groundwater-Smith & N. Mockler (Eds.), Big Fish, Little Fish: Teaching and Learning in the Middle Years (pp. 207–222). Port Melbourne, VIC: Cambridge University Press. Pendergast, D. (2016). Reforming the middle years of education: Reflecting on the Queensland context. Literacy Learning: The Middle Years, 24(3), 11–15. Pendergast, D. (2017). Middle years education. In D. Pendergast, K. Main, & N. Bahr (Eds.), Teaching middle years: Rethinking curriculum, pedagogy and assessment (3rd ed., pp. 3–20). Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Pendergast, D., Flanagan, R., Land, R., Bahr, M., Mitchell, J., Noblett, G., Cain, M., Misich, R., Carrington, V., & Smith, J. (2005). Developing lifelong learners in the middle years of schooling. Carlton, South: Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs. Pendergast, D., & Main, K. (2017). Quality teaching and learning. In D. Pendergast, K. Main, & N. Bahr (Eds.), Teaching middle years: Rethinking curriculum, pedagogy and assessment (3rd ed., pp. 66–80). Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Prosser, B. (2008). Unfinished but not yet exhausted: A review of Australian middle schooling. Australian Journal of Education, 52(2), 151–167. Queensland Government Department of Education. (2018). A flying start for Queensland Children. Retrieved from http://flyingstart.qld.gov.au/Pages/home.aspx#7. Date accessed: July, 14, 2018.

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Rumble, P., & Aspland, T. (2010). The four attributes model of the middle school teacher. Middle Years of Schooling Association, 10(1), 4–15. Seward-Linger, R. (2016). Building capacity for Year 9 reform: Learning from the teachers’ perspectives (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://eprints.usq.edu.au/32877/2/Seward-Linger_2016.pdf. Date accessed: July, 14, 2018. Sparapani, E. F., & Callejo Perez, D. M. (2015). A perspective on the standardized curriculum and its effect on teaching and learning. Journal of Education and Social Policy, 2(5), 78–87. Stringer, P. (2013). Capacity building for school improvement. Rotterdam, NL: Sense Publishers. University of Tasmania. (2018). Education and teaching. Retrieved June 25, 2018, from www.utas.edu.au/ courses/study/education-and-teaching

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23 ENGAGING MIDDLE YEARSʼ LEARNERS An Australian Perspective, 1990–2018 Rachel Flenley, Julie McLeod, and Russell Cross

Engagement is a catch-word in Australian education today, one particularly pronounced in middle level (age 10–15) schooling. While the term remains ambiguous and technically contested in scholarly domains, in policy and practitioner material, engagement is generally understood as a multidimensional and malleable construct consisting of three interrelated components: behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004). It is widely documented within scholarly literature, public discourse, and educational policy that Australian schools have been failing to engage young adolescent learners, with motivation and engagement in the middle years of schooling constructed as a significant problem for both the individual and society (Pendergast, 2009). The solution to this problem is usually framed in pedagogical terms— the creation of “developmentally appropriate” learning environments usually situated within the existing two-tier primary (elementary)/secondary structure of Australian schooling, and the application of a “middle schooling” philosophy of teaching that supports the specific cognitive, social, and emotional needs of young adolescents (Barratt, 1998; Carrington, 2006). In contemporary Australian educational discussion, early adolescence and middle schooling engagement are commonly represented as existing in enduring and stable, if problematic, relations, as I elaborate below. However, they are “invented concepts,” with the constructs of adolescence and middle schooling first emerging in the United States at the turn of the 20th century (Cuban, 1992) and engagement taking shape as a theoretical educational construct in the mid- to late-1980s (Christenson, Reschly, & Wylie, 2012). All three coalesced in Australian education in the early 1990s to produce the problem of (dis)engagement in middle level schooling; a problem that has both persisted and been reconstituted over the past three decades. This chapter offers a historical reading of engagement’s trajectory through Australian middle level education and examines its effects on ideas of good teaching and learning in policy and practitioner material. As the early 1990s marked a key moment for the alliance between middle level schooling and engagement, this examination begins with the literature of that era and extends to that of the current day. First, it provides some wider socio-cultural context for the emergence of engagement and the advent of the middle schooling movement in Australia. Then, in a review of trends in the scholarly engagement literature and Australian policy material in the period 1990–2018, it outlines key problematizations of young adolescent engagement. In doing so, it identifies central recurring and contrasting themes in psychological and sociological approaches, highlighting the philosophies and assumptions that underpin them. In the final section, it explores the effects of engagement on ideas of good pedagogical practice through an 318

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analysis of a series of teacher guideline documents produced in the state of New South Wales, selected for the ways in which they capture national contemporary trends. We now turn to set the scene by documenting some of the broader educational context in which engagement in the middle years became a focused area of concern.

Creating the Conditions for Engagement: The Australian Context, 1990–2018 The idea that young adolescents needed to be engaged in schooling first appeared in Australia in the early 1990s. At this time, the nation was just emerging from its most significant economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Its manufacturing industry was in decline, interest rates were at record highs, and unemployment rates were in double digit figures with rural, working class, and young people affected most severely (Campbell & Proctor, 2014). One policy solution to this employment problem was to raise the school-leaving age beyond 15 years. In 1984, 45 percent of students completed year 12. By 1994, this figure was 74.6 percent (Burke & Spaull, 2007), equating to around 60 000 more young people each year in schools requiring a higher level secondary education. Retention, however, was only considered a partial solution to a complex problem. Young people needed be able to contribute to a post-industrial and increasingly globalized knowledge economy. The federal Labor government at that time, led by Prime Minister Bob Hawke, envisioned building a “clever country.” In a 1990 election speech, Hawke declared that Australia must become “a leader in the production and export of ideas,” and that the “ever-increasing number of young Australians finishing high school [must] strive for excellence” (1990). The educational achievements of students, particularly disadvantaged ones, therefore became a crucial political and economic concern (Carrington, 2006). These socio-economic conditions were accompanied by cultural transformations. Escalating rates of divorce and single parenthood were changing the face of the Australian family and shifting migration patterns were bringing new levels of linguistic and cultural diversity to Australian schools (Luke et al., 2003). An emerging consumer culture targeted young people in advertising campaigns, positioning them as a distinct group, one with its own mores and needs and “outside the parameters of adult control” (Luke et al., 2003, p. 15). New scientific literatures were also remaking perceptions of adolescents. Intersecting developmental, therapeutic, and sociological discourses constructed young people as alienated, and the idea that adolescents were both “at risk” and a “risk to” society reverberated through public and policy discussions (Carrington, 2006). Issues such as teenage pregnancy, crime rates, and alcohol and drug addiction were public problems that received great attention. Middle level schooling became a prominent social space in which to address worries about young people and what were perceived as related social and economic concerns. The first major Australian project to explicitly conceptualize engagement as a solution to these problems was the national Student Alienation During the Middle Years of Schooling Project (Australian Curriculum Studies Association [ACSA], 1996). Informed by research seeking to solve similar but locally nuanced concerns emanating from North America (e.g., Beane, 1991; Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1989; Finn, 1989; Newmann, 1981), major findings were (a) young adolescents had identifiable developmental characteristics and (b) the existing two-tiered school structure and traditional teaching practices did not serve their needs, resulting in alienation and academic underachievement. A third—intervening and interventionist—stage was required; one based on a “new philosophy of schooling that will fully engage young people rather than the ‘bricks and mortar’ issues associated with creating middle schools” (ACSA, 1996, p.vi). Engagement became galvanized as both an organizing concept and a key driver of Australian middle level school reform over the late 1990s and early 2000s. In similar patterns across the 319

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nation, educational reviews and policies explored alienation in young people in relation to schooling (Barratt, 1998). This focused on issues such as truancy, stagnating achievement rates, and classroom behavior, and linked their alleviation to improving literacy, numeracy, critical thinking, and lifelong learning skills. Significant initiatives included the Middle Years Research and Development Project (Hill & Russell, 1999), the National Middle Schooling Project (Barratt, 1998), the Queensland Schools Reform Longitudinal Study (Hayes et al., 2003), and the formation of the Middle Years of Schooling Association, now called Adolescent Success. Other social-justice oriented programs such as the Fair Go project (Munns & Woodward, 2006) focused on increasing engagement of disadvantaged students across both elementary and secondary levels. Despite findings that this initial attempt at middle level school reform in the mid-1990s across the nation had been inconsistent (Luke et al., 2003) and an evident deceleration of initiatives in the early years of the new millennium, a second generation movement subsequently gained momentum in the mid-2000s (Graham, 2009) and middle level schooling is now an accepted part of the Australian educational landscape (Pendergast, Main, & Bahr, 2017). Engagement also remains a stubborn middle years’ problem, with a proliferation of policies and frameworks around the nation outlining strategies for its amelioration. The most recent national Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians, for example, singled out the middle years in relation to engagement: The middle years are an important period of learning, in which knowledge of fundamental disciplines is developed, yet this is also a time when students are at the greatest risk of disengagement from learning. Student motivation and engagement in these years is critical, and can be influenced by tailoring approaches to teaching, with learning activities and learning environments that specifically consider the needs of middle years’ students. (Ministerial Council for Education Employment Training and Youth Affairs [MCEETYA], 2008, p. 12) As in the 1990s, these anxieties are situated within wider socio-economic concerns and cultural transformations. Despite a rising gross domestic product and resilience against major economic challenges, such as the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008, Australia’s economic position remains volatile. At the time of writing, youth unemployment is double the national average, sitting at around 12 percent, but rising to 18 percent when underemployment—a feature of the “gig economy”—is taken into consideration (Brotherhood of St Laurence, 2018). Many of these jobs are in new and burgeoning economies such as personal service, health-care and other lifestyle and individually oriented sectors. Changes in the digital landscape, particularly the emergence of social media, mean adolescents are now highly technologized and connected, with schools grappling with the social and educational implications of this (Carrington, 2006) and with the challenges of producing 21st century citizens when the shifting politico-social landscape makes it unclear who these might be. In such a climate, there are immense and multiple pressures on young people and on schools—the call to engagement appears as a way to address such difficulties and help build resources for young people in an uncertain world.

(Re)conceptualizing the Problem of Engagement We turn now to examine some of the various ways in which the construct of engagement has been conceptualized as both a problem and solution in international scholarship as well as more specifically in Australian policy literature, historically and in the present. 320

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Rescuing the “At-Risk” Student One problem particularly pronounced in the literature of the late 1980s and the 1990s was that of the “at-risk” student. This usually referred to students considered more likely to drop out or leave school before graduation without the skills and understandings to enter the world of work or further education, thus exposing themselves to a range of negative consequences including reduced earning capacity, increased mobility, and the uptake of risky behaviors (Batten & Russell, 1995; Eyers, Cormack, & Barratt, 1992). For these students, engagement was mobilized as a tool to improve retention and achievement rates. Medical discourses tend to underpin conceptions of the at-risk student in the psychologically oriented and policy literature. As with health issues, such as obesity or heart disease, risk factors are generally classified in two ways: social conditions that cannot be altered and events or behaviors that can (Finn & Zimmer, 2012). Social conditions considered predictors of early school withdrawal or insufficient achievement tend to hold constant across the engagement literature during the period 1990–2018: low social economic status, male gender, mobility, a non-white background, indigeneity, household stress, lack of parental support for schooling, and belonging to a single parent family are all identified as key indicators (Angus et al., 2009; Batten & Russell, 1995). Students with these identity characteristics and backgrounds are considered more likely to feel disconnected from school and the purpose of schooling, leading to events or behaviors, such as habitual lateness or truancy, passivity, disruptive behavior, and failure to complete work (Fullarton, 2002). Finn (1989) found that school participation and identification (belonging to and valuing school) operate together in developmental cycles, with positive cycles leading to successful school completion and negative cycles leading to school withdrawal and/or failure. Based on Finn’s seminal work, a common central assumption is that participation and belonging are key indicators, mediators, and outcomes of (dis)engagement. Behavioral signifiers of engagement include regular attendance, academic practices such as coming to class prepared and completing homework (Stout & Christenson, 2009), and participation in extra-curricular and community activity (Finn & Zimmer, 2012; Fullarton, 2002). Identifying intervention measures that help at-risk young people connect with and participate in school is therefore a key focus, with the end goals being both retention and improved outcomes. Warm and supportive teachers who show concern while encouraging autonomy and expecting accountability (Skinner & Belmont, 1993; Voelkl, 2012), fair and consistent behavior management practices, routine monitoring of behavioral indicators (Stout & Christenson, 2009), and small learning communities (Newmann, Wehlage, & Lamborn, 1992) have been common recommendations. Other research and policy material has constructed the problem of risk more broadly, with alienation considered a potential or actual problem for many or most adolescents (Carrington, 2006; Hill & Russell, 1999). Early constructions of this problem drew on both psychological (e.g., Erickson, 1960) and sociological discourses (e.g., Seeman, 1975) and represented young people as estranged, fragmented, or powerless with engagement both alienation’s binary and solution (ACSA, 1996; Newmann, 1981). While adolescent alienation remains a problem in the literature today, it is more likely to be framed in terms of wellbeing and associated with other psychological and mental health problems, such as depression and anxiety (Bempechat & Shernoff, 2012). Responses to adolescent alienation are often, therefore, remediated through developing resilience, mindfulness, and other therapeutic practices (Wright, 2011) as well as engagement.

Relocating Risk: A Problem of (Dis)empowerment In the more sociologically oriented literature, the problem of at-risk students has a different complexion. While similar groups and problems are identified, sociologists (Hattam, Prosser, & Brady, 2008; Zyngier, 2011) have taken issue with labels such as drop out or at risk, arguing that

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that they cast engagement—and educational success and failure—in over-simplified and personal terms that fail to recognize entrenched social conditions and educational practices that result in many students deciding that school is not for them. Instead, and drawing on a range of critical (e.g., Apple & Beane, 1999; Bernstein, 1996) and emancipatory theorists (e.g., Freire, 1993; hooks, 1994), the term “marginalized” is used to convey the argument that these students are actively excluded in and from the institution of schooling. Aligning what is learned in schools more closely with marginalized students’ lives, experiences, and aspirations thus emerges as the focus within much of this work (Smyth, 2006; Zyngier, 2011). Researchers working in this paradigm further have argued that students from disadvantaged backgrounds are often less likely to receive instruction that promotes higher order thinking and the development of deep knowledge and are, instead, more likely to be positioned as passive recipients of transmissive forms of learning, characterized as pedagogies of poverty (Haberman, 1991). Creating cognitively challenging learning programs in which disadvantaged students develop these deeper skills and knowledge is therefore a core concern (Munns & Woodward, 2006). Also rejecting interventionist policies and programs that position (dis)engagement as the property and responsibility of the student, scholars such as Smyth (2006, p. 289) have taken a relational position to argue that “success and failure needs to be recast in multidirectional terms,” with disengagement described as a process “played out in the relationship between young people and school.” In this literature, engagement is mobilized—often in the name of “student voice”—to argue for student involvement in the shaping of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment as well as wider school decisions (Baroutsis, McGregor, & Mills, 2016; Zyngier, 2007). Other research has envisioned engagement as a transformational tool, with its purpose to enable and enact social and democratic change (Portelli & McMahon, 2004). The concept of student voice has been picked up in more recent Australian policy literature, although constructions and intentions vary widely—from sharing learning with parents (Department of Education and Early Childhood Development [DEECD], 2009b) and having a say in school improvement processes (DEECD 2009a) to projects such as ruMAD (r u making a difference?) in which students take action on issues relating to social justice, peace, and sustainability (Zyngier, 2007). In all uses, however, notions of student agency are vital, and linked to this is the assumption that recognition of student voice is both a strategy to support engagement and evidence of student engagement.

Success for All While improving outcomes specifically for the at-risk student has been a focus for some engagement research and policy development, for much other research the problem has been schooling success—and academic success in particular—for all middle level learners. Recurring words associated with successful students across the literature include focused, critical, invested, and mastery-oriented (as we illustrate in the final section of this chapter); terms drawing from or closely associated with motivational theory and research. While there is some debate over the relationship between motivation and engagement (Martin, Ginns, & Papworth, 2017), the constructs are frequently worked together to explore the combination of environmental preconditions, psychological characteristics, and learning behaviors associated with academic achievement. The idea that motivation and engagement are optimized when students experience feelings of relatedness, autonomy, and competence (Connell & Wellborn, 1991; Deci & Ryan, 1985) is a common research theme, with findings echoing those emerging from the school retention literature. Relatedness, or experiencing feelings of connectedness to others, is considered most likely to occur when students are cared for and supported by teachers and peers (Wang & Eccles, 322

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2013). Autonomy is experienced when students are involved in relevant and personally meaningful curriculum (Hayes et al., 2003; Newmann et al., 1992), while competence is understood as experiencing success at challenging tasks which encourages flow, or deep engagement (Csíkszentmihályi, 2008; Shernoff, 2013). Much research has attended to the cognitive and meta-cognitive skills needed for success. In the policy literature of the 1990s and 2000s, these were often organized as higher order thinking skills and their inclusion seen as an essential element of middle level pedagogy (Luke et al., 2003). Today, in contrast, self-efficacy and goal theories (e.g., Deci & Ryan, 2000; Dweck, 2012) dominate. Self-regulated learners are widely analyzed as more academically successful, possessing the ability to set meaningful learning goals, plan, and monitor their learning, and adapt or adopt cognitive and behavioral strategies to meet goals (Hattie & Yates, 2013; Martin, 2007; Shernoff, 2013). While often explored as context specific variables, these traits and behaviors are also expressed as enduring learning dispositions, often linked with other constructs such as resilience and 21st century learning skills. For example, Martin and Marsh (2006) focused closely on task-oriented dispositions to identify five essential characteristics of engaged and academically resilient students: confidence (self-efficacy), coordination (planning), control, composure (low anxiety), and commitment (persistence). Similarly—but using the term “learning powers” and drawing on social-cultural and socioecological theories—Crick (2012) identified engaged learners as creative, curious, resilient, and strategically aware, focused on meaning making and willing to move into positive learner identities. Programs aimed at developing such skills and dispositions proliferate in Australian policy and practitioner domains, with the work of Hattie (e.g., 2012) and Dweck (e.g., 2012) particularly influential.

A Developmental Mismatch The idea that there is a developmental mismatch between young adolescent needs and traditional schooling structures and practices leading to disengagement is a central problematization in psychologically oriented and policy literature. Early representations of this problem in Australian policy literature drew on ideas from the 20th century developmental stage theories of Hall (1904), Piaget (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958), and Erickson (1960) to construct adolescence as a period of great cognitive, physical, and socio-emotional change associated with a drive for independence in parallel with identity confusion as young people navigate their way between childhood and adulthood. The South Australian Junior Secondary Review (1992, p. 9), also utilizing ideas emanating from North American middle level scholarship (Hargreaves & Earl, 1990), assigned developmental tasks to early adolescents that included adjusting to profound physical, intellectual, social, and emotional change; growing towards independence; developing a sense of identity; and thinking in progressively more abstract and reflective ways. While a conception of adolescence as a hormone fueled transitional period of storm and stress experienced by all was not accepted unconditionally in the 1990s (Cormack, 1991)—and has since been contested (Carrington, 2006)— the idea that young adolescence is a time of unmet developmental needs permeates the middle level literature of the era. Similar themes reverberate throughout the scholarly literature. Using the idea of stageenvironment fit, Eccles and colleagues (1993) argued that young adolescents’ growing needs for autonomy, freedom, and the rising importance of peer relations are inconsistent with the opportunities afforded them in school, typically leading to a marked decline in motivation, engagement, and achievement. In contemporary educational discussion, phrases such as “middle years slump” and “year 9 dip” pepper the literature and are almost invariably followed by statistics illustrating their effects on academic achievement rates and suggestions for pedagogical intervention (e.g., Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation, 2013). 323

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Transitions are a focal point in developmental problematizations of (dis)engagement. The move from the student-centered care and control of the primary years to the disciplinary focused individualism of secondary education has been identified as a persistent problem in both scholarly literature (Barber & Olsen, 2004; Wigfield, Eccles, MacIver, Reuman, & Midgley, 1991) and policy literature (Department of Education and Early Childhood Development, 2009a; Eyers et al., 1992). Relatedly, the notion of belonging currently serves as a powerful organizing concept in Australian policy literature, with reports that a decline in a sense of belonging occurs during the year/s following the move to secondary education, particularly for girls and Indigenous students (Department for Education and Child Development, 2017 [South Australia]). Fostering a sense belonging is thus widely regarded as necessary for securing successful transitions, and integral to creating a middle years’ environment in which engagement can flourish.

(Dis)engagement in Australian Middle Level Schooling: Pedagogical Solutions While the discussion thus far suggests that constructions of the problem of engagement in the middle years of schooling have been diverse, they nevertheless converge on the common idea that traditional schooling structures and/or practices can lead to student disengagement and that the solution to this lies in developing new curricula, pedagogies, and organizational practices. In this section, we seek to illuminate some of these matters in reference to current initiatives within Australia. We begin by briefly identifying key principles and practices that emerged in the 1990s and crystalized as common sense about engaging middle school pedagogy. Then, through a close examination of contemporary teacher guideline documents—produced as part of a series by the Centre for Education and Statistics and Evaluation (CESE), a division of the Education Department of the state of New South Wales—we offer a critical reading of how these are envisioned to operate in practice and point to some of their possible effects.

Creating “Common Sense”: (Re)developing Middle School Practice In the late 1990s, the National Middle Schooling Project was commissioned to develop a “common and agreed view” about middle schooling practice in Australia (Barratt, 1998). In response, and drawing on both international literature (e.g., Beane, 1991; Hargreaves, 1995) and local research (e.g., ACSA 1996), it produced a position paper outlining adolescent needs and a set of guiding principles for, and characteristics of, effective practice. Following the “broad principles and practices associated with constructivism, outcomes-based-education, and student-centered education” (Chadbourne, 2001), the project found that young adolescents required opportunities to explore identity, build positive relationships with adults and peers, and experience purpose, empowerment, and success in a safe and stimulating environment. Given these circumstances, it was anticipated students might become “engaged, focused, and achieving adolescents” (Barratt, 1998, p. 34). These recommendations became known as middle schooling “signifying practices” (Pendergast et al., 2017, p. 14) and are now broadly accepted as: • • • • • • • •

clear philosophy relevant to context; higher order thinking strategies; integrated and disciplinary curricula that are negotiated, relevant, and challenging; heterogeneous and flexible student groupings; cooperative learning and collaborative teaching; authentic and reflective assessment with high expectations; democratic governance and shared leadership; and parental and community involvement in student learning. 324

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These signature practices were to be accompanied by a number of environmental and organizational changes, including the establishment of designated middle level areas within schools, smaller sub-school, or house groups that enabled closer teacher-student relationships, and programs to smooth the transitions between elementary, middle, and senior school schooling stages (Hattam et al., 2008). What, then, are the markers of engaging middle level teaching and learning today? How have the middle school philosophy and its signature practices been extended, translated, or interrupted since their inception? One key idea sustained over the years is that engagement is a direct pathway to achievement. The CESE text, What Works Best Reflection Guide, offered a pedagogical roadmap for this pathway, giving schools “explicit examples of what can be done to improve student engagement and achievement” (CESE, 2016, p. 2). While these recommendations were for all years of schooling, in the series their application was imbued with a sense of urgency at the middle level school. A companion text indicated links between student disengagement and reduced achievement in year 9 national reading tests—with students exhibiting positive behaviors, attendance, and interest ahead of their less motivated peers by between three and seven months of learning (CESE, 2017b, p. 3). Engagement gave instructional practice “a particular shape” (Bacchi, 2012) in the What Works Best Reflection Guide, creating clear axes of distinction between effective and ineffective teaching. High teacher expectations for all are required, with concerns raised that “students from disadvantaged backgrounds may be achieving less than their full potential due to lower expectations of their ability” (CESE, 2016, p. 3). Good pedagogy is individualized, with curriculum differentiation an “effective means by which this can occur in every classroom” (CESE, 2016, p. 3). However, the constructivist learning discourses infusing the curriculum philosophies of the 1990s and early 2000s have receded, with best practice involving “teachers clearly showing students what to do and how to do it” (CESE, 2016, p. 4). Student engagement is to be fostered by encouraging “active student participation in lessons” (CESE, 2016, p. 7) rather than through discovery and self-directed learning. The theme of student nurture—now conceptualized as advocacy—has intensified and infuses the series. In the two-part text, Supporting Students’ Learning, the authors positioned a “supportive learning environment … alongside effective teaching strategies” as a crucial key to engagement and educational success (CESE, 2018a, p. 2). The care and control of the primary years—that earlier documents constructed as developmentally out of sync at middle years—has extended upwards, with a core role of secondary to support students’ social and emotional wellbeing and help them “navigate the everyday course of school life” (CESE, 2018a, p. 3). To do this, teachers were positioned as coaches and mentors as well as instructors. For example, in one case study example, a secondary school reported on its learning support team that “ensures that every student has a tailored path to support them as soon as they join the school” and “develops support plans for students experiencing, or at least at risk of experiencing, difficulties at school so that they can receive quick and appropriate attention” (CESE, 2018a, p. 5). In another, a mathematics teacher reported on the importance of making sure he gets to know all his students well, particularly those “who may need help but you wouldn’t know otherwise, because they want to fly under the radar” (CESE, 2018b, p. 4). Close monitoring and surveillance go hand in hand with this nurture and instruction, with data collection and analysis now the key to achieving and demonstrating successful knowing, caring, and teaching. Creating new ways of evaluating and comparing students, engagement data is used at the system and school levels to analyze behaviors such as attendance and extra-curricular involvement, psychological states such as anxiety, and environmental conditions such as family background. Such indicators are then assessed against social and academic outcomes so that appropriate interventions can be enacted (2018a). Increasing parental and community involvement in student learning remains as 325

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one such intervention, with little change between the suggested activities of the previous decades and those in the series today: information nights, providing feedback, and involving parents in school events are still offered as key strategies. Two related texts—The Role of Student Engagement in the Transition from Primary to Secondary School (CESE, 2017c) and a case study entitled Homebush West Public School: A “Middle School Approach” (CESE, 2017a)—offered particular insight into how the developmental needs of young adolescents and concomitant best practice are envisioned today. In the case study, “middle school is a notion that is openly and deliberately shared with year five and six students to emphasize the important transition that they will soon face—their transformation from children in primary school to young adults in secondary school” (CESE, 2017a, p. 2). Here the last two years of primary school were constructed as an apprenticeship for secondary school, underscoring and perpetuating notions of adolescence as a time of becoming, and middle schooling as a period of preparation. Year five and six students were “consciously distinguished from their younger peers,” with all middle grades students given the “opportunities to step into leadership roles and encouraged to take these roles seriously” (CESE, 2017a, p. 2). Special privileges and exclusive extra-curricular activities were also extended to these students, as well as increasing choice over seating arrangements and classroom structure and a voice in school design plans (CESE, 2017a, pp. 2–3). With these came added responsibilities for the students and motivational coaching roles for classroom educators who taught students “to be responsible for their own learning,” “to set their own learning goals,” and to have a growth mindset that “helps them prepare for moving into high school” (CESE, 2017a, p. 3). While moving confidently into adulthood is the central theme in the primary school case study, in The Role of Student Engagement in the Transition from Primary to Secondary School (CESE, 2017c), themes of vulnerability and protection predominated; with friendship instability, bullying, a reduction in parent involvement, and larger school size all cited as potentially problematic and leading to a lack of belonging. In this text, the middle level school was constructed a place of potential danger for students psychologically, or socially by means of background, unprepared for its environment. “Explicitly teaching social skills,” “transition camps,” “small class teams,” “buddy systems and developing students,” “strategies to build relationships and work successfully with others” are all offered as examples of good prophylactic practice, aimed at “correcting” the student and preventing the spread of disengagement. Professional cooperation within and across the primary and secondary domains was another significant intervention measure with “transition teams” and “communities of schools” now embedded as normal practice. We see here some of the ways in which the alliance of middle years and engagement has continued to exert a powerful influence on educational policy, the organisation of schooling, and the more micro-level pedagogical strategies of the classroom. Ensuring that students are engaged is both a responsibility of middle years schooling and a necessary prerequisite for students to have a positive experience of middle and secondary schooling.

Conclusion This chapter presented a brief historical review of engagement’s trajectory in Australian middle level school educational literature produced over the years of 1990 to 2018. It explored how engagement came to be considered both a problem and a solution for young adolescents, identified key problematizations, and critically examined its pedagogical effects in current middle level school practice. While the chapter placed its focus on the Australian context, adolescent engagement is an internationally shared concern (e.g. National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine, 2004; Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2012). In deconstructing often taken-for-granted views about young adolescent learners and engagement, this 326

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chapter offers educators and policy-makers a lens through which they might reconsider the assumptions guiding middle years thinking and the problems it seeks to address. In doing so, it seeks to open up new avenues for considering the history and practical and pedagogical effects of the key interrelated concepts of middle years and student engagement.

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Canberra, ACT: Commonwealth Department of Education, Science, and Training. Martin, A. J. (2007). Examining a multidimensional model of student motivation and engagement using a construct validation approach. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 77(2), 413–440. doi:10.1348/ 000709906X118036 Martin, A. J., Ginns, P., & Papworth, B. (2017). Motivation and engagement: Same or different? Does it matter? Learning and Individual Differences, 55, 150–162. doi:10.1016/j.lindif.2017.03.013 Martin, A. J. & Marsh, H. W. (2006) Academic resilience and its psychological and educational correlates: A construct validity approach. Psychology in the School, 43(3), 267–281. Ministerial Council for Education Employment Training and Youth Affairs [MCEETYA]. (2008). Melbourne declaration on educational goals for young Australians. Canberra, ACT: Author. Munns, G., & Woodward, H. (2006). Student engagement and student self-assessment: The REAL framework. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 13(2), 193–213. doi:10.1080/ 09695940600703969 National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine. (2004). Engaging schools: Fostering high school students’ motivation to learn. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi:10.5860/CHOICE.42-1079 Newmann, F. M. (1981). Reducing student alienation in high schools: Implications of theory. Harvard Educational Review, 51(4), 546–564. doi:10.17763/haer.51.4.xj67887u87l5t66t Newmann, F. M., Wehlage, G., & Lamborn, S. (1992). The significance and sources of student engagement. In Student engagement and achievement in American secondary schools (pp. 11–39). doi:10.4236/ojapps.2014.45022 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. (2012). PISA 2012 results: Ready to learn: Students’ engagement, drive and self-beliefs (Volume III). Paris, FR: Author. Pendergast, D. (2009). The success of middle years initiatives: Some important considerations. 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24 HUMANITIES-FORWARD DEVELOPMENTS IN NORWEGIAN MIDDLE GRADES ENGLISH EDUCATION Jessica Allen Hanssen and Maja Henriette Jensvoll

With the recent inclusion of English as one of the three priority subjects in Norway’s new fiveyear teacher education model, the subject of English as a second language has been elevated in status from a useful skill to an essential and vital part of what it means to be an educated member of Norwegian society, second only to the national language and mathematics in academic importance and prestige. With the heightened emphasis placed on the subject of English, new questions are raised about what is English, or what should it be; questions that were previously peripheral but have now become significant. The answers to these questions, such as what is the ultimate purpose of becoming highly fluent in a second language, or what does fluency even mean, vary, depending on who is asking them, or to whom the response is delivered. For some, English is a tool, a practical means to an expedient end. For others, English widens to include avenues of meaning making that do not necessarily lead to a tangible or salable product, but nevertheless generates ideas that only exist as a product of second language mastery. Perhaps the most significant questions raised by the new status of English are: How much English is enough? What does it mean to “speak” or “know” English in the 21st century? Who among us is qualified to make this distinction? The general understanding or convention among teachers of foreign languages is that the learning of a language is divided into four basic elements—speaking, listening, writing, and reading— with an added digital emphasis that informs all of these areas. These skills can readily be attained on a superficial level, but if we are looking to take our language pupils to the higher and more significant level of English language usage expected in a relatively wealthy and urbane nation such as Norway, teachers will need to infuse lessons with more elusive fifth element: culture. If English teachers do not have substantial subject knowledge themselves, they may end up only working on the superficial level. The subject of English, in recent years, has become the de facto repository for non-linear, humanities-based thinking in a national education model and economic reality that privileges progressive, data-driven, and quantifiable knowledge production. Rather than address how or why this change to a knowledge-based economy occurred, however, the school had situated the teaching and learning of English within the comfortable rhetoric of being a tool for engaging “the outside world;” a kind of selective verbal and narrative ecotourism. Thus, the subject of English fell under pressure from various forces. While no one would claim that English is less 331

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important than before in today’s information economy, the subject faces external pressure from the hard science academic model and from the realities of international professional communication— to make the subject of English obsolete as a culture-bearing exploration of the innermost Me and, rather, to privilege quantifiable competence over non-quantifiable understanding. This movement has been sharply challenged, particularly with regard to the role of English as a culture-bearing moment in a young person’s education. New policies are now in place that will support English as an important arena for lifelong learning, with a heightened emphasis on the central role literature plays in middle grades English. This chapter charts certain developments in Norwegian education policy that directly impact middle grades English education and highlights the role of humanities-based thinking in current educational practice. In addition, we provide insight into the Norwegian educational system in general and contribute to a deeper understanding of relevant issues and concerns within Norwegian schools, such as teacher professionalism, autonomy, and responsibility—especially with regard to the way English is taught at middle grades. Finally, we profile some programs and developments especially relevant to middle grades education, with an eye toward creating dialogue about what individual teachers in Norway and worldwide can do to foster an exemplary English learning environment (Hanssen, 2018).

The Norwegian Context In a wealthy, liberal country of 5.5 million, few will argue against the need for worldwide communication through the use of English. Norway has a famously high level of English proficiency at all grade levels (Education First, 2017), and English is generally treated as a second, not foreign, language in middle grades education (Curtain, 2015). In Norway, middle grades English teachers, up through year 10, are asked to produce lessons that “use different situations, working methods and learning strategies to develop one’s English-language skills” and that enable learners to “read, understand and evaluate different types of texts of varying degrees on different topics” (Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training [NDET], 2013, pp. 10–11). We then have to explore “proficiency,” and what this proficiency is for, before then considering the other factors that go into developing Norwegian educational policy for the promotion of English. There seems to be a certain disconnect between the relatively high level of basic skills in English, for example, that foreigners and researchers immediately recognize when asking for help or directions, and the surprisingly low PISA results Norway generates, given its per capita spending on education. English, like mathematics, provides a basis for worldwide comparison and ranking of students, teachers, schools, and governments, and it is clear that the English being promoted in schools is directed sharply at improving test results (Veimo, n.d.; Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research [NMER], 2018). There is no category on the PISA evaluation to rate a student’s aptitude for contemplative analysis of a language or aesthetic enjoyment of its literature, even though no one would argue that these aspects are somehow unimportant to “English.” English teachers are simultaneously asked to communicate a language and historical and cultural tradition, and also to dismantle exactly this tradition in favor of pragmatic approaches to the language that diminish its value as a humanities-driven subject. Due to Norway’s high scientific, economic, and academic engagement, and taking into account the limitations of the Norwegian language as a means of conveying said engagement due to the number of active users, knowledge production essentially equates with mastery of the English language. Norway’s oil economy, and the subsequent economic and social investments that accompany it, have facilitated large-scale research operations, notably in the fields of medicine, aquaculture, and, perhaps ironically, alternative energy. This new economic infrastructure has certain ramifications for the subject of English, particularly at the university level, but by ready extension universally. While students do have a certain amount of economic security that they 332

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never had before, societal demands cause many of them to feel pressure to expand this security and to improve upon an already stable economy. Other students, particularly the younger ones who have grown up with economic prosperity, have different expectations or priorities, and they have a harder time being motivated towards academic achievement. In addition, many students, as a result of new economic prosperity, have come from rural, district, or even international backgrounds in order to get a college education and societal advancement that was either unnecessary or unavailable to them before. This is relevant because in Norway, tenth-grade students are asked to choose either a trade school, general studies, or specialized track for their high school education that can potentially limit their access to higher education or to certain disciplines. Job security is, therefore, at the forefront of a middle level school leaver’s mind, even if they have not yet made the connection between mastery of English and access to potential opportunities. Concerned about this disconnect, perhaps because it leads to diminished potential for young Norwegians to engage the international economy, policy shapers at various levels of government are seeking to address the problem. Three recent developments at different levels of Norwegian educational policy have shaped, and will continue to shape, middle grades English education in Norway for years to come. These are: 1) Revised subject curriculum that addresses subject developments (NDET, 2013). 2) Heightened emphasis on humanities-based thinking in education (Meld. St. 25, 2016–2017). 3) Revised model for middle grades teacher education at colleges and universities prioritizing English in new ways (NMER, 2014, 2016).

Background Some small background on recent developments in the Norwegian higher education sector will help foreground the discussion, especially regarding the role English will play in education in years to come. One major development is the movement from a four-year, bachelor degree model for teacher education to a five-year, master’s degree model. The added year expands the preexisting curriculum to include advanced pedagogy, a master’s thesis based on teaching practice in a school subject, and, notably, the opportunity to acquire advanced training in three school subjects. English, along with Norwegian and mathematics, has been designated a “priority subject,” (NMER, 2018) meaning that teacher-candidates are encouraged to select it as an area for advanced study due to its importance in the national school curriculum, and the registered lack of qualified teachers. In many Norwegian teacher education programs, English has even been made obligatory, again stressing its value against the new five-year model. A major research project, called Masterteach, is planned to document and examine the impact that a five-year teacher education will have on subject knowledge, including English, through comparing and investigating the various teacher education models at the Norwegian higher education institutions that host teacher education (Fuglseth, Pharo, & Sæthre-McGuirk, 2018). The other recent development surrounds the importance of humanities within Norwegian education. In 2016, NMER released a white paper, called “Humanities in Norway,” that laid out a detailed strategy to support and protect humanities subjects (e.g., English) which the ministry sees as challenged by business models across sectors that diminish the value of humanities subjects or do not account for their value at all. The ministry identified three areas in which the need for humanities knowledge is strong: (a) integration, migration, and conflicts; (b) major shifts in technology; (c) climate, the environment, and sustainability (NMER, 2016, p. 7). That humanities is a stabilizing force against rapid cultural, technological, and environmental change is not lost on the ministry. The last word, sustainability, is especially significant, although 333

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perhaps in ways they did not intend. Sustainability commonly related to energy consumption and management, for example the reduction of waste or carbon impact. Other definitions of the word imply nourishment. When we literature and language scholars think of our role in the outside world, or even in the education circle, are we wrong to think of “cultural sustainability” as a relevant outcome? Even within the idea of sustainable development as an organizing principle for human development, there exists a split between meeting new challenges while preserving existing resources. We relate the concept back to the subject of English, where there has been a certain schism between those who teach the subject as an extension of modern-day social sciences or business and those who teach it as an extension of classical aesthetics. English has to address all of these things, and more, yet there is limited space allotted in the school day. As a notable aside, the national curriculum that English teachers will learn to work with, whether at their schools or in the new teacher training, has recently been modified (NDET, 2013), and now includes four primary categories of “competence aims”: language learning, oral communication, written communication, and culture, society and literature where it used to have three: language learning, communication, and culture, society and literature, placing a special emphasis on the division of oral and written production in English. As for the literature, teachers have certain freedom to choose literature that supports their interpretation of curricular goals, rather than having texts prescribed by a national, regional, or school governance. In Norway, middle grades English teachers, up through year 10, are asked to produce lessons that “use different situations, working methods and learning strategies to develop one’s Englishlanguage skills” and that enable learners to “read, understand and evaluate different types of texts of varying degrees on different topics” (NDET, 2013, para. 3). The protected place of literature in the current English curriculum—and the freedom teachers had in choosing the types of literature that best support their pupils’ learning—came under criticism in 2017 by a special expert review committee seeking to refine the “core elements” (kjernelementar) of English to simply “communication” and “language learning” (NDET, 2017a). The committee put together a comprehensive series of suggestions for how to understand and improve the relevance of English within these “core elements” as a collection of linguistic, socio-linguistic, and pragmatic competences, and with NDET’s ideas such as sustainable growth, democracy, and public health and wellbeing in mind. The committee correctly defined English as both a tool and a formative process by invoking the German-inspired word dannelse, which connotes culture and formation. They left out, however, the idea of literature being the essential and most efficient means by which these areas are explored and developed, and when the committee sent their suggestions for review, more than 300 respondents from the school and higher education sectors, as well as from the interested public, replied with a nearly unanimous call for literature to be included. The committee, as an example of the exact values of sustainability and democracy they mean for English to convey, responded by adding a new “core element” to their initial two: “meeting English language texts” (NDET, 2018). While on one hand functioning independently from each other, these developments also indicate on the other certain shifts in thinking on a macro level, whereupon the end result appears to be a movement towards new interpretations of English less as a rote subject of fact-finding expediency and more as a dynamic and formative entrance into a rich international dialogue (Fenner, 2005, 2011). When teachers teach strategies for speaking and writing English without clearlydefined and meaningful cultural context to guide the users, they create language users who can perhaps find information quickly (e.g., on the Internet), but without an ultimate end or purpose. Without the specific content and context of English language literature, artistic expression, and culture to guide and inform English teachers and learners alike, we risk losing the unique rhythm, aesthetic, and historical consciousness of English. What better way to establish these values in English classrooms than through knowledge of and appreciation for how these values 334

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are transmuted through English language literature? How did Western society come to these conclusions about our shared values? Through shaping powerful narratives that feed the soul and help people understand the importance of compassion, dignity, respect, and humanity in general. Teaching English literature and its conventions enables students of English to engage a collective history and contemporary outlook that widens perspectives on a multitude of situations and cultures that are not necessarily their own, with the added physical dimension of doing it in a second language. This builds empathy for other people’s struggles in a way that is hard to imitate in the first language.

Features of Humanities-Forward Reforms In this section we briefly describe and contextualize three areas—authentic text, digital competence, and interculturalism and inclusivity—that, in order to fully comply with the recent Norwegian government’s movements toward a more humanities-forward education, will require teacher discretion and autonomy as well as updated subject knowledge. These three factors influence a discussion of teacher autonomy, responsibility, and professionalism to follow.

Authentic Text We have established why literature should be central in developing English language skills as a vital part of the nation’s sense of cultural sustainability, but Norwegian educators also need to examine when, how, and what types of English language literature are taught. Norwegian schoolchildren begin learning English words and grammar in the formal arena in grade 1, and national testing begins in grade 5. Their informal exposure and approach to English, however, differs sharply from their classroom experience. Due to the popularity of English language programming, both on television and on the Internet (e.g., YouTube, online games, gaming networks), informal learning quickly outpaces formal learning. Once a certain general language fluency has been attained, there seems to be a sharp disconnect between what young learners want from English and what they experience at school (Charbonneau, 2016; Drew, Oostdam, & van Toorenburg, 2013; Hasselgreen, Drew, & Sørheim, 2012). Charbonneau (2016) documented a distinct difference in motivation for learning in fourth- and fifth-grade English classrooms that primarily rely on formal teaching materials such as textbooks, and classrooms that open up for mixed methods and books perceived as “authentic.” For students who do not encounter authentic texts in the early grades, motivation could be strengthened through the use of graded readers designed to introduce key cultural and narrative concepts with simple and clear language. Authenticity, of course, is an idea in constant transition that requires teachers to keep up-to-date with what their students would consider to be authentic English, and it is difficult for working teachers to find quality authentic texts that are also appropriate for the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. There is nothing worse than teachers who think they are cool or “with it,” but who are in fact woefully behind, and the older students are quicker to notice and disengage. As any middle grades English educator knows, this creates stagnation, boredom, and frustration with a subject that should by definition have considerable youth appeal. English teaching at the middle grades should therefore strive for authenticity, not only in text(book) choices, but in appreciating the contexts for which students will want to learn English, even when they are somewhat removed from the teacher’s personal experience. Since the second national tests are administered in grade 8, with a significantly more sophisticated set of themes with an emphasis on relevance, we see an important window of opportunity in grades 5 to 8 for English instruction to engage authentic narratives. 335

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Digital Competence There is obviously a strong temptation, when attempting to meet EFL learners authentically, to engage language learning through the digital arena, with digital competence widely supported by the curriculum as an important skill. Since many Norwegian schools have considerable funding for instructional technology, it is commonplace to find computers, iPads, and the like in regular use. However, because many learners experience significant digital proficiency development in the informal arena, they are readily able to master the required skills without much instruction. Quizzes, activities, and projects are increasingly digitized. One conflict that arises as a result of the endless push and enthusiasm toward “instructional technology” as a means unto itself, though, is that without the careful introduction and privileging of subject content, it can quickly become a movement which “does not hold” because it is “partly contra-pedagogical” (Buck, 2017, pp. 35–36). The reinforcement of curriculum goals through gamification (frequently the meeting point of the four areas of the curriculum) ought to match the depth of the learning material, and if there is little real content in English beyond “pragmatic competence,” the need to shoehorn instructional technology into lessons privileges rote memorization and fact finding over aesthetic appreciation or exploration. This is perhaps done with good intentions as, for example, the increasingly-popular gamification of reading comprehension as Making Learning Awesome! via platforms such as Kahoot. This attempt to retain the interest of young learners by turning a literary text into readily quantifiable material requires, however, that significant class time be devoted to setting up teams, writing literal (rather than inferential) quiz questions, and working with Kahoot itself. Instead, learners should be discovering and figuring out together why the literary text matters in the context of their own experience, and not just how quickly one can find or spit out a given fact in the target language or technology. If we require “practice with a purpose,” what is the purpose of introducing these gamified experiences except to confuse and frustrate the learner when inferential reading skills are inevitably later expected? These are concerns that we feel will need to be addressed by both individual teachers and policymakers as digitization continues.

Interculturalism and Inclusivity The subject of English is now understood to have considerable influence in the way that young Norwegians approach interculturalism, both within and outside of Norway (Bredella, 2006; NDET, 2013). Interculturalism (frequently used alongside multiculturalism in Nordic countries) refers to the knowledge, skills, and attitudes a person needs to relate to others’ ways of thinking, living, communicating, and expressing cultural in an appropriate manner. Interculturalism is expressly mentioned in the Norwegian “core elements” document for English. Never before has cross-cultural dialogue been more relevant in such areas as, for example, socioeconomic challenges, varying spiritual and religious practices, physical exceptionality, and neurodiversity, and English is the de facto language of this dialogue. Being able to tell one’s own story, and to listen to other stories, is essential to the ideas of identity formation and empathy building that go handin-hand with the tradition of teaching English language literature. Here, English teachers have a special responsibility to choose authentic, challenging texts that reflect a wide range of identities for English language learning itself to evolve (Bland 2018). In turn, teachers must consider the various subject goals established nationally and internationally, including the need for students to develop a sense of global competence and purpose (NDET, 2013; Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2005). Again, this is somewhat uncharted territory for teachers and stakeholders alike, and so we turn to government policies for guidance and inspiration.

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Teacher Autonomy, Responsibility, and Professionalism in the Humanities Context Middle grades teachers—and their educators—have a responsibility to shepherd in these policy changes through developing competence (Mausethagen, 2013), monitoring those who are responsible for these changes, and, most importantly, nurturing young English learners as they continue their physical, intellectual, and social growth. According to Mausethagen (2015), teachers’ professional knowledge refers to subject knowledge as well as pedagogical competence and research-based knowledge about teaching. This refers to what knowledge teachers consider to be important and relevant for their own work as teachers, how they seek this knowledge, and how they utilize it. Teachers must have the ability and the will to develop their consciousness regarding their own teaching and learning through analysis to make necessary changes. The white paper document Meld. St. 31 (Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture, 2018) shows that professional teachers rarely use professional and research-based knowledge to stay updated and oriented in their field. According to Ertsås and Irgens (2014), teachers’ professional knowledge is first and foremost understood as learning processes whereby learning is transformed to shared knowledge through participation and communication, for example in a group of teachers. Additionally, Mausethagen (2015) defined the professional teacher along three dimensions: their professional responsibility, their professional knowledge, and their professional autonomy. The regulations and demands instructing teachers’ work define their professional responsibility and refer to documents like the national curriculum known as Knowledge Promotion, the laws that regulate schools and student assessment in Norway. The motivation for introducing the current national curriculum was the fact that Norwegian students showed poorer test results than comparable countries on international tests. The reform was meant to change this by introducing clearer competence goals, and by using different measurements to test student performance (NMER, 2005). Here it is perhaps relevant to briefly look at the influence of national tests on the teaching of English. While, as previously stated, the national curriculum does not give a common core curriculum, the national tests are very clear in what language skills it measures. The national tests in English are supposed to be built on the competence aims of the national curriculum and focuses on reading comprehension, vocabulary, the understanding of concepts and grammar. (NDET, 2017b). The teachers are supposed to use the test results to help their students and aid the work with formative assessment and adapted education. At the same time, municipalities and schools are supposed to use the data for quality development in education, and the data may also be used in research. However, there has been great skepticism among teachers and also part of the general public towards these tests, particularly directed at how the results are presented and discussed in the press. However, this focus has led to considerable improvement in the quality of the tests and focus on how teachers and students may utilize these tests for learning rather than just measuring achievement. (NDET, 2017c). A comparison can be drawn here to the American situation where, while there is considerable difference in the expectations expressed by teachers in This We Believe compared to what is printed as state policy in the Common Core State Standards, the idea that it comes down to the experience and agency of the individual English teacher to decide what are best practices for her students is essential and prized (Wilson, Ramirez, & Meyer, 2015). Ongoing research in Norway by Veimo focuses on how the national tests in English seem to be designed to test language skills in conjunction with social and cultural competence rather than language competence as a mean for introspection or formation. Veimo hypothesizes that the types of test questions most likely to appear on Norwegian national exams affects the way teachers plan their teaching so they can maximize their pupils’ grades. This is a critical issue for middle grades instruction, as tenth graders are obliged to sit for national exams, chosen at random, that track their development and influence options for secondary education.

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Teachers in Norway, both in schools and in higher education, have considerable autonomy compared to those working in, for example, the United States or United Kingdom (NDET, 2013, 2016; Wilson et al., 2015), but this autonomy comes with unique challenges. Professional autonomy relates to the freedom teachers have to design their own teaching. Teachers may find that the focus on developing communities of practice may challenge their feelings of professional autonomy. According to Mausethagen (2015), the teachers’ autonomous motivation is explained through teachers’ need for contentment combined with space to shape their job within set regulations and demands from the school. James and McCormick (2009) claimed that teacher autonomy is preserved by the teachers themselves as they discuss the importance of learning amongst their peers. Postholm (2013) claimed that cooperation and sharing of experiences may contribute to colleagues getting to know each other better and feel more comfortable in each other’s company, and this cooperation may lead to even more informal cooperation between them. Hobson and colleagues (2009) claimed that teachers must be challenged, connecting their thinking about praxis to concrete situations in the classroom. Tomlinson and colleagues (2010) explained teachers’ professional acquisition of knowledge as implicit and rarely expressed, unless they are challenged to make it explicit. When teachers are they able to connect their thinking to concrete situations, this situates their knowledge and connects it to their own practice, thus creating a foundation for change and development in schools. It is important to make room for development of “responsible autonomy” because teachers need time and space to develop their own style within the given framework. According to Hobson and colleagues (2009), professional knowledge acquisition may lead to professional learning when teachers have the opportunity to try out new lesson schemes in their own classrooms and evaluate their own experiences based on this. Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) described the tension between autonomy and intention. Teachers have a strong collective will and at the same time freedom to make use of individual ways of working to reach their goals. The autonomy of the individual within an organization may be challenged when leaders seek to establish communities of practice in which teachers are questioned about their pedagogical choices. The concepts of externalization and socialization includes the sharing of tacit knowledge within a sociocultural context. This is essential within communities of practice where tacit knowledge may become explicit. When knowledge is made concrete and is communicated, it may be utilized by others in the organization as well through combination and internalization. Such professional learning communities may be interpreted as referring to groups of teachers supported by their leaders (Stoll & Louis, 2007). Here, pedagogical knowledge is developed through cooperation between teachers and leaders in a learning environment. Inspired by this literature on school development, the Norwegian government initiated a fiveyear long project called Ungdomstrinn i Utvikling [UiU, Lower secondary schools in development] (NDET, 2017e). The goal was to develop the schools as learning organizations and help teachers utilize new research-based knowledge about teaching and student learning. Also, the aim was to make teaching more practical, varied, relevant, and motivating for the students, focusing on class management and the so-called basic skills: reading, writing, and numeracy (OECD, 2005). This sense of the teacher’s collective autonomy is also matched by considerable collective accountability (Jensvoll & Lekang, 2017; Meld. St. 21, 2016–2017; NDET, 2017d; Postholm, 2011). Through processes of consciousness raising and the development of learning cultures where tacit knowledge becomes explicit and shared and new practices are tested out and discussed, teacher professionalism is developed further. The study shows that this kind of school development work gives the teachers ownership of the development process and strengthens their consciousness about their own teaching as well as develops the learning cultures at the school. Thus, this development becomes an important way in which to reinforce the teachers’ professional knowledge, responsibility, and autonomy. (Jensvoll & Lekang, 2017). 338

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For example, in the teaching of English, when visiting schools throughout the five-year UiU project period, the UiU work group has observed teachers cooperating and working out different ways in which to develop their teaching to include numeracy in their teaching as a way of enhancing the students’ understanding of different abstract concepts, rather than making the mistake of doing math in English class. At the lower grades, this may involve playing shop or playing games that involve counting, but older students require different challenges that include more advanced understanding of measurements and statistics. One such example was of teachers who made and used different sticks for measurement, to give the middle grades students clear ideas of size and distance in English using inches, feet, and yards compared to how this is done in Norwegian using the metric system. This is an important lesson, not just in numeracy but in intercultural awareness: there is more than one way to understand the world. In another teacher observation made by the UiU workgroup, and after discussing how numeracy could and could not contribute to the teaching of English for their students, one teacher said that it wasn’t planning a trip to London (a typical classroom activity) that her students needed. They needed to understand the concept of poverty and how that has been described and understood at different times in history. To do this, she chose an excerpt from Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist describing poverty and how little they had to eat, comparing and contrasting that with an excerpt from J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, describing a modern version of poverty. This angle opens insights into our own culture and past, and it illustrates how students learning the value of money can enhance their understanding of literature and the big questions in life while developing their competence in English. Simply put, the difference between a basic skill such as “numeracy” and a social abstraction such as “poverty” is humanities. When a tenth-grade English teacher chooses to use examples from authentic literature, whether it be canonical texts such as selections from Dickens or something contemporary by Rowling, and uses them to illustrate the true price of food and other goods in an intercultural context, the lesson becomes more dimensional and useful than a textbook English lesson that deals with currency, recipes, or measurements. When working with numeracy in English, it is not primarily to work with math, but rather as a way into an increased understanding of the world. While it is plain to see how essential it is to be able to engage literature in this way, it requires a great deal of subject knowledge. The idea of the collective responsibility of teachers to develop and improve their teaching, as illustrated above by the teachers discussing ideas on numeracy in English lessons together, has also been prioritized by Norwegian policy makers (NDET, 2017d). Research points to the value of this as seen in works by Fullan and Hargreaves (2016) and Robinson (2006); in particular, Fullan and Hargreaves’ (2016, p. 2) “call to action” statement that “enhancing the role of teachers individually and collectively in learning to lead the development of practice must be deeply rooted in a learning culture” becomes especially relevant in this context. As changes continue to be made, and updates constantly required, teachers may be somewhat ambivalent to the “new” expectations and demands on the profession (Jensvoll, nd). This can lead to less attention being placed on creating an exemplary learning environment (Hanssen, 2018; Wagenschein, 1956). To avoid this, teachers must come to understand and appreciate their collective accountability as a professional responsibility, as it is understood in belonging to and representing the teaching profession Regarding the five-year teacher education model, which allows for increased subject knowledge in English, teacher educators have a responsibility to encourage teachers to balance autonomy and collective responsibility with a primary focus on student learning. Using authentic literature and discussing its relevance is an important way of engaging and motivating teacher-students, which in turn motivates teachers to keep finding new literature to “feed” them. As newer teachers enter the work force, they will inspire in-service teachers with new information and insights into contemporary authentic literature. If this process is never started, however, then teachers will not benefit from that reciprocal energy. 339

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The new five-year teacher education model provides an incentive to teach English language and culture through English language literature. Teachers must choose texts that are interesting, age appropriate, and reflective of a intercultural and inclusive worldview (Hoff, 2016). While teacher educators can do their best to choose relevant and useful texts, from both up-to-date and canonical literatures, one of these things is not like the other. Some time-tested, classic English literature can and should be reinforced and maintained through university level subject education and awareness of the teaching methods that best support it. This provides a sense of stability and continuity that schools rely on when hiring new teachers—that they all come in with a basic understanding of their subject. The contemporary literary texts, however, like the authentic language and cultures they emulate, are by definition changing, and so these are inevitably cycled and updated. This means that newly hired teachers have to be able to enter and participate in a professional learning community at their school, as they both learn the routines of that school and keep the other teachers updated on subject developments. This, too, is about national policies regarding integration and sustainability, on a simultaneously macro and individual level.

Conclusion This chapter highlighted several recent movements in Norwegian national educational policy that have led to a repositioning of humanities in middle grades English education. With such developments as a revised English curriculum, new emphasis on humanities-forward thinking in education, and a new national five-year model for middle grades teacher education that allows for deeper subject knowledge of English, the understanding of English as an important arena for lifelong learning has never been stronger. In addition, this chapter outlined certain aspects of Norwegian educational policy and developments, especially with regard to authentic texts, digital competencies, and interculturalism and inclusivity. Finally, this chapter profiled some programs and developments especially relevant to middle grades English education, especially considering the importance of teacher professionalism, autonomy, and responsibility. We believe that through the careful development, implementation, and follow-up of educational policy at various levels, Norway is poised to make great developments in achieving a truly humanities-forward middle grades education. Future research endeavors should track the impact of these various developments, especially through tracking teacher-students and assessing how much subject knowledge goes into their daily English teaching. It is not enough to simply make well-meaning policies and hope for the best; they need to be maintained and nurtured if we expect them to flourish.

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Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training. (2017d). Ny generell del av læreplanen [New overarching chapter of the national curriculum]. Retrieved from www.udir.no/laring-og-trivsel/lareplanverket/fagfor nyelsen/ny-generell-del-av-lareplanen/ Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training. (2017e). Retrieved from www.udir.no/kvalitet-ogkompetanse/nasjonale-satsinger/ungdomstrinn-i-utvikling/ Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training. (2018). Engelsk – Oppsummering av innspill [English – Summing up input and suggestions]. Retrieved from www.udir.no/laring-og-trivsel/lareplanverket/fagfor nyelsen/kjerneelementgruppene/engelsk–oppsummering-av-innspill/ Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, (2005). Kunnskapsløftet – Reformen i grunnskole og videregående opplæring [Knowledge promotion – The reform of primary and secondary education and training]. Retrieved from www.regjeringen.no/globalassets/upload/kilde/ufd/prm/2005/0081/ddd/pdfv/256458kunnskap_bokmaal_low.pdf Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research. (2014). Regulations relating to the act relating to primary and secondary education. Retrieved from https://lovdata.no/dokument/SF/forskrift/2006-06-23-724/ KAPITTEL_16#KAPITTEL_16 Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research. (2016). Regulations relating to the framework plan for primary and lower secondary teacher education for years 5–10. Retrieved from www.regjeringen.no/contentas sets/c454dbe313c1438b9a965e84cec47364/forskrift-om-rammeplan-for-grunnskolelarerutdanning-for-trinn5-10—engelsk-oversettelse.pdf Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research. (2018). Promotion of the status and quality of teachers. Retrieved from www.regjeringen.no/en/topics/education/innsikt/larerloftet/id2008159/ Norwegian Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture. (2008). Meld St. 31: Kvalitet i skolen (Quality in Schools). https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumenter/stmeld-nr-31-2007-2008-/id516853/sec1 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2005). Definition and selection of competencies (DeSeCo). Executive summary. Retrieved from www.oecd.org/education/skills-beyond-school/definitio nandselectionofcompetenciesdeseco.htm Postholm, M. B. (2011). A completed research and development work project in school: The teachers‘learning and possibilities, premises and challenges for further development. Teaching and Teacher Education: An International Journal of Research and Studies, 27(3), 560–568. Postholm, M. B. (2013). Classroom management: What does research tell us? European Educational Research Journal, 12(3), 389–402. https://doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2013.12.3.389. Robinson, V. M. J. (2006). Putting education back into educational leadership. Leading & Managing, 12(1), 62–75. Stoll, L., & Louis, K. S. (2007). Professional learning communities: Elaborating new approaches. In L. Stoll & K. S. Louis (Eds.), Professional learning communities: Divergence, depth and dilemmas (pp. 1–14). Maidenhead: Open University Press/McGraw Hill. Tomlinson, P.D., Hobson, A.J. & Malderez, A. (2010). Mentoring in teacher education. In B. McGaw, P. L. Peterson, & E. Baker (Eds.), International encyclopedia of education (pp. 749–756). 3rd edition. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Veimo, A. (n.d.). Nationally mandated written English exams and study plans: The effect on teacher autonomy and student democracy. (Unpublished research). Bodø, Norway: Nord University. Wagenschein, M. (1956). Zum Begriff des exemplarischen Lehrens. Verstehen lehren [Teaching to understand. On the concept of the exemplary in teaching]. (J. Salted & C. Holdrege, Trans.). Ghent, NY: The Nature Institute. Retrieved from http://natureinstitute.org/txt/mw/exemplary_full.htm Wilson, N., Ramirez, L., & Meyer, C. (2015). This We Believe and the Common Core: How closely do the tenets of This We Believe connect with Common Core ELS Standards? AMLE Magazine. Retrieved from www.amle.org/BrowsebyTopic/WhatsNew/WNDet/TabId/270/ArtMID/888/ArticleID/489/This-WeBelieve-and-the-Common-Core.aspx

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25 MIDDLE LEVEL SOCIAL STUDIES EDUCATION IN TURKEY A Window to Citizenship Education Zafer İbrahimoğlu

Citizenship education is an old educational practice with philosophical and historical foundations that go back a long way. Aimed at raising people in conformity with the ideals of the group that possesses political power, citizenship education has continued almost in all geographies and societies from ancient Greece until today and has varied with the political, economic, and sociological needs in each context (Andrews & Moycock, 2007; Heater, 2004; Navarro Medina & Alba Fernandez, 2015). Although citizenship education has been continuous to a certain extent, there are also periods in which it undertook particularly important missions. The first period of an increase in significance of citizenship education are times of national formation/transition to nation states, wars, colonization, assimilation attempts, revolutions, and reforms (Brett, 2012; Green, 1997; Ikeno, 2005; Piatteova, 2005; Quaynor, 2015; Tin, 2006). The main goal citizenship education in the aforementioned situations is the attempt to influence societies on the affective dimension. Basic affective factors such as belonging, patriotism, and heroism might be ranked among the fields aimed to be influenced through citizenship education. Therefore, it can be stated that there is a close relationship between citizenship education and values education. Another dimension of citizenship education that needs to be considered is the effort to equip the citizens with the information and skills required for them to be more qualified individuals for the future. In this context, bringing up qualified individuals that societies need or will need in short-medium term is of top priority. Today, societies must raise active, participating individuals who can use information and communication technologies, speak different languages, are equipped with universal ethical values, and have a diverse and high rate of literacy in order to “have” qualified citizens in the future. To achieve this critical educational goal, middle level education is one of the most important stages of education that needs to be addressed. In the middle grades, the individual/student who is equipped with basic knowledge, skills, and values in primary school becomes able to cope with issues requiring more complex skills in terms of mind and body in parallel with improvements in development and learning psychology. If this state of being readily available is brought together with education environments comprised of the right goals and content, a significant advantage will be gained in raising citizens with the qualifications to meet the needs of 21st century.

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Citizenship education has been provided for students within different concepts of education for the last 100 years throughout which it gained a corporate structure. While there are specific courses in some countries especially oriented towards forming and developing citizenship competencies, in other countries the information, skills, and values related to citizenship education are interspersed among different course contents, and sometimes they are provided for students within a tacit curriculum. Citizenship education is provided under the roof of social studies courses in many countries, including the United States of America.

Social Studies: A Citizenship Education Program Social studies emerged in the United States as a citizenship education program at the beginning of 20th century, and has begun to be included in the curricula of other countries over time. Therefore, in order to understand the historical and philosophical foundations of social studies, the development process of this course in the United States should be examined first. The need to seek a solution to social and economic problems that existed in American society at the time had significant impacts on the emergence of social studies (Mindes, 2014). The political and social polarization that had continued throughout the 19th century and accumulated problems attracted the attention of administrators in line with the mobility of internal and external migration which increased social interaction towards the end of the century. Approximately 14 million European immigrants migrated to the United States and became new American citizens in 40 years between the years of 1860 and 1900 (Reeves, 2000, p. 4). This mobility in social life caused, in time, numerous different people and groups who determined a lifestyle in conformity with the forms they had constituted in their living environments, to face the obligation to live together. One of the main reasons for this outcome is the growth of cities and turning into attraction centers. In addition to this, there were increasing concerns in various parts of society about problems which emanated from its structure - such as the status of colored people and native Americans. These issues could have became chaotic for society as a whole (Saxe, 1991). As James Banks stated, knowledge, skills, and values pertaining to social/human sciences might have significant functions in solving individual and social problems (Banks, 1973). Even though education leaders in America had included courses belonging to social science disciplines towards the end of the 19th century, they carried an integrated version of social/human sciences into effect as a citizenship education program at the beginning of the 20th century in an attempt to facilitate different segments of society to live together in line with recommendations of various thinkers in the field of education (Nelson, 2001; Skeel, 1970). Numerous arguments have been brought about regarding the concept of social studies and how it should be defined from the 1900s until now (Barth, 1993; Ross, 2006). The leading definition that is most commonly used in the relevant literature is the one introduced by the National Council for Social Studies (NCSS). NCSS (1994) defines social studies as: …the integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence. Within the school program, social studies provides coordinated, systematic study drawing upon such disciplines as anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, law, philosophy, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology, as well as appropriate content from the humanities, mathematics, and natural sciences. The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world. (p. 3) 344

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With reference to this definition, NCSS has established the knowledge, skills and values which are to be provided for students within the scope of social studies course set around 10 themes. These themes (Stern, 2002) are: culture; time, continuity, and change; people, places, and environment; individual development and identity; individuals, groups, and institutions; power, authority, and governance; production, distribution, and consumption; science, technology, and society; global connections and lastly civic ideals and practices.

Turkish Education System and Social Studies Education The Turkish national education system is explained as follows in Article 18 of the Basic Law of National Education (Özdemir, 2012): Turkish National Education System is composed of two main sections as Formal Education and Non-Formal Education. Formal Education involves preschool education, primary education, middle level education, and higher education institutions. Non-formal Education involves all training activities along with or outside of Formal Education. (p. 25) The stages in the Turkish education system was structured as primary school, middle level school, and high school shortly after the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, and it continued in this manner for quite a long time. The compulsory stage in this structure has been mostly primary school and [compulsory] education has been gradually increased (Akyüz, 2011). Although the intention had been to increase the length of compulsory education to eight years with a legal amendment in 1973, it was only enacted in 1997 (Akbaşlı & Üredi, 2014, p.111). Primary and middle level schools were combined as of 1997–1998 school year, and the primary education period became eight years without interruption. Another stage was added in 2012 and 4+4+4 education system, which is still in operation today, was put into practice (Epçaçan, 2014). In this system, which stipulates 12 years of compulsory education, the first four years are determined as primary school, the second four years are determined as middle level, and the third four years are determined as high school. The first eight years are also defined as primary education. When the history of social studies education is examined as a citizenship education program in Turkey, these changes in school stages that have occurred in the Turkish education system over this period should not be ignored. The fifth grade, which is now the first grade of middle level schools, used to be defined as the senior class of primary schools for a very long time.

Historical Development and Citizenship Education in Turkey The social studies course, which as we have seen in the case of the US was intended to provide citizenship education, was only introduced into the Turkish curriculum after the second half of the 1960s. Towards the end of the Ottoman State, some courses like geography and history involved in social studies had found their way into the curriculum and were offered to students in accordance with the single-discipline curriculum design. In the Republic of Turkey, founded after the collapse of the Ottoman State, a different mission was imposed on education to make the citizens adopt the basic paradigms of the newly founded state (Çelebi & Asan, 2013; Kanbolat, 2017). Deputy of Education Esat explained this situation as follows in 1931: During my personal supervisions at schools, I observe that some students need to be enlightened more about the objectives of the courses they take and especially about the 345

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national and homeland related purposes. Hence each course taken at a school aims to achieve a number of goals and the most important one of these goals is making the students adapt to national life and educating them as citizens who are devoted and beneficial to the Turkish Nation and to the Republic of Turkey to the utmost, deeply enlightening the students about the general and particularly national goals of courses is a tool which will increase their interest in courses and make them committed to courses. (Yücel, 1994, p. 363) This task foisted upon the education system provided the basis for the emergence of citizenship education courses in curricula that aimed at shaping the new type of citizens of the new state. In the first years of the Republic of Turkey, it is possible to see some courses in the curricula which had contents and goals directly aimed at civic education. In this context, courses of civic and social studies were of high importance. The aim of these three courses was to make the students to comprehend the knowledge, skills, and values that an ideal Turkish citizen should possess (Kapluhan, 2012; Sel & Sözer, 2018; Şimşek, 2014). In 1948, the primary school curriculum was amended and updated. The single-discipline structure of history, geography, and civics courses included in social studies was preserved in this update and the basic duty within the context of citizenship education was imposed on the civics course. When the targets set out in the related course are examined, it is clear that a priority was ensuring that students were equipped with the national cultural elements, and subsequently spent their lives actively using these elements (Turkish National Ministry of Education, 1948, p. 117). The “new social studies movement” that emerged in the 1960s in America had significant impacts on the understanding and implementation of education (Byford & Russell, 2007). The pioneers of this movement, who advocated a learner-centered integrated social studies course, also influenced the changes and transformations seen in many countries with their books, conferences, and seminars (Bassey & Cecilia, 2012; Fenton, 1966). Turkey was one of the countries that transitioned to the multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary approach in designing social studies courses in their curricula instead of single-discipline approach during this period. In the new primary school curriculum draft prepared in 1962, history, geography, and civics courses, which had been taught as separate courses until then, were transformed into a single course named “Society and Country Studies.” The reason for this change was explained as follows in the curriculum: The Life Sciences course taught in third grade of primary schools has special importance in terms of suitability for child development with respect to knowledge, skills and habits wished to be gained by children. It is a necessity to provide this integrity and unity in fourth and fifth grades which we call the second term. Given this necessity, the courses of history, geography and civics, which are taught as separate courses in the second term are combined as units under the title of Society and Country Studies. (Turkish National Ministry of Education, 1962, p. 27) The primary goal of the Society and Country Studies course designed in accordance with the multi-disciplinary curriculum approach is stated in the curriculum as follows: “Raising Turkish children as good citizens and perfect individuals devoted to their families, nation, homeland, Turkish reforms and ideals who are hardworking, investigating, examining, self-sacrificing and virtuous” (Turkish National Ministry of Education, 1962, p. 26). As can be clearly understood from this purpose of the course, citizenship education, which had been provided within different courses in compliance with the single-discipline curriculum approach until that time, began to be taught to students based upon the course of Society and Country Studies (Çetin, 2003). The 346

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basic approach in citizenship education is to make the students primarily appreciate the values of their state, nation, and the culture and then complete their personal development accordingly. The 1962 primary school curriculum remained in force for five years until it was revised again in 1968. This revision led to an integrated course approach towards citizenship education, first steps of which had been taken in 1962 curriculum, to be included in the curriculum as a social studies course inspired from the practices in the United States of America. Citizenship education which was shaped within the frame of life studies course in the first, second, and third grades of primary school (Özdemir Özden, 2014), was provided in the fourth and fifth grades with a course titled social studies. In 1968 the primary school curriculum in which a course named social studies was included for the first time in Turkey, the objectives of the first lessons were grouped under four headings. These aims that were regulated around the themes of citizenship duties and obligations, relationships with society, developing the ability to know the environment and the world, and developing economic literacy were intended to develop and maintain the devotion of students to the Turkish revolution and equip them with the qualities they will need to be productive members of society (Primary School Curriculum Draft, 1968, pp. 63–65). Social studies education, which started in the second grade of primary schools in 1968, was also introduced into middle level teaching in a very short time. National Education Council meetings have periodically been held to take advisory decisions for policymakers involved in the Turkish Education System. These meetings both addressed problems and potential solutions to the current education process, and discussed future developments. In this context, the 8th National Education Council meeting was held in 1970, middle level education was also addressed and various proposals were brought forward to increase its quality. One of the first suggestions of council members to policymakers related to goals and targets. The goal of the middle level school is explained as follows in the text of this council meeting: The mission of middle level education is primarily providing a common general culture and citizenship education for students in the quality required by personal and social life and then preparing them for fields of business, occupations or higher education depending on their interests, talents and abilities. (Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı, 1970, p. 2) History, geography, and civics courses which had been separate until the 1970s were combined under the name of social studies in middle level schools, after the second phase of primary school reforms, with the intention of ensuring middle level education incorporated the citizenship education curriculum. By examining the rationale behind the individual courses before the integrated social studies course was created, we can better understand the decisions made in later years.The following explanations are included in the 1970 middle level school curriculum under the heading of principles of education and training: Each course should be regarded as a tool to achieve national goals at schools. The most important point that teachers should pay ultimate attention when teaching history, civics, geography .. is laying emphasis on the information related to Turkish nation, Turkish homeland and problems of the hometown .. and in this way, instill the students with love, devotion and love to serve and make them gain interest in and awareness of the affairs in their hometown. The duty of the teacher in a history course is not only providing some information but teaching that the Turkish nation has been superior throughout the history and provided the best examples in every aspect of life to other nations by spreading its culture.. the duty of the teacher in civics course is not only 347

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introducing national institutions but making the students to comprehend the work and importance of these institutions and arousing devotion and respect for them.. in geography course the students will love their homeland more, want to see their homeland superior and happier, understand the value of ever-increasing number of highways, schools, banks, factories and other economic and prosperity institutions and understand the value of their duties to make their homeland to develop on the paths of culture, prosperity, economy, health and welfare better. (pp. 9–11) In the new middle level curriculum suggested within the scope of the commission, four compulsory social studies course hours in a week were stipulated. In the 9th National Education Council held in 1974, it was suggested to reduce the weekly social studies course hours from four to three. The progress of the course defined as social studies which commenced in the 1970s was interrupted in 1985. The military junta who seized the power after the military intervention in 1980 changed curricula in a way that they thought was right (Ayaz, 2015; Öztürk, 2009). Within the scope of this change, the integrated social studies lessons were abrogated and three different courses under the names of national history, national geography, and citizenship studies were created in middle level schools (Akpınar & Kaymakçı, 2012; Alaca, 2017). Ülkü Bilgen, who was the Minister of National Education in that period of transformation, explained the reason for this change as follows: It is determined that the social studies course in middle schools will be provided in three different courses as of 1985–1986 school year to teach consciousness of national history, our own geography and provide citizenship education within the understanding of Turkish culture to our students in a more efficient manner. (Turan, 2016, p. 263) While the social studies course provided for students in fourth and fifth grades between the years of 1985 and 1997 was an integrated course, they remained as separate courses in middle level schools. The scope of studies within the curriculum were changed as a consequence of the increase in the length of compulsory education from five to eight years in 1997, and national history and national geography courses in middle schools were cancelled, and an integrated Social Studies course replaced them as it was in the period before 1985. The Social Studies curriculum specified three hours of teaching per week during the first three years. It was designed and implemented in a multidisciplinary structure, focusing principally on history and geography (Çatak, 2015, p. 84). Another important revision in the middle school curriculum was made in 2005. The new curriculum, experimental studies of which were commenced in 2004, was implemented in all middle level schools as of 2005. In this context, the Social Studies curriculum was regulated and changed again. The key change was in the philosophy of social studies education. The 1998 curriculum's philosophy concentrated on the implementation of perennial and fundamental ideas, whereas the new curriculum introduced progressive and reconstructionist education philosophies. Accordingly, the 2005 Social Studies curriculum evolved from a teacher-centered education approach to a process in which the teachers act as guides in the learning process of students and assume a role to regulate and control the learning process (Dinç & Doğan, 2010). The 2005 Social Studies curriculum was mainly inspired by the curricula in force in the United States of America. Almost all of the learning areas in the curriculum are mainly composed of the themes determined by the NCSS (Doğanay, 2008, p. 91). One of the important regulations made in the 2005 Social Studies curriculum related to the aim and vision of the course. Despite the integrated course, the history, geography and 348

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citizenship studies topics were to be taught separately. In this context, the ideas behind social studies weregiven greater breadth, it was emphasized that students should be equipped with not only the requisite knowledge of history, geography and citzenship, but also qualities required for their wider social lives. Therefore, contents relating to other social and human sciences were included in the scope of this course. This emphasis is explained as follows in the descriptions of this part of the course: Topics of social studies course which was designed to raise efficient and responsible Turkish citizens should be taught under social sciences topics such as history, geography, economy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, political science, law and citizenship studies. For example, when addressing geographic regions of Turkey, the activities in these regions during the War of Independence should also be included, they should be associated with topics of history and citizenship to create a sensitivity of national awareness and history. In a similar way, literary works and printed materials should be benefited from to conglutinate social studies with literature and geography and the students should be given the feeling of patriotism. (Kıroğlu, 2007, p. 520) Another attention-grabbing issue in the 2005 Social Studies curriculum designed to raise efficient and participating citizens was about skills education. The education system attempted to teach students some of these skills in the curriculum of the period before 2005, but beginning with 2005 curriculum, the target skills to be gained by students were directly associated with topics and it became more systematic. The skills which have been aimed to be gained by students in the curriculum are shown in Table 25.1. As can be seen in Table 25.1, the Social Studies course has 15 specific skills which students will gain in order to be ideal citizens. These skills are those basic ones which a citizen needs intheir daily lives, in order to be effective individuals within a participatory, democratic state, in the age of the 21st century information technologies. This list of skills, where one can see traces of the social science disciplines that constitute the Social Studies course, provides significant data relating to the quality of citizenship education that the curriculum aimed at (Taşkıran, Baş, & Bulut, 2016). Skills of thinking and active social participation are given particular importance and it is intended to raise today's middle level students, who will be citizens of the future, as individuals who can think, discuss, question and contribute to the development and transformation of the society they live in by actively participating in democratic, social processes. Another important emphasis is on the utilization of information and communication technologies. The place of technology in our life is gradually growing and it has become an indisputable reality that

Table 25.1 List of Skills to be Provided Directly in 2005 Curriculum Research

Communication

Creative Thinking

Using information technologies Critical thinking

Decision making

Entrepreneurship

Using Turkish effectively, accurately and well

Perception of change and Social participation continuity Empathy Perception of time and chronology Observation

Problem Solving

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we need to allow more space for technology in our lives as citizens. As a reflection of this reality, it is intended to provide the skills to use the basic information and communication technologies by associating them with the content of the course. In connection with this objective, the Ministry of National Education of the Turkish Republic has developed the FATİH project. It aims to provide the necessary infrastructure of interactive whiteboards and internet connections in the classrooms of all schools and develop teaching materials to use with this infrastructure. Thus the students will be able to participate in educational activities and will benefit from these new technological resources (Eryılmaz & Salman, 2014; Kavak, Arık, Çakır, & Arslan, 2016). Another of the concepts, globalization, goes in parallel with the integration of information and communication technologies into the citizenship education curriculum. At the present time, given the discussion about the world as a global village, providing citizenship education independent from ideas of globalization will be neither realistic nor efficient. For this reason, a new learning field named “global connections” was added to the 2005 Social Studies curriculum. In the curriculum, the reasons why the students should be citizens with high level of global awareness is explained as follows: Relationships between societies have further increased as the developments in science and technology have removed the boundaries of time and space. Ongoing political, economic and cultural relationships of people in different regions for hundreds of years are intensified in conjunction with technology. In such a period, students are required to be more conscious about these relationships. The learning field of global connections aims at equipping the students about all kinds of relationships between societies through the themes of sciences such as geography, anthropology and economy. (Kıroğlu, 2007, p. 520) One of the most important components of citizenship education is undoubtedly the values education. In this context, value education has an important place in the 2005 Social Studies curriculum. The values to be directly provided in association with the learning field and topics for each class level are listed in the curriculum. Even though numerous values are set out for the students within the scope of social studies education between 4th and 7th grades, the values required to be particularly elaborated within the scope of the course are listed in Table 25.2 When the values are examined, it can be said that they are predominantly composed of concepts which can be referred to as universal values. Attention is called to issues that individuals should place importance on both for themselves and others in the relationships they will establish with other stakeholders in social life. In this context, it can be said that the individuals can only actualize themselves within the scope of value education by aiming at developing their social relationships in this process.

Table 25.2 List of Values to Be Directly Provided in 2005 Curriculum Tolerance

Attaching importance to unity of family

Independence

Sensitivity to historical heritage

Scientificness

Sedulity Helpfulness

Solidarity Hospitality

Sensitivity Liberty

Aesthetics Academic honesty

Love of nature

Responsibility

Cleanness

Honesty Paying attention to being healthy Patriotism

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These changes and transformations explained within the scope of the Social Studies curriculum can also be interpreted as a reflection of discussions made in the literature in the field of citizenship and citizenship education in recent years. The scientific, sociological, and economic transformations that have occurred at an unprecedented pace from the second half of the 20th century until today have significantly affected the concepts of citizenship and citizenship education, either directly or indirectly. As a result of this interaction, some new concepts have been added to the citizenship literature. These new concepts include: global, environmental, technological, multi-cultural and economic citizenship. When the contents of the 2005 Social Studies curriculum in relation to knowledge, skills and values are examined, it is seen that most of these new concepts generated in the citizenship education literature are reciprocated one way or the other. Accordingly, it will not be wrong to say that the citizenship education provided through the Social Studies course is interrelated and interacts with the current literature arising from the changes on a global scale. As a reflection of the transformation process we have been experiencing on a global scale since the second half of 20th century, the need to update the curriculum has occurred faster than in the past. An educational institution which is expected to lead social transformations can only succeed to be a pioneer if it can adapt itself to these transformations. In this context, the Social Studies curriculum which was updated and entered into force in 2005 was reviewed and updated again in 2017. The 2017 curriculum, which is not that different from 2005 curriculum in terms of basic structure and philosophy, is rather based on simplifying the curriculum with the intention of reflecting current developments and providing some solutions to some of the problems which have been encountered during its implementation (Çoban & Akşit, 2018, p. 501). In this context, important skills, that democratic and participating citizens who are active in 21st century social life (Bearden, 2016), should have such as digital citizenship and discussion culture have been added to the 2017 Social Studies curriculum (Tay, 2017, p. 477). In addition to this, another innovation brought in by 2017 curriculum is the emphasis on educating the students as financially literate citizens, consequently financial literacy was one of the skills students should have gained by the end of the course. Within this context, it can be said that the goal is to turn students into conscious consumers. It is essential to comprehend the basic modes of operation of the economy and to learn to protect one’s rights and law in the economic activities encountered by the individual in their daily lives and to learn the ways to obtain these by resorting to legal remedies when necessary. The Social Studies course aims to provide middle level students with economic literacy in issues that can have a direct impact on a person’s own life such as career choices and career planning as well as in relatively social dimensions such as social welfare.

Social Studies Teacher Training System The Turkish Republic faced numerous problems in the early years. The most important of these was undoubtedly the qualitative and quantitative problems regarding education. There were serious deficiencies in almost all components of the education process. The physical conditions of schools were poor and there were insufficient numbers of teachers was (Sakaoğlu, 2003). The founders of the Republic endeavored to find rapid, practical solutions that took quantity to forefront rather than quality in order to correct these deficiencies in the education system. The primary issue in this respect was the training and employment of teachers. There was not a well-established, systematic, and comprehensive corporate structure during the early years of the Republic. In order to eliminate this deficiency to some extent, a Middle Level Teaching School was opened in 1926, and as it was soon realized that this school would not be enough to correct the deficiency. Two- or three-year training institutes were established 351

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in different provinces in Anatolia, Ankara being in the first place (Erdem, 2014). Departments of History and Geography were added to these institutes in 1930–1931, and they began training teachers for middle level school courses in these disciplines (Altunya, 2008). In the following years, their name was changed into the Higher Teacher Education School and Faculty of Education and they performed important tasks as the basic structures that train teachers for middle level education (Duman, 1991). Because there had been no course named Social Studies in Turkey from the date of its foundation till 1968, there was naturally no institution to train social studies teachers in this period. Alternatively, they endeavored to train field teachers to teach the courses of history and geography in the curriculum. The social studies teaching curriculum was first opened in the 1967–1968 school year in the institutes where middle level school teachers were trained. When the Communiques Magazine published by the Ministry of National Education dated July 1, 1968, is examined, it is seen that the Ministry defined social studies as follows: Social studies mentions mutual influences of people with their physical and social environment; examines human relationships, the content of social studies is composed of basic needs of humans, manners and customs, institutions, values, cultural heritage and its continuing dynamic features, living styles to meet such living conditions, working together and utilization of environment. In a way, social studies are parts selected among from social sciences for the purpose of teaching. As is known, social sciences, on the other hand, are further reviews of the relationships between human beings. Traditional social studies curriculum involves the following three subjects: History, geography and civics (Education). (Ministry of National Education, 1968, p. 299) Training teachers for the social studies course—which is defined as history, geography, and civics education—is described in the same publication as follows: Social studies training is taught in the manner to provide the required knowledge, improve attitudes and strengthen skills of teacher candidates which are needed in our world and in our own society both of which have been gradually getting complicated within the three-year curriculum of the training institute. (Ministry of National Education, 1968, p. 300) When the Social Studies course was cancelled after the military coup in 1980 and the singlediscipline model entered into force again, the social studies teacher training process ceased and studies for training history and geography teachers was introduced (Dilaver, 1994). One of the most important phases related to training social studies teachers was actualized in 1997. In parallel with regulations made in the school curriculum, training institutes have also been re-structured. The social studies teaching undergraduate program was opened for middle schools which provided four years of education within the primary education curriculum. The undergraduate program for social studies teaching opened within the Faculty of Education in 1998 and has survived until today by undergoing changes and transformations along with those that occurred in the middle level school Social Studies curriculum (Kaymakçı, 2006). Within the scope of restructuring the work of the Faculties of Education in 2008, social studies teaching, which has been included in primary education till that time, was constituted as a department within the newly founded Department of Turkish and Social Sciences Education. At the present time, the undergraduate program for social studies teaching is training teachers for middle level schools with a four-year training course within the Faculties of Education. 352

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The undergraduate program for social studies teaching in 2018 is composed of 154 hours of class over eight semesters: 66 hours of these classes are for professional teaching knowledge, 28 hours general knowledge, and 70 hours practical training. The content of the undergraduate program is updated in line with the changes and transformations which have occurred in the middle level curriculum. Students are being trained in the basic knowledge and skills for the disciplines which constitute social studies such as history, geography, citizenship, anthropology, and sociology within the scope of field training included in the curriculum. In respect of the professional teaching knowledge, courses covering this knowledge and its associated skills are provided along with special field training for social studies teaching. The courses involved within the scope of general knowledge are common in all departments in the faculty and include courses on such topics as economic literacy, human rights and democracy, media literacy, arts and aesthetics required to educate efficient, democratic and participating citizens for the 21st century information and communication age. Candidate teachers do internships in middle level schools six hours per week in both semesters of their senior year under the name of teaching practice; they obtain the opportunity to observe and experience the reflections of teaching profession in practice.

Conclusion Social studies—an education program whose main aim is to raise active, democratic and participatory citizens—is a course present in the education system of many countries, including Turkey. In Turkey, the first course with the name of social sciences emerged at the primary school level in 1968, and in the middle level in the 1970s. Today, social studies education, which starts at the fourth grade of primary school, is presented to students in the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades of middle level school. Therefore, it is possible to acknowledge social studies as a middle level course in the practice exclusive to Turkey. The philosophy, structure, and content of middle level Social Studies curriculum in Turkey have undergone many changes from 1970s to the present day. The most important point in this process of change was the 2005 curriculum of middle level social studies which was unconventional from its philosophy to its structure. Its interdisciplinarity was at the forefront; and in it, elements of constructivist and re-constructionism principles can be seen. However, such a significant transformation against traditional approaches and practices has had a great deal of difficulty and has met with resistance in its implementation (Dinç & Doğan, 2010). In addition to the physical infrastructure deficiencies, some teachers and administrators who resist mental transformation prevented the rapid and effective implementation by taking a cautious and sometimes reactionary attitude towards these transformations that they saw as an unorthodox social studies education. Therefore, this transformation experience has given important lessons to educators, administrators, and policy makers. In the case of radical change involving philosophical transformations, it becomes quite difficult to reach a conclusion when all the components of the system are not made ready. Therefore, parallel to update/renewal/transformation studies within the scope of the curriculum, studies should be conducted to increase the education process components’ level of being readily available (Aykaç, 2007). If these two processes advance in a parallel way, not consecutively, the desired synchronization can be created much more easily and effectively. Teacher training and in-service training of teachers are of great importance in this process. For an effective, quality, and permanent change in middle level social studies education, the structure and content of the curriculum as well as the qualifications of teachers who are the practitioners of the program are important. The new citizenship qualifications that have emerged with the innovations brought to our lives by the 21st century age of information and communication technologies become more and more complex with each passing day. In order to 353

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reach the desired goals, it is essential that teachers who will play an active role in having students gain such complex and multidimensional competencies have adequate qualifications. In conclusion, the middle level social studies course has an important mission as a citizenship education program in Turkey. To achieve this critical mission, it is of vital importance that all components of the education process and the dynamics of the 21st century are considered. In the search for an effective and quality social studies education, these aspects should not be ignored; it should be kept in mind that all components of the system must be evaluated within the process of development and transformation in increasing the quality of social studies course.

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Epçaçan, C. (2014). Opinions of primary and middle school teachers and administrators on the 4 +4 +4 education system (Siirt Sample). EKEV Academy Journal, 18(58), 505–522. Erdem, A. E. (2014). Öğretmen yetiştirmenin bugünü ve geleceği: Sorunlar ve çözüm önerileri. Ankara: Anı Yayıncılık. Eryılmaz, S., & Salman, Ş. (2014). Teachers and students who participate in Fatih project expectations from the project and perceptions of information technology usage. Elektronik Mesleki Gelişim ve Araştırma Dergisi, 2(1), 46–63. Fenton, E. (1966). Teaching the new social studies in middle schools. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc. Green, A. (1997). Education and state formation in Europa and Asia. In K. Kennedy (Ed.), Citizenship education and the modern state (pp. 9–27). London, UK: The Falmer Press. Heater, D. (2004). A history of education for citizenship. London, UK: Routledge-Falmer. Ikeno, N. (2005). Citizenship education in Japan after World War II. International Journal of Citizenship and Teacher Education, 1(2), 93–98. Kanbolat, E. (2017). Nationalization and modernization discussions in education in Ataturk era. Yakın Dönem Türkiye Araştırmaları, 16(31), 57–80. Kapluhan, E. (2012). Atatürk period (1923–1938) of geography education in primary school. Marmara Geography Journal, 25, 152–170. Kavak, Y., Arık, G., Çakır, M., & Arslan, S. (2016). Evaluation of the Fatih project in the context of national and international education technology policies. Journal of Research in Education and Teaching, 5(2), 308–321. Kaymakçı, S. (2006). Sosyal bilgiler öğretmenliği lisans programlarının içerik değerlendirmesi. International Social Science Education of Journal, 3, 41–57. Kıroğlu, K. (2007). Yeni ilköğretim programları (new primary education curriculums). Ankara: Pegem Akademi. Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı. (1970). Sekizinci Milli Eğitim Şurası. Retrieved from https://ttkb.meb.gov.tr/meb_iys_ dosyalar/2017_09/29165001_8_sura.pdf Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı. (1974). Dokuzuncu Milli Eğitim Şurası. Esaslar, raporlar ve kararlar, 1974. Ankara: Author. Mindes, G. (2014). Social studies for young children: Preschool and primary curriculum anchor. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education. National Council for the Social Studies. (1994). Expectations of excellence: Curriculum standards for social studies. Washington, DC: Author. Navarro Medina, E. and Alba Fernandez, N. (2015). Citizenship education in the European curricula. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 197, 45–49. Nelson, J. L. (2001). Defining social studies. In W. B. Stanley & G. Conn (Eds.), Critical issues in social studies research for the 21st century (pp. 15–38). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing. Özdemir Özden, D. (2014). Hayat bilgisi öğretiminde vatandaşlık eğitimi. In S. Şimşek (Ed.), Hayat bilgisi öğretimi (pp. 215–544). Ankara: Anı yayıncılık. Özdemir, S. (2012). Türk eğitim sisteminin yapısı, eğilimleri ve sorunları. In S. Özdemir (Ed.), Türk Eğitim Sistemi ve Okul Yönetimi (pp. 1–49). Ankara: Nobel Yayınları. Öztürk, Ö. (2009). National education ideology in Turkey after 1980 (Unpublished Master thesis). Konya-Turkey: Selcuk University. Piatteova, N. (2005). Citizenship education as an expression of democratization and nation-building processes in Russia. European Education, 37(3), 38–52. Quaynor, L. J. (2015). Researching citizenship education in Africa: Considerations from Ghana and Liberia. Research in Comparative & International Education, 10(1), 120–134. Reeves, T. C. (2000). Twentieth-century America, a brief history. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Ross, E. W. (2006). The social studies curriculum. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Sakaoğlu, N. (2003). Osmanlıdan günümüze eğitim tarihi. İstanbul: İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları. Saxe, D. W. (1991). Social studies in schools: A history of the early years. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Sekizinci Milli Eğitim Şurası (8th National Education Council.) (1971). Esaslar, Raporlar ve Kararlar. Ankara: MEB. Sel, B., & Sözer, M. A. (2018). A study of political construction childhood on civics books in Turkish Republican Period (1928-1948). Hacettepe University Journal of Education, 33(2), 293–315. Şimşek, S. (2014). Geçmişten günümüze hayat bilgisi. In S. Şimşek (Ed.), Hayat bilgisi öğretimi (pp. 3–26). Ankara: Anı yayıncılık. Skeel, D. J. (1970). The challenge of teaching social studies in the elementary school. Pacific palisades, CA: Goodyear Publishing Company. Stern, B. S. (2002). Social studies standards meaning and understanding. Larchmont, NY: Eye on Education.

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26 MEASURING WHAT MATTERS Rethinking Middle Grades Accountability Systems in the Era of the Every Student Succeeds Act Steven L. Turner

We know that many children cried during or after [standardized] testing, and others vomited or lost control of their bowels or bladders. Other [students] simply gave up. One teacher reported that a student kept banging his head on the desk, and wrote “This is too hard,” and “I can’t do this,” throughout his test booklet (Koretz, 2018, p. 23). In the United States, decades of research and assessment data have not yielded consensus that standardized testing is a pathway to greater accountability or gains in student learning; in fact, the long-standing emphasis on testing and accountability by high-stakes testing has led to more testing, particularly in the middle grades (Harvey, 2018; Nelson, 2013). In 2015, the average amount of instructional time devoted to taking mandated tests for an eighth grade student was four days, or 2% of yearly school time (Hart et al., 2015). In a 2013 study of testing in school districts, students in grades 3–8 in one large urban district spent 16 days preparing to take state required tests, and middle grades students in another school district spent a full month on test preparation (Nelson, 2013). How middle level schools approach issues of testing and accountability is one of the key factors that will shape the future of middle level education and middle level philosophy. This chapter reviews the current emphasis on educational accountability through standardized testing and offers directions for rethinking measures of scholastic achievement and accountability systems in the middle grades.

Standardized Testing and Accountability: Immediate History and Uncertain Future In 1983, the U.S. Secretary of Education and members of the National Commission on Excellence in Education published A Nation at Risk, an explosive report on the state of education and public schools in the United States. A Nation at Risk was a call for increased attention to accountability in schools and launched a national conversation in the United States that still continues to this day about the perceived decline of the nation’s public schools, the use of standardized testing, and accountability. A Nation at Risk promoted an argument that American schools needed to be held accountable for higher performance and that higher performance should be measured by external testing (Bae, 2018; Mehta, 2015).

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The focus on standardized testing in the United States did not begin with the publication of A Nation at Risk. That distinction belongs to the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” ESEA funded primary and secondary education, emphasizing equal access to education, and established an emphasis on high standards for student achievement and accountability. ESEA has been reauthorized several times, including as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) and, most recently in 2015, as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). ESEA, its subsequent reauthorizations, and the publication of A Nation at Risk helped establish a common narrative of failing U.S. schools full of students who are not learning—a narrative that is still flourishing 50 years later. Learning and achievement disparities do exist in the U.S. public school system—a significant number of students in many U.S. schools are struggling, trapped in an unequal educational system that exacerbates income inequalities (Grubb, 2007; Weir, 2016). Most often, educational inequalities mean students of color, and students from low-income backgrounds are getting a short-changed educational experience in schools and classrooms (Milner, 2018; Weir, 2016). Studies comparing U.S. schools in affluent and poor communities have documented how much less learning was expected from children in poor communities (Resnick & Zurawsky, 2005). To some educators, the advent of high-stakes testing and common curriculum is a tool to remedy differences in learning and achievement by using standardized accountability measures to illuminate school inequality, identify students who need help, and plan targeted interventions (Dotson & Foley, 2016; Koretz, 2018). Other examinations of high-stakes tests suggest tests with scores tied to real consequences (e.g., grade promotion, tracking, and graduation) can significantly motivate academic achievement and educational improvement (Darling-Hammond, 2002; Hess & Brigham, 2000). Currently, standardized tests, value-added scores, and other proficiency assessments are used in many K–12 schools to measure student learning, teacher efficacy, and school quality all in the name of increased accountability. Teachers have always been accountable to parents, principals, colleagues, and school boards, but the current emphasis on accountability by test scores represents a new dimension of accountability—accountability with a targeted emphasis on testing and test scores that many believe undermine student learning and high-quality instruction (Braaten, Bradford, Kirchgasler, & Fox, 2017; Thomas & Howell, 2012).

Teaching and Learning in the Age of Accountability Learning and achievement, two words often used interchangeably, are not used synonymously in this chapter. Learning occurs when students are able to interpret and explain, complete authentic tasks, and show knowledge and growth through their work. Achievement refers to students’ proficiency scores on standardized tests. Amid calls for increased accountability and more rigorous curriculum and academic standards, the field of middle level education now finds itself in a spotlight of intense debate over accountability measures, standardized tests, and middle school philosophy (Tienken et al., 2017). Over the last two decades, high-stakes tests, pressure on middle grades teachers to increase student standardized test scores, and other accountability measures have gradually infiltrated the inventory of developmentally responsive middle level instructional practices (Greene et al., 2008; Howard & Miller, 2017; Turner, 2009). High-stakes tests and associated measures of proficiency and accountability have been found to decrease instructional time of subjects not often tested (e.g., social studies) and decreased academic learning time (Nelson, 2013). A multistate study that examined testing data from 18 states concluded high-stakes tests did not increase student learning (French, 2003); however, what has increased is a reward and punish, test-based accountability system that labels some school district winners or losers based on achievement and proficiency targets (Koretz, 2017; Nelson, 2013). What began as a well-intentioned movement in the United States to measure achievement with standardized tests at one or two points in K–12 358

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education has grown and transformed into an extensive nationwide system of standardized accountability assessments that test nearly every student in nearly every grade.

Learning from the Middle: Moving beyond Standard Measures of Scholastic Achievement Accountability and the focus on standardized tests has changed the classroom practices of middle level educators (Greene et al., 2008; Musoleno & White, 2010) and contributed to student disengagement (Koretz, 2018). Middle level teachers have reported struggling to enact their vision of effective middle grades instruction while teaching within the current culture of high-stakes testing and rigid accountability policies (Musser et al., 2013), and middle level schools have seen the narrowing of curriculum, with science, social studies, music, and art courses cut or eliminated so that young adolescents will have time for more test-taking preparation (Erb, 2003). It is not just the constant cycle of testing that stresses students; it is the relentless focus on test scores, test preparation; and test readiness drills at nearly every grade level that disengages learners (Koretz, 2018). While the standards and accountability movement was propelled by a promise of educational equity, the over-proliferation of accountability by standardized test scores has contributed to a miasma of unintended effects in U.S. schools including tracking (i.e., students grouped by perceived ability or achievement), unequal access to high-quality curriculum, and less qualified teachers in struggling school districts. These side effects of test-based accountability have resulted in generations of students of color and disadvantaged students attending schools rife with educational disparities and widening achievement gaps (Darling-Hammond, 2007). The current model of accountability by test scores has not achieved its promise of educational equity, nor has the widespread focus on test scores created expected incentives to drive learning or higher academic achievement. Standardized tests may not capture fully or accurately how well students are learning (Tienken, 2018). The better teachers do in teaching students essential knowledge and skills, the less likely there will be items on standardized achievement tests that measure those skills (Popham, 1999). Standardized test scores provide only one measure of a student’s skills, are too susceptible to influence from non-school factors, and may not always be representative of the nuances of middle school philosophy (Koretz, 2018; Tienken et al., 2017). The current era of accountability has led middle level educators to a critical juncture that presents them with two stark choices—continue current test-based standardized measures of accountability and risk replicating inequality, or advocate for and create more comprehensive, student-centered accountability systems that help educators make informed decisions about student learning and achievement.

The Opportunity: Every Student Succeeds Act The 2015 reauthorization of ESEA, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), promotes many of the same educational goals of its predecessors, including higher graduation rates, closing the achievement gap, and yearly reporting of proficiency using standardized test scores. ESSA abolishes NCLB’s sanction-heavy Annual Yearly Progress system (AYP) that forced schools and districts to focus heavily on test scores in only mathematics and language arts (Darling-Hammond et al., 2016). ESSA also contains several new provisions specifically targeted to support less advantaged students and students of color. To help deliver on the American promise of equal educational opportunity, ESSA suggests school districts focus on proficiency as well as other key school factors such as resource equity, evidence-based interventions for school improvement, student use of higher order thinking skills, and a system of multiple measures to assess school performance and progress (Cook-Harvey, Darling-Hammond, Lam, Mercer, & Roc, 2016). Surveys of parents, 359

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teachers, and district administrators have indicated overwhelming support for multiple assessment measures to provide a close-up view of the progress, performance, and needs of each child at different moments in the school year within a full range of subjects (Northwest Evaluation Association, 2012). In a recent national poll, 68% of parents reported they were skeptical that standardized tests helped teachers know what to teach (Meier & Knoester, 2017). The suggestion that middle level schools develop a system of multiple measures of assessments of learning and achievement aligns with middle level philosophy. The Association of Middle Level Education (AMLE) position paper, This We Believe, recommends varied and ongoing assessments that advance and measure learning as one of the 16 essential characteristics of successful middle level schools (NMSA, 2010, p. 24). Several longitudinal studies of middle level schools have found that student achievement was higher in schools that implemented practices recommended in This We Believe (e.g., Greene et al., 2008). ESSA provides districts and states access to resources and instructs each state to create an accountability system based on multiple indicators. Two required indicators are (a) the traditional standardized measure of student proficiency and academic achievement on annual assessments in mathematics and English/language arts (ELA) for grades 3–8 and (b) high school graduation rates for secondary schools. ESSA gives states greater latitude in choosing what indicators and measures to include in an accountability system; however, at a minimum, each state’s accountability system should include: • • •

In middle level schools, measures of student growth, or measures of how the achievement gap is narrowing. Proficiency gains in the English language for English language learners. At least one other valid and reliable statewide indicator of school quality or student success— such indicators may include school climate, safety, student engagement, access to and completion of advanced work, educator engagement (Cook-Harvey et al., 2016; Darling-Hammond et al., 2016).

ESSA fosters a more holistic view of achievement and learning by encouraging states to include in accountability systems one or more non-academic measures of the quality of schools (Schneider, Jacobsen, White, & Gehlbach, 2017). The factors driving the new approach to student learning and achievement in ESSA are not easy to discern—years of criticism against the overuse of standardized testing failed to change federal policy. However, as accountability became synonymous with school labels and sanctions, many educators have expressed that accountability, in its truest sense, should be used to leverage improvement (Darling-Hammond et al., 2016). Even before ESSA was passed, school districts across the country had shown a willingness to move away from a single high-stakes tests toward multiple data sources of student learning and achievement—including writing samples, individualized reading assessments, portfolios, classroom work samples, and classroom observational data (McAssey, 2014). ESSA’s call for multiple measures of assessment represents an opportunity and a powerful incentive for school districts and states to move away from the current overreliance on single, annual measures of testing.

Measuring What Matters Accountability systems in the United States tend to be bifurcated—they either focus on overall school performance as the unit of analysis or they tie student achievement to individual teacher evaluation (Figlio & Loeb, 2011). To measure what matters, school accountability systems need to include three aspects: student achievement data, educators’ practices, and classroom climate (Bernhardt, 2017; Koretz, 2018). Enacting a better framework to measure student learning and school quality also should include essential inputs that represent what educators, parents, and students care 360

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about in schools, including a strong instructional environment, positive school culture, and sufficient resources to enable the realization of the school vision (Schneider et al., 2017). In addition to student standardized test scores, other measures of accountability that are valued might form the basis for a comprehensive school accountability system. Meier and Knoester (2017) suggested several forms of assessment that offer educators more useable data than standardized tests: student self-assessments, teacher observations, descriptive reviews of students, ELA and mathematics interviews with students, student work portfolios, and external school reviews. Further measures of school performance closely related to student achievement include graduation rates, student retention and drop-out rates, scores of final exams, student numbers of students in advanced courses, and suspension rates (Figlio & Loeb, 2011). Additional key indicators accountability systems may need to address include student engagement, attention to student diversity and equity, college and career readiness, and opportunities for educator professional development (Reeves, 2004; Schneider et al., 2017). Other school variables that often get attention—such as availability of computers, number of credentialed teachers, parental satisfaction, and school crime rate—have not been found to be strongly related to student achievement (Figlio & Loeb, 2011). School accountability systems have to be more comprehensive than in years past, as ESSA requires states to include data on school quality, climate, and safety. ESSA’s shift toward a more comprehensive view of accountability offers districts and states an opportunity to reconceptualize accountability systems, think intentionally about what’s valued in education, and reexamine the ways schools can be measured (Darling-Hammond et al., 2016; Schneider et al., 2017).

Leading from the Middle: Envisioning an Accountability System under ESSA Assessments and indicators for middle school accountability systems aligned with ESSA should be grounded in what is knowable about young adolescents’ learning and achievement, be rooted in educational goals that support equity and closing achievement gaps, and generate data schools and districts can use for continuous improvement. Under ESSA, what would a rational and comprehensive accountability system look like for middle level schools? All accountability system indicators under ESSA need to be able to be measured annually, based on long-term educational goals and included in state and school district report cards. To be useful, middle school and district accountability systems need assessments that provide meaningful data on student learning and a clear focus on what students are expected to know, understand, and be able to do at each grade level. After the passage of ESSA, new frameworks for measuring school quality and explorations of assessment measures considered more effective than standardized tests were recommended (Darling-Hammond et al., 2016; Koretz, 2017; Meier & Knoester, 2017; Schneider, 2017; Schneider et al., 2017). One recent study asked educators and parents to look beyond standard measures of school achievement to focus on indicators and measures that capture a broader array of a school’s strengths and weaknesses, including measuring a school’s instructional environment, culture, and examining whether the district offers sufficient resources to enable the school’s vision (Schneider, 2017; Schneider et al., 2017). Other recent examinations of accountability systems describe assessment approaches that provide a more accurate and effective measure of student learning than the limited data standardized tests offer and argue for the end of standardized testing (Koretz, 2017; Meier & Knoester, 2017).

Six Measures of School Quality and Accountability Educators, researchers, and measurement specialists frequently examine commonly used indicators for evidence-based school performance and academic progress, creating a practical and fairly 361

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consistent knowledge base that helps identify measures of school quality and indicators of student learning and achievement. The measures of school quality and indicators of learning and achievement shared in this chapter are drawn from the extensive knowledge base of indicators for accountability systems and the emerging frameworks for measuring school quality developed after the passage of ESSA. Given that each school seeking to redesign its accountability system is unique and diverse, the six indicators and assessment measures listed below do not represent a one size fits all schools approach but are, instead, presented with the goal of offering possible directions for envisioning measures of middle level school accountability systems more closely aligned with ESSA requirements.

Student Academic Achievement in Reading/ELA and Mathematics in Grades 3–8 To comply with ESSA, middle level school accountability systems must include yearly student proficiency scores on annual assessments in mathematics and ELA in grades 3–8. ESSA also requires student academic achievement in science to be measured at least once in grades 3–5 and once in grades 6–9. These proficiency requirements essentially lock middle level schools into several standardized assessments of student achievement. However, because those assessments are one part of a varied and more representative accountability system, assessment of young adolescents’ learning and achievement in schools will not be based solely on performance on one annual test (Cook-Harvey et al., 2016; Darling-Hammond et al., 2016).

Measures of Student Growth Middle level schools with accountability systems aligned to ESSA must include a measure of student growth. Measures of growth examine the academic performance of an individual student or the same collection of students over two or more points in time, while measures of improvement examine overall change in academic performance over time within grades or across grades without following the same student or the same group of students (Castellano & Ho, 2013; D’Brot, 2017). Common growth model approaches schools use include gain scores or growth rates usually derived from comparisons on year-to-year proficiency tests. Gain scores present the difference between earlier and current test scores, while growth rates identify the change in a student’s performance over a given amount of time (Castellano & Ho, 2013; D’Brot, 2017).

Progress of English Language Learners in Grades 3–8 toward Proficiency in ELA English language learners must be tested annually to monitor their progress in achieving English language proficiency. Under ESSA, schools, districts, and states must establish a clear vision for English language acquisition and operationalize growth-to-target interventions (Lyons & Dadey, 2017). The most commonly used test of English language proficiency is ACCESS 2.0, developed and administered by a consortium of 35 states. ESSA allows for English language learners in their first year in a U.S. school to be exempted from taking the ELA proficiency exam; however, all English language learners in their second year must take all district and statewide assessments.

A Non-Academic Indicator of School Quality or Student Success One major difference between ESSA and NCLB is that ESSA requires at least one non-academic measure of school quality or student success (SQSS). The SQSS indicator is an opportunity for districts and states to highlight school priorities and outcomes that are valued and provide a more 362

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comprehensive picture of student learning and achievement (Fowler, 2018). SQSS indicators can include school climate, safety, student engagement, access to and completion of advanced work, and educator engagement, and several of these have already been implemented in some states (Cook-Harvey & Stosich, 2016; Darling-Hammond et al., 2016; Marsh, Bush-Mecenas, & Hough, 2017). For example, a small, urban school district in Massachusetts worked with researchers to create a new framework for school quality that includes measures of school culture, safety, sense of belonging, and commitment to learning as essential inputs or key outcomes that can be used to measure school quality (Schneider et al., 2017).

Professional Development for Teachers and Educator Learning Opportunities While student learning and achievement are influenced by many more factors than an individual teacher, teachers and their instructional decisions are often cited as one of the most significant influences on student learning and achievement (Heck, 2009; Tucker & Stronge, 2005). If schools are to achieve large gains in student learning that will help close the achievement gap and promote equity, they will need to provide high-quality support and targeted professional development for teachers (Koretz, 2018). Furthermore, schools should survey and measure the quality of professional development opportunities for teachers (Darling-Hammond, 2013; Schneider, 2017). ESSA stipulates that professional development for teachers should be intensive, sustained, collaborative, data-driven, and matched with the instructional environment of the school. Given ESSA’s provisions for accountability systems with multiple indicators and assessments, examining organizational priorities and providing teachers with professional development opportunities that focus on classroom assessments and data-driven instruction measures may be recommended.

Additional Indicators and Measures As more educators and state leaders are starting to develop a clearer understanding of the requirements for ESSA and deciding which indicators of school quality and student success to include in accountability systems, districts and states are implementing indicators that measure opportunities to learn, such as school and classroom conditions, access to curriculum, access to resources, and access to qualified teachers (Bernhardt, 2017; Darling-Hammond et al., 2016; Schneider, 2017). School districts and states are creating dashboards that use several opportunity to learn indicators to strive for continuous improvement and identify schools that need support (Darling-Hammond et al., 2016). Advocates of reduced standardized testing in the middle grades may be dismayed that ESSA-aligned accountability systems need to include at least three indicators of student learning and achievement measured by standardized tests. Those indicators are required by ESSA, and districts and states have to follow the ESSAs recommendations; however, because ESSA calls for a more representative accountability system beyond standardized tests, schools can select indicators that are more varied and comprehensive than those ESSA requires (Cook-Harvey et al., 2016; Darling-Hammond et al., 2016).

Implications for Future Research in Middle Level School Accountability Systems Given the greater flexibility states have under ESSA to create more balanced accountability systems, most states and some territories are examining or redesigning systems of accountability (Cook-Harvey & Stosich, 2016). There is considerably more to learn regarding the relationship between middle school philosophy, ESSA, and its mandate for redesigned accountability systems. Many key elements influence the selection of indicators for schools and districts that remain to 363

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be considered—school schedules, performance assessments, common core curriculum, tracking, interdisciplinary approaches, school climate, and accommodations for students with special needs. Some questions requiring further consideration include: • • • •

Are middle level schools still to focus on college-readiness? To what extent should middle level school accountability systems include social-emotional indicators? Do the indicators of success in grades 4–6 represent the same vision of success in grades 7–8? How does a broad vision of success in the middle grades tie into high schools’ vision of accountability?

Like NCLB, ESSA calls for standardized tests of proficiency in state accountability systems, even though some current research suggests schools should turn away completely from standardized tests to other measures of accountability that might be more effective (Meier & Knoester, 2017). Thus, researchers might investigate the persistence of test-based accountability. Additionally, the voices and experiences of young adolescents regarding accountability and their experiences with current and redesigned accountability systems warrant further study. Finally, future research on accountability systems should present both domestic and international perspectives.

Conclusion Research on accountability systems cannot and does not indicate the best indicators or assessment approaches to use with all learners. States, districts, and middle level schools will need to identify important characteristics of their student populations, identify and implement short and long-term goals that will help students at every level, and provide assessments and indicators that collect meaningful student and school-based data, all with the hope of informing future instructional decisions and school practices. One of the greatest flaws of test-based accountability systems has been the idea that poorly supported schools would systematically overcome effects of poverty and nonschool factors through rigorous instruction and testing (Berliner, 2006). Rather than arguing against school or district accountability, the goal of this chapter was to discuss to what extent standardized test-based accountability is limited in its viability and to use the new directive for multiple measures of accountability in ESSA as a starting point for presenting an actionable framework for envisioning redesigned accountability systems in middle level schools. The way states and school districts approach issues of testing and accountability will significantly shape the future of middle level education and middle level philosophy. Above all else, accountability systems should have as a foundation school and classroom indicators that reflect needed dimensions of equity for all young adolescents, as well as assessments that illuminate the opportunities that exist for school improvement and enhanced learning in our nation’s middle level schools.

References Bae, S. (2018). Redesigning systems of school accountability: A multiple measures approach to accountability and support. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 26(8). Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.26.2920 Berliner, D. C. (2006). Our impoverished view of educational reform. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 949–995. Bernhardt, V. L. (2017). Measuring what we do in schools: How to know if what we are doing is making a difference. Alexandria, VA: ASCD Books. Braaten, M., Bradford, C., Kirchgasler, K. L., & Fox, S. F. (2017). How data use for accountability undermines equitable science education. Journal of Educational Administration, 55(4), 427–446. Castellano, K. E., & Ho, A. D. (2013). A practitioner‘s guide to growth models. Washington, DC: Council of Chief State School Officers.

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27 HIDDEN IN THE MIDDLE The State of Homelessness in Middle Level Education Matthew J. Moulton

AJ,1 a participant from my dissertation study conducted with and for young adolescents experiencing homelessness, turned his bag of chips up and funneled its contents into his mouth. At this point we had known each other for a few months and were in the member checking stage of data collection and analysis. I ran my ideas and theorizations past him and when I mentioned his friends and teachers supporting him as a student experiencing homelessness, he replied with, “My friends don’t know.” Matt: AJ: Matt: AJ:

Yeah? Your friends don’t know because you don’t tell them, right? Mm-hmm (affirmative). The teachers don’t know. The teachers don’t know? Only my homeroom teacher know, and the counselor. Mm-hmm. They the only two people that even know.

He looked at me matter-of-factly. His brown eyes relaying something to the effect of that’s just the way it is. AJ believes that only two people in his school know that he experiences homelessness. The true number is probably larger, but not by much. Most teachers are unfamiliar with the McKinney-Vento Homeless Education Assistance Improvements Act that calls for supporting students experiencing homelessness, or who even qualifies for services (Hallett, Skrla, & Low, 2015). The stories of students experiencing homelessness have rarely been told (Aviles de Bradley, 2011; Saldanha, 2015). Their inclusion in middle level education research is even sparser (Brinegar, 2015). Middle grades students experiencing homelessness are predominantly positioned as existing in spaces away from conversations that inform policy, and they have largely been excluded from work that governs their experiences in and out of school. The purpose of this chapter is to inspire research that re-humanizes the identities and narratives about young adolescents experiencing homelessness. The chapter should be read as an entry point into a funnel of sorts that ultimately brings readers to a rationale, seated in This We Believe (NMSA, 2010) and other key middle level texts, for engaging in research with and for young adolescents experiencing homelessness. Homelessness needs to be viewed as a condition that people experience and not as defining characteristic. The McKinney-Vento Homeless Education Assistance Improvements Act of 2001

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(hereafter, MV) defines students experiencing homelessness as individuals who lack a “fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence” (MV, 2015, § 725). Dominant narratives on the other hand include adjectives like “dirty, hungry, drunken, addicted, or psychotic” (Kim, 2013, p. 294). As a result of these dominant narratives, young adolescents experiencing homelessness have been “stereotyped as having a negative influence on other children in public school” (Crook, 2015, p. 403). This chapter is organized as follows. First, I use MV (2015) as an anchor to define student homelessness. Second, I present the history and purpose of MV. Third, I share statistics on homelessness to paint a picture of its prevalence. Fourth, I examine literature related to youth homelessness. In conclusion, considering all the information relayed, I locate research with young adolescents experiencing homelessness within the bounds of middle level education research.

Defining Homelessness Poverty and homelessness have become commonplace. Homelessness is everywhere and nowhere at the same time; the individuals who experience it are positioned as “less than” and rendered invisible (Harris & Fiske, 2006). The stigma of homelessness carries with it “the cultural narrative of homelessness as rooted in personal failure” which students must navigate as they progress through life (Toolis & Hammack, 2015). MV was the first federal legislation that directly addressed the education and support of children and youth experiencing homelessness. MV defines homeless children and youth as any individual who lacks a “fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence” (MV, 2015, § 725). This includes children and youth who • • • • • • • •

share the housing of other persons due to financial hardship, also known as “doubled-up”; are living in motels, hotels, trailer parks, or camping grounds; are living in emergency or transitional shelters; are abandoned in hospitals; are awaiting foster care placement; have a primary nighttime residence that is not designed as regular sleeping accommodation for human beings; live in cars, parks, public spaces, abandoned buildings, substandard housing, bus or train stations, or similar settings; or are classified as migratory children who qualify as homeless.

Confusion persists in the face of MV’s definition of homelessness. Some living conditions described by MV, like being “doubled-up,” differ from traditional and dominant views of homelessness. This difference is difficult to reconcile for educators who believe that students fitting the MV definition may not be homeless according to their personal beliefs, which typically encompass only the completely unsheltered (Hallett, Low, & Skrla, 2015; Hallett, Skrla et al., 2015; Kim, 2013). Speaking to these concerns, Julianelle and Foscarinis (2003) elaborated on MV’s definition of homeless and described the severity of each case. For example, emergency shelters and motels or hotels often limit the length of stay for individuals and families resulting in “virtually constant mobility” (Julianelle & Foscarinis, 2003, p. 41). Doubled-up residences experience similar instability. Hosts could decide to retract housing offers based on personal preference or tie the offer to unethical or illegal ultimatums that put youth in awkward and dangerous circumstances, a finding also reported by Hallett (2011). When considering other housing options outlined by the MV definition, Julianelle and 368

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Foscarinis stated that these locations (e.g., abandoned buildings, cars, or structures not designed to serve as human housing) are “grossly inadequate and often unsafe” (2003, p. 41). Once shelter is acquired, safety is not confirmed (Julianelle & Foscarinis, 2003). Supports must still be provided to alleviate the stresses and impacts of homelessness.

The McKinney-Vento Act The federal government addressed the increased need for understanding of, and support for, students experiencing homelessness through the McKinney-Vento Homeless Education Assistance Improvements Act of 2001 (MV, 2015). Originally adopted in 1987 as the Stewart B. McKinney Act, MV was “the first comprehensive federal response to homelessness” (Foscarinis, 1991, p. 1234). MV lacked a formal definition of homelessness until 2002 and did little to address the needs of populations experiencing homelessness outside of emergency assistance (Foscarinis, 1991; No Child Left Behind Act, 2002). The purpose of MV is to “ensure that children who are experiencing homelessness have equal access to public education and that state and district-level policies and practices remove all barriers to student enrollment, attendance, participation, and achievement” (Miller, 2012, p. 809). At times, MV has been referenced as “an unfunded mandate” (Wong et al., 2009, p. 6) that does little to support its implementation. The U.S. Secretary of Education holds the authority to provide states with grant funds to accomplish the policy’s requirements (MV, 2015). Each year, the Secretary of Education compiles a report about the prevalence of homelessness in U.S. public schools, the academic standing of students experiencing homelessness, and the grant funding provided to support MV’s goals. The national average of funds provided per student experiencing homelessness per year was $50 (NCHE, 2016). Under MV, each state must establish an Office of the Coordinator of Education for Homeless Children and Youths (MV, 2015). The staff in this office must create reports describing the severity and what schools are doing to address homelessness; serve as the contact with the U.S. Secretary of Education on all things related to homeless education; collaborate with social service agencies and education stakeholders; and act as the point of reference for Local Education Agencies (LEAs) (MV, 2015). At the local level, each homeless liaison—a position that is mandated by the federal government (MV, 2015)—is responsible for homelessness services and programming for the entire district. Local liaisons are responsible for ensuring that students who qualify for services are identified by schools and other agencies (MV, 2015). Liaisons must also provide professional development opportunities for educators, social service agencies, and the parents/guardians of students experiencing homelessness about educational rights and opportunities (MV, 2015). Some districts have liaisons who are overwhelmed by the caseload. For example, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has more than 800 schools and only one homeless liaison (Tierney & Hallett, 2010). In 2017, LAUSD enrolled more than 17,000 students experiencing homelessness (Chandler, 2017). Disjointed expectations, inconsistent funding, and lack of authority often amount to under appreciation and feelings of isolation for homeless liaisons (Cunningham, 2014; Hallett, Skrla et al., 2015).

United States of Student Homelessness For the purposes of this chapter, I chose to use the Education of Homeless Children and Youth (EHCY) Federal Data Summary for school years 2012–2015 (NCHE, 2016). The numbers presented here should be read as conservative estimates of the actual total number of students experiencing homelessness. Population totals may be under-reported due to complications with 369

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reporting in multiple states (NCHE, 2016). Alabama, for example, experienced technical difficulties that resulted in more than a 10% decrease in population of students experiencing homelessness (NCHE, 2016). Population totals may also be under-reported because of the requirement that a student must be officially identified as homeless to be included in the count (NCHE, 2016). Some students who qualify for services are reluctant to self-identify due to the stigma associated with homelessness (Roschelle & Kaufman, 2004). Still, other individuals are unaware that services and supports are available (e.g., Hallett, 2011, 2012). The data summary states that there were nearly 1.3 million students experiencing homelessness enrolled in public schools during the 2014–2015 school year (NCHE, 2016). More than 50% of the students experiencing homelessness were reported from only six states: California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and Michigan. Given MV requirements, states or districts may apply for grants to support students experiencing homelessness (MV, 2015). The national average of funds provided per student identified as homeless was $50 (NCHE, 2016). Puerto Rico was granted the most funding per student at $460, followed by Washington ($292 per student), Rhode Island ($220 per student), Connecticut ($161 per student), and New Jersey ($147 per student). The states with the least amount of funding per student were Oklahoma and Utah, which both averaged $26 per student. The next four states were Oregon and Colorado ($27), Nevada ($30), and California ($32). Even Puerto Rico’s $420 per student per year seems like an inadequate amount of money to level the playing field with classmates not experiencing homelessness. The NCHE (2016) data report documented four housing categories: hotels/motels, unsheltered, doubled-up, and shelters/transitional housing/awaiting foster care placement. The majority of students experiencing homelessness were doubled-up or share housing with others (76%). This represents nearly one million youth who were not considered homeless under the HUD definitions and dominant societal narratives (Henry, Watt, Rosenthal, & Shivji, 2016). The remaining 24% of students experiencing homelessness were housed in emergency and transitional shelters (14%), hotels or motels (7%), and unsheltered (3%). The majority of youth experiencing homelessness were accompanied by at least one parent or guardian, but percentages of unaccompanied youth are increasing across the board and “make up 10% or more of the homeless student population in 23 states” (NCHE, 2016, p. iv). Kindergarten enrolled the highest number of students identified as experiencing homelessness (118,684) and the eleventh grade enrolled the fewest (68,740). According to grade bands, the early grades (K–3), middle grades (4–8), and high school (9–12) accounted for 36, 35, and 26% respectively. Table 27.1 presents the population data for each of the middle grades.

Table 27.1 Number of students experiencing homelessness per grade Grade

Number of students experiencing homelessness

4 5 6 7 8 Total

98,552 91,928 88,044 84,028 82,214 444,766

(National Center for Homeless Education [NCHE], 2016)

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Though the number of students experiencing homelessness decreased from fourth grade to eighth grade, the total took more than a 10% jump in the ninth grade to 94,543. Regardless of how one defines middle grades, the number of young adolescents experiencing homeless should be viewed as significant.

Literature on Youth Homelessness Literature on homelessness covers a wide landscape and includes (not exclusively): nursing, pediatrics, public health, anthropology, behavioral sciences, social work, psychiatry, government policy, economics, law, and education. With such a wide base of literature, this chapter seeks to provide a broad description of the work that is being done with and for students experiencing homelessness.

Experiences of Youth Identified as Homeless In my review of literature, common themes arose in the category of experiences of youth identified as homeless: the importance of home, voices challenging dominant narratives, and health concerns for those experiencing homelessness.

The Importance of Home A movement to end youth homelessness called Housing First stresses the importance of obtaining consistent and reliable housing as the first and most influential factor in ensuring equity. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness (2016): The vast majority of homeless individuals and families fall into homelessness after a housing or personal crisis. For these households, the Housing First approach provides them with short-term assistance to find permanent housing quickly and without conditions. In turn, such households often require only brief, if any, support or assistance to achieve housing stability and individual well-being. (para. 3) In a large-scale study of students experiencing homelessness across the United States, one third of the participants reported some sort of history in foster care (Bender, Yang, Ferguson, & Thompson, 2015). Kennedy (2007) found that violence exposure exacerbates the likelihood of experiencing homelessness. Job prospects are difficult for older adolescents experiencing homelessness and, subsequently, so is finding stable housing (Karabanow, Hughes, Ticknor, Kidd, & Patterson, 2010). In a study of doubled-up youth, Hallett (2012) found that the organization of a doubledup living situation could positively impact educational outcomes. For example, two families that merged together and shared expenses were found to encourage educational participation more so than two families who only shared a dwelling (Hallett, 2012).

Voices Challenging Dominant Narratives Youth voices are often not included in discussions and plans meant to address homelessness. Acknowledging that many programs and policies exist to support youth experiencing homelessness, Aviles de Bradley (2011) shared that “often these approaches exclude the insight of those most affected, the youth themselves. It is critical to include these perspectives in an effort to provide a more thorough understanding of homelessness among youth” (p. 156). Addressing this gap, Aviles de Bradley conducted interviews with six youth experiencing homelessness in 371

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Chicago. The youth themselves could “frame, interpret, and share meaning of their educational experiences” (p. 158) and contribute to the slim body of knowledge relating to youth experiencing homelessness. The interviews revealed the influence of caring adults. Students experiencing homelessness want “adults in their lives to help them process their experiences, thoughts, and feelings as individuals, but also to address and repair relationships with their parents” (p. 164). Additionally, participants stated that they do not necessarily identify as “homeless” and consider the label a misnomer. Considering this, Aviles de Bradley suggested that there exists a “need to redefine and re-conceptualize what it means to be homeless” (p. 168) in conjunction with participants experiencing homelessness. Ellis and Geller (2016) used the term housing insecurity when working with and discussing the experiences of youth who have been labeled homeless. They conducted interviews with students using narrative inquiry. Viewing the results through a critical race theory lens, Ellis and Geller’s results further confirmed the importance of supportive adults and provided evidence to counter the false stereotypes that people from low-income families do not care about education and that they are lazy (Gorski, 2012). Speaking specifically about motivation and positive relationships with caring adults, Ellis and Geller (2016) wrote, “The stories the youth shared described their desire to do the work; however, structural barriers made work completion challenging and sometimes impossible. Furthermore, the lack of assistance from teachers discouraged these young people from trying” (p. 599). Structural barriers need to be addressed so that positive environments for youth experiencing homelessness can be cultivated and sustained. Grineski’s (2014) work challenged deficit perspectives, which Gorski (2011) defined as “approaching students based upon our perceptions of their weaknesses rather than their strengths” (p. 152). Interviews with stakeholders and surveys completed by youth were used to produce “a more holistic narrative that illustrates [children experiencing homelessness] who act on varied interests, gifts, and talents” (Grineski, 2014, p. 203). Grineski presented ethnographic cases that addresses biases and preconceived notions of homelessness, combating beliefs and narratives of pity that can be truly detrimental to motivation and achievement in classrooms. Working with youth and families on literacy within a homeless shelter, Jacobs (2014) sought to present stories to challenge these dominant narratives and influence policy with respect to homelessness. Through ethnography and portraiture, Jacobs was able to craft counter portraits that challenged dominant narratives about homelessness. Jacobs stated, “Through the act of storytelling parents saw themselves as teachers, learners, role models, and advocates for their children” (p. 184). In a society that demonizes poverty (Giroux, 2012), empowering marginalized individuals is a vital step towards emancipation and sustainable change. Mohan and Shields (2014) conducted interviews and assembled portraits of students written in first person for an added layer of humanity. Their findings demonstrated how beliefs that individuals experiencing homelessness suffer from addiction is unfounded, and the influence of school faculty and staff is significant.

Mental and Physical Health Concerns for Those Experiencing Homelessness The health needs of students experiencing homelessness are vitally important. In a study of 356 adolescents experiencing homelessness, data reported that participants were equally likely to be victimized on the streets regardless of the means by which they became homeless (MacLean, Embry, & Cauce, 1999). Additionally, youth experiencing homelessness are more likely to develop body image issues (Fournier et al., 2009); express negative attitudes about school (Kennedy, 2007); have parents who are perceived as non-supportive (Nott & Vuchinich, 2016); and, if they had experiences in the foster care system, more likely to trade sex for money or drugs (Hudson & Nandy, 2012). 372

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Oliveira and Burke (2009) found that at times the decision to live on the street was made rationally and resulted in the development of social capital amongst a group who shared similar experiences. McCay and colleagues (2011) also found that connection with others would support mental health among youth experiencing homelessness. These findings echo the call for caring and supportive adults to work with youth experiencing homelessness in educational settings (e.g., Ellis & Geller, 2016; Hallett, 2011). Researchers have documented how students experiencing homelessness exist in school spaces unbeknownst to the teachers they interact with on a daily basis whether by a teacher’s ignorance of the MV definition of homelessness or from a student’s blending in with classmates and “passing” as housed (Hallett, Low et al., 2015, Hallett, Skrla et al.,2015; Kim, 2013; Powers-Costello & Swick, 2008). With so many students experiencing homelessness who pass as housed within school settings, work with education stakeholders must take place to promote caring and supportive relationships with every student.

Education Stakeholders and Homelessness The work of teacher educators, professional development providers, and researchers seeking to educate stakeholders on student homelessness takes numerous forms. These programs include professional development or book groups for in-service teachers (Chow, Mistry, & Melchor, 2015; Powers-Costello & Swick, 2008); partnerships with community-based organizations (Bruce, Chance, & Meulemans, 2015; Miller, Pavlakis, Samartino, & Bourgeois, 2015); work with pre-service teachers (Hallam, Buell, & Ridgley, 2003; Kim, 2013); service-learning or experiential learning (Calabrese Barton, 2000; Johnson, Grazulis, & White, 2014); and researcher partnerships with school district personnel (Hallett, Low et al., 2015, Hallett, Skrla et al.,2015). The research studies in this section will be divided into two different sub-sections based on their approach to addressing student homelessness. These two sub-sections include challenging the problem and challenging the perception.

Challenging the Problem Some studies seem to address homelessness in general rather than the individuals experiencing homelessness. Miller and colleagues (2015) utilized organizational brokerage theory and found that strong support networks consisting of numerous actors operating on school, district, and community levels for the benefit of children experiencing homelessness can lead to sustainable change. Miller and colleagues (2015) argued that the solution to homelessness is not one size fits all and lies in between overarching policy and individual narratives and support, a finding echoed by Hallett, Low et al. (2015) in their work with a northern California school district. Lack of alignment between political, administrative, and professional systems will limit the impact of homelessness initiatives (Hallett, Skrla et al., 2015). Sulkowski (2016) called for a deeper involvement in advocacy by school psychologists. Although they represent “some of the most knowledgeable professionals in schools about relevant laws that influence schooling, educational service delivery, and the provision of mental health supports” (p. 768), Sulkowski asserted that many school psychologists still lack a deep understanding of MV and how its programs and supports should be implemented.

Challenging the Perception Deficit-laden perceptions of homelessness have the potential to make or break efforts addressing homelessness. Pity does little to solve the societal issue of homelessness. Deficit ideologies “explain and justify outcome inequalities—standardized test scores or educational attainment, for example—by pointing to supposed deficiencies within disenfranchised individuals and 373

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communities” (Gorski, 2011, p. 153). When operating from a deficit ideology, power and possibility rest in the strategies rather than the people. Gorski (2013b) described the perils of deficit ideologies when working with students from poverty. Strategies, if employed under the umbrella of deficit ideologies, will render themselves inconsequential because they will do nothing to address the overarching ideology (Gorski, 2013b). Real change comes by challenging the perception of homelessness and those experiencing it. Calabrese Barton (2000) used service-learning opportunities for pre-service teachers on site at homeless shelters to challenge perceptions and beliefs. Pre-service teachers involved in the project shared that these experiences changed their views of what homelessness is. Also working with pre-service teachers, Kim (2013) structured opportunities for pre-service teachers to interact with children and families experiencing homelessness on a personal level. Prior to this work, Kim found that pre-service teachers’ beliefs about homelessness mirrored those of dominant society, ignored the idea of children existing in homelessness, and considered children in homelessness “abnormal” (p. 298). After working with families and children experiencing homelessness, pre-service teachers amended these opinions and beliefs, similar to the Calabrese Barton (2000) findings, and their experiences laid the groundwork for more equitable views and beliefs. Beliefs held by practicing teachers and other school district personnel might prove to be more challenging to address, as evidenced by Powers-Costello and Swick (2008). Recognizing the difficulty in working with teachers on their beliefs about homelessness and speaking directly to the core of deficit ideology, Powers-Costello and Swick (2008) stated, “Teacher perceptions of children and families who are homeless are especially difficult because our culture tends to see homelessness as a reflection of individual weakness and defect rather than symbolic of social injustice” (p. 241). Hallett, Skrla et al. (2015), also working with practicing teachers and district personnel, found that even when a district seeks to help every student succeed, individuals holding perceptions antithetical to policies and mandatory services like MV have the potential to derail any positive impacts. Beliefs about students experiencing homelessness, though not physical or easily quantifiable, will oftentimes dictate future directions for schools and districts. True change, according to Gorski (2013a), is not possible when the push is solely external and lacks the support of an internal personal belief about the necessity for equity and social justice. Teacher educators, professional development providers, and professors at institutions of higher learning have an obligation to prepare those in their charge for compassionate and empathetic interactions with individuals experiencing homelessness. If their goal is equity and justice, they must work at clearing paths towards addressing the societal structures that make homelessness not just possible, but an overwhelming reality.

Why Focus on Student Homelessness in the Middle Grades? Society’s perception of homelessness and those who experience it is antiquated and deeply troubling (e.g., Cozzarelli, Wilkinson, & Tagler, 2001; Kim, 2013; Pimpare, 2017; Toolis & Hammack, 2015). This perception simultaneously defines, restricts, and positions homelessness as existing in some other place, separate from where people who have access to stable housing congregate and hold conversations. Cloaked in normality (Feuer, 2012), students experiencing homelessness exist in classrooms where misunderstandings of their lived experiences and a disregard for societal conditions that contribute to their inadequate access to stable housing are ignored. When students fail to conform to society’s stereotypical perception of who is homeless, teachers are ill-prepared to address the needs of students experiencing homelessness who fail to conform to society’s stereotypical perception of who is homeless. Teachers’ ill-preparation results in perpetuated marginalization. Aviles de Bradley (2011) saw the potential that school communities 374

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possess: “Schools can become vital spaces for students experiencing homelessness, if school administrators, faculty and staff are aware of their needs and are prepared to provide the resources and support that enhance educational outcomes for this group of students” (p. 157). The increased needs for teachers’ understanding and the representation of students’ voices necessitate the significance of research with and for students experiencing homelessness. This We Believe: Keys to Educating Young Adolescents (National Middle School Association [NMSA], 2010) states that young adolescents, “deserve an education that will enhance their healthy growth as lifelong learners, ethical and democratic citizens, and increasingly competent, self-sufficient individuals who are optimistic about the future and prepared to succeed in our ever-changing world” (p. 3). This We Believe calls for middle schools to be developmentally responsive, challenging, empowering, and equitable (NMSA, 2010). DiCicco, Cook, and Faulkner (2016) shared that the essential attributes and 16 characteristics of successful schools for young adolescents outlined in This We Believe, “emphasize the importance of staffing classrooms with teachers specifically prepared to work with the age group” (p. 2). Jackson and Davis (2000) stated that teachers in the middle grades must locate their curriculum within the cultural, historical, and personal interests and needs of the young adolescents. In other words, teachers must actively seek an understanding of their students’ voices and experiences. By and large, middle level research has not addressed issues of equity and social justice. In her examination of the 691 articles and book chapters published in four main middle grades specific texts from 2000–2013, Brinegar (2015) found a dearth of published research in areas that are critical to developing systems and practices meant to support the needs of every young adolescent, including specific populations (e.g., males, African Americans, students with disabilities); diversity (e.g., broad topics related to equity, discrimination, social justice, multicultural education); motivation and engagement; student voice; leadership; and family/community connections. (p. 1) For example, Brinegar (2015) illuminated the inequity in representations related to youth living in poverty. Only 1% of the 691 published items addressed students living in poverty versus 22% of the nation’s population identified as experiencing poverty. Middle grades researchers must pursue, borrowing from This We Believe, more empowering and equitable research. This We Believe describes an empowering education as “providing all students with the knowledge and skills they need to take responsibility for their lives, to address life’s challenges, to function successfully at all levels of society, and to be creators of knowledge” (NMSA, 2010, p. 13). This We Believe and Turning Points 2000 (Jackson & Davis, 2000), like Aviles de Bradley’s findings related to students experiencing homelessness, stress the importance of positive relationships between young adolescents and adults. This We Believe views relationships with caring adults as a foundation for much of its framework (NMSA, 2010). Jackson and Davis (2000) consistently described the importance of curriculum, teaching methods, and assessments, but they also highlighted the importance of dignity and respect, stating “yet, when successful adults are asked what aspect of their education most influenced their later accomplishments, they often cite a special relationship with a teacher” and “relationships with adults form critical pathways for [young adolescents’] learning” (p. 121). Speaking specifically on the motivation and empowerment of students experiencing homelessness that positive relationships with caring adults can generate, Ellis and Geller (2016) wrote, “The stories the youth shared described their desire to do the work; however, structural barriers made work completion challenging and sometimes impossible. Furthermore, the lack of assistance from teachers discouraged these young people from trying” (p. 599). It is structural barriers (e.g., lack of transportation, 375

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attendance issues, and exclusionary discipline) that need addressing in order to cultivate and sustain positive environments for students experiencing homelessness. Middle level schools should be designed for the benefit of the students who fill the halls. If a school lacks spaces for students to congregate, students could be led to believe that school has no role in socialization, a point in direct contradiction to This We Believe (NMSA, 2010) and Turning Points 2000 (Jackson & Davis, 2000). This We Believe states that “[Y]oung people’s desire for peer acceptance and the need to belong to particular social groups are often intense and sometimes lead to shifting allegiance from adults to peers” (p. 7) and that young adolescents need to “develop the interpersonal and social skills needed to learn, work, and play with others harmoniously and confidently” (p. 12). The text seems to imply that empowerment and personal interest are born out of collaboration, interaction, and positive relationships with peers. Relationships are vital, as Doda (2013) shared: “When relationships are undervalued, middle grades schools and classrooms can become places where young adolescents have difficulty connecting to or investing in school” (p. 341). Collaboration, interaction, and positive relationships manifest themselves in environments that are designed specifically with individuals in mind. Middle level schools must be physically designed to meet the needs of their students, not simply as buildings used to “hold” students in between elementary and high school. Additionally, strength for students experiencing homelessness can be found in relationships with others. If school is not seen as a place for students to interact with each other, then it simply becomes another location of transience in a condition marked with inconsistency. Middle grades schools must be equitable. This We Believe defines equitable as, “advocating for and ensuring every student’s right to learn and providing appropriately challenging and relevant learning opportunities for every student” (NMSA, 2010, p. 13). Gorski (2016) described equity literate educators as individuals who are able to recognize even the most subtle forms of inequity and bias in school environments. He called for educators to ask the following of themselves: Do I understand the challenges students experiencing poverty face outside school well enough that I recognize even the subtlest ways in which those challenges are reproduced within schools? Am I capable of recognizing stereotypical depictions of people experiencing poverty when I flip through a textbook under consideration for adoption in my school district? (p. 17) The young adolescents who populate the halls and classrooms of middle grades schools across the United States must have teachers who actively seek equity. Equity is not a prize that can be actualized but instead must be continuously sought in order to provide the most equitable environment for students. Doda (2013) reminded readers that rhetoric does not always signify reality. There could be an abundance of rhetoric surrounding equity in middle level schools, but should that equity not come to fruition, “Young people lose hopeful visions of their future when they enter schools that inadvertently create barriers to success” (Doda, 2013, p. 336). When young people lose hope, they “fall prey to many high-risk choices and behaviors that can wreak havoc with their development and capacity to learn and succeed in and out of school” (Doda, 2013, p. 337). This We Believe’s call for equity is why work with and for young adolescents experiencing homelessness is of vital importance (NMSA, 2010). Middle grades educators and researchers must be ready and willing to meet the challenges of their classrooms. In order to effectively teach middle grades students, teachers and administrators need to make intentional choices to advocate for young adolescents (NMSA, 2010). Further, we must strive to foster inclusive environments in which students, teachers, and administrators acknowledge and celebrate differences by showing 376

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empathy and being fully attentive and responsive to the experiences and viewpoints of students. Students’ experiences and viewpoints cannot be heard if students are removed from the learning environment. We must strive to ensure all students are viewed and treated as valued, contributing, and essential members of the school community (NMSA, 2010). It should be stated again, if it was not abundantly clear, that the work that must be done to challenge dominant narratives surrounding homelessness should not rest on the backs of the youth themselves. The work of seeking counter narratives, theorizing them, reporting out on the findings, and alleviating the sting of homelessness should fall squarely within the bounds of humanizing, youth-engaged researchers and advocates. Addressing youth homelessness will require collaboration among numerous stakeholders, especially with, arguably, the most important stakeholders: the youth themselves. Their voices have been virtually excluded from the development of the public perception of homelessness. The work of educators requires that they include youth perspectives. A learning environment cannot be equitable if every member of the classroom community does not have the privilege of contributing to the discourse. Within the walls of our classrooms, we have the opportunity to impact entire communities with our choices.

Note 1 Pseudonym.

References Aviles de Bradley, A. M. (2011). Unaccompanied homeless youth: Intersections of homelessness, school experiences, and educational policy. Child & Youth Services, 32(2), 155–172. Bender, K., Yang, J., Ferguson, K., & Thompson, S. (2015). Experiences and needs of homeless youth with a history of foster care. Children and Youth Services Review, 55, 222–231. Brinegar, K. (2015). A content analysis of four peer-reviewed middle grades publications: Are we really paying attention to every young adolescent?. Middle Grades Review, 1(1), Article 4, 1–7. Bruce, M., Chance, R., & Meulemans, L. (2015). Joining forces for families: An embedded response to neighborhood poverty. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 28(6), 750–756. Calabrese Barton, A. (2000). Crafting multicultural science education with preservice teachers through service-learning. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 32(6), 797–820. Chandler, A. (2017). Pupil services homeless education program: Executive summary. Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles Unified School District. Chow, K. A., Mistry, R. S., & Melchor, V. L. (2015). Homelessness in the elementary school classroom: Social and emotional consequences. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 28(6), 641–662. Cozzarelli, C., Wilkinson, A. V., & Tagler, M. J. (2001). Attitudes toward the poor and attributions for poverty. Journal of Social Issues, 57, 207–227. Crook, C. (2015). Educating America’s homeless youth through reinforcement of the McKinney Vento Homeless Assistance Act. Faulkner Law Review, 6(2), 395–408. Cunningham, K. A. (2014). A question of priorities: A critical investigation of the McKinney-Vento Act. Critical Questions in Education, 5(3), 218–232. DiCicco, M., Cook, C. M., & Faulkner, S. A. (2016). Teaching in the middle grades today: Examining teachers‘beliefs about middle grades teaching. Middle Grades Review, 2(3), Article 3, 1–16. Doda, N. M. (2013). The challenge of equity in the middle grades. In P. G. Andrews (Ed.), Research to guide practice in middle grades education (pp. 331–354). Westerville, OH: Association for Middle Level Education. Ellis, A. L., & Geller, K. D. (2016). Unheard and unseen: How housing insecure African American adolescents experience the education system. Education and Urban Society, 48(6), 583–610. Feuer, A. (2012, February 3). Homeless families, cloaked in normality. New York Times. Retrieved from www. nytimes.com Foscarinis, M. (1991). The politics of homelessness: A call to action. American Psychologist, 46(11), 1232–1238. Fournier, M. E., Austin, S. B., Samples, C. L., Goodenow, C. S., Wylie, S. A., & Corliss, H. L. (2009). A comparison of weight-related behaviors among high school students who are homeless and non-homeless. Journal of School Health, 79(10), 466–473.

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Giroux, H. (2012). Disposable youth: Racialized memories and the culture of cruelty. New York, NY: Routledge. Gorski, P. C. (2011). Unlearning deficit ideology and the scornful gaze: Thoughts on authenticating the class discourse in education. Counterpoints, 402, 152–173. Gorski, P. C. (2012). Perceiving the problem of poverty and schooling: Deconstructing the class stereotypes that miss-shape education practice and policy. Equity & Excellence in Education, 45(2), 302–319. Gorski, P. C. (2013a). Reaching and teaching students in poverty: Strategies for erasing the opportunity gap. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Gorski, P. C. (2013b). Building a pedagogy of engagement for students in poverty. Kappan, 95(1), 48–52. Gorski, P. C. (2016, May). Re-examining beliefs about students in poverty. School Administrator, 17–20. Grineski, S. (2014). The multi-dimensional lives of children who are homeless. Critical Questions in Education, 5(3), 203–217. Hallam, R. A., Buell, M. J., & Ridgley, R. (2003). Preparing early childhood educators to serve children and families living in poverty: A national survey of undergraduate programs. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 18(2), 115–124. Hallett, R. E. (2011). Educational experiences of hidden homeless teenagers: Living doubled-up. New York, NY: Routledge. Hallett, R. E. (2012). Living doubled-up: Influence of residential environment on educational participation. Education and Urban Society, 44(4), 371–391. Hallett, R. E., Low, J. A., & Skrla, L. (2015). Beyond backpacks and bus tokens: Next steps for a district homeless student initiative. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 28(6), 693–713. Hallett, R. E., Skrla, L., & Low, J. A. (2015). That is not what homeless is: A school district’s journey toward serving homeless, doubled-up, and economically displaced children and youth. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 28(6), 671–692. Harris, L. T., & Fiske, S. T. (2006). Dehumanizing the lowest of the low: Neuroimaging responses to extreme out-groups. Psychological Science, 17, 847–853. Henry, M., Watt, R., Rosenthal, L., & Shivji, A. (2016). The 2016 annual homeless assessment report (AHAR) to congress part 1. Washington, DC: United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. Hudson, A., & Nandy, K. (2012). Comparisons of substance abuse, high-risk sexual behavior, and depressive symptoms among homeless youth with and without a history of foster care placement. Contemporary Nurse, 42(2), 178–186. Jackson, A. W., & Davis, G. A. (2000). Turning points 2000: Educating adolescents in the 21st century. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Jacobs, M. M. (2014). Literacy, education, and inequality: Assimilation and resistance narratives from families residing at a homeless shelter. Critical Questions in Education, 5(3), 172–188. Johnson, K. A., Grazulis, J., & White, J. K. (2014). Sleep out on the quad: An opportunity for experiential education and servant based leadership. Critical Questions in Education, 5(3), 233–241. Julianelle, P. F., & Foscarinis, M. (2003). Responding to the school mobility of children and youth experiencing homelessness: The McKinney-Vento Act and beyond. The Journal of Negro Education, 72(1), 39–54. Karabanow, J., Hughes, J., Ticknor, J., Kidd, S., & Patterson, D. (2010). The economics of being young and poor: How homeless youth survive in neo-liberal times. Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, 37(4), 39–63. Kennedy, A. C. (2007). Homelessness, violence exposure, and school participation among urban adolescent mothers. Journal of Community Psychology, 35(5), 639–654. Kim, J. (2013). Against the unchallenged discourse of homelessness: Examining the views of early childhood preservice teachers. Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, 34(4), 291–307. MacLean, M. G., Embry, L. E., & Cauce, A. M. (1999). Homeless adolescents’ paths to separation from family: Comparison of family characteristics, psychological adjustment, and victimization. Journal of Community Psychology, 27(2), 179–187. McCay, E., Quesnel, S., Langley, J., Beanlands, H., Cooper, L., Blidner, R., & Bach, K. (2011). A relationship-based intervention to improve social connectedness in street-involved youth: A pilot study. Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing, 24(4), 208–215. McKinney-Vento Homeless Education Assistance Improvements Act of 2001. (2015) [MV], P.L. 100-77, 42 U.S.C. §§ 11431-11435. Miller, P. M. (2012). Educating (more and more) students experiencing homelessness: An analysis of recession-era policy and practice. Educational Policy, 27(5), 805–838. Miller, P. M., Pavlakis, A., Samartino, L., & Bourgeois, A. (2015). Brokering educational opportunity for homeless students and their families. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 28(6), 730–749.

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Mohan, E., & Shields, C. M. (2014). The voices behind the numbers: Understanding the experiences of homeless students. Critical Questions in Education, 5(3), 189–202. National Alliance to End Homelessness. (2016). Housing first [Fact sheet]. Retrieved from www.endhomelessness. org/pages/housing_first National Center for Homeless Education. (2016). Education of homeless children and youth (EHCY) federal data summary for school years 2012-2013 to 2014-2015. Greensboro, NC: Author. National Middle School Association. (2010). This we believe: Keys to educating young adolescents. Westerville, OH: Author. No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 [NCLB]. (2002). P.L. 107-110, 20 U.S.C. § 6319. Nott, B. D., & Vuchinich, S. (2016). Homeless adolescents’ perceptions of positive development: A comparative study. Child Youth Care Forum, 45(6), 865–886. Oliveira, J. O., & Burke, P. J. (2009). Lost in the shuffle: Culture of homeless adolescents. Pediatric Nursing, 35 (3), 154–161. Pimpare, S. (2017). Ghettos, tramps, and welfare queens: Down and out on the silver screen. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Powers-Costello, E., & Swick, K. J. (2008). Exploring the dynamics of teacher perceptions of homeless children and families during the early years. Early Childhood Education Journal, 36(3), 241–245. Roschelle, A. R., & Kaufman, P. (2004). Fitting in and fighting back: Stigma management strategies among homeless kids. Symbolic Interaction, 27, 23–46. Saldanha, K. (2015). Promoting and developing direct scribing to capture the narratives of homeless youth in special education. Qualitative Social Work, 14(6), 794–819. Sulkowski, M. L. (2016). The student homelessness crisis and the role of school psychology: Missed opportunities, room for improvement, and future directions. Psychology in the Schools, 53(7), 760–771. Tierney, W. G., & Hallett, R. E. (2010). Writing on the margins from the center: Homeless youth + politics at the borders. Cultural Studies ←→ Critical Methodologies, 10(1), 19–27. Toolis, E. E., & Hammack, P. L. (2015). The lived experience of homeless youth: A narrative approach. Qualitative Psychology, 2, 50–68. Wong, J. H., Elliott, L. T., Reed, S., Ross, W., McGuirk, P., Tallarita, L., & Chouinard, K. (2009). The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act Subtitle B-Education for Homeless Children and Youths Program: Turning good law into effective education. Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy, XVI(1), 53–115.

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Future Directions

28 LOOKING BACK TO MOVE FORWARD An Historical Analysis of Educating the Young Adolescent in the United States Shawn A. Faulkner, Chris M. Cook, and Penny B. Howell

From before the inception of the junior high school to the middle school that is commonplace today, there have been differing views on how best to meet the educational needs of the young adolescent. Different educational and structural models have been proposed and implemented to varying degrees; but with each model, there has been a period of partial implementation followed by dissatisfaction with the outcomes achieved. While there is general consensus that young adolescents are unique and require an educational experience different from elementary and secondary school experiences, educators in the United States have not fully embraced a common approach to educating the 10 to 15 year-old child. It is often helpful to look back in order to move forward. By examining the recommendations of the past, we can identify directions for our future work. The purpose of this chapter is to conduct an historical analysis of prominent literature, frameworks, and recommendations focused on the education of the young adolescent in order to provide clarity to the complex, ever-changing dynamics of education at the middle level. Children in today’s schools are more culturally, linguistically, and ethnically diverse, and the community’s expectations for schools continue to evolve. By building on the foundational and historically significant ideas of the past while considering the new realities of education, we will identify salient aspects of young adolescent education that we believe are relevant for 21st century schools, and we propose our own recommendations—“next steps,” if you will—to enhance the educational experiences of middle grades students.

Looking Back: Evolution of Education for the Young Adolescent For the past 150 years, the public school system in the United States has developed, evolved, and reorganized itself numerous times and for various reasons. Consistent throughout the literature on these changes has been the question of what to do with students who do not fit easily into the elementary grades or the secondary grades. The evolution of educational practices for the young adolescent student has remained not only a constant struggle in our educational system, but also one that has changed very little over time.

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The Reorganization of Public Schools: Impetus for Change C. W. Eliot brought the reorganization of the school system to the forefront in his article, The New Education (1869), in which he outlined the issues of college entrance exams as they related to public school education. In his article and subsequent writings, Eliot proposed adjusting the content and grade structure to push more content and rigor down into the grammar school, making high school a step leading to college (Eliot, 1869, 1886). This suggestion prompted the National Education Association (NEA) to establish the Committee of Ten (COT) to review the education system and make recommendations for changes. In 1894, the COT convened to consider the “uniformity of school programmes and requirements for admission to college” (NEA, 1894, p. 6). The recommendations revealed ideas consistent with modern day structures and practices in education. They called for more highly trained teachers to be able to ensure subjects were correlated and associated with one another. The COT recommended “flexible and comprehensive schedules of studies” with hands on curriculum (NEA, 1894, p. 142). Eliot and the COT have been credited with bringing about significant changes to the public school system that are still in existence today. Shortly after the COT compiled its report, the NEA proposed a Committee of Fifteen on Elementary Education (CFEE). This committee convened to review the “training of teachers,” the “correlation of studies in elementary education,” and the “organization of city school systems” (NEA, 1895, p. 3). Within the recommendations of this report, the committee’s recommendations focused on students in grades beyond the sixth year. Early in their report they noted, “to know the child is of paramount importance” (p. 24) and “teachers should study the psychology of the child” (p. 24). The CFEE also pointed out the critical nature of teaching this age group and describes the years between the seventh and eight years as, “adolescence … the period of beginnings … a transition period of mental storm and stress” (p. 36). The committee also noted the critical nature of teachers for this group by saying, “To guide youth at this formative stage … requires a deep and sympathetic nature and that knowledge of changing life which supplies guidance wise and adequate” (p. 36). This report highlighted the beginning stages of the struggle to effectively educate the young adolescent student. By 1913, Bunker focused further on the education of students in the seventh and eighth years of school (Bunker, 1913, 1916). He advocated rigor in the upper elementary grades and recommended shortening elementary schools to add more years to high school instruction. He concurred with the suggestion of an “intermediate school from 1909” (Bunker, 1913, p. 63) and more individualized instruction for reorganized schools. Shortly after Bunker’s report on the reorganization of secondary schools, the Cardinal Principals of Secondary Education was published (Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, 1918). This report outlined many principles of education that remain consistent with the education of young adolescents today. It suggested, “The need to reorganize comes from less unified family life, more diversity and responsibility” (p. 7). Furthermore, it noted the number of changes to children and their lives as additional evidence that changes to the structure of the school system was needed. A number of recommendations were made, including: • • • •

The curriculum should be differentiated for “ages 12 or 13.. [to] begin a preliminary survey of the activities … [the student] may chose” (p. 15); The six years of secondary education should be divided into two periods designated as the junior and senior periods (p. 15); The junior period emphasizes the attempt to help pupils explore aptitudes and make provisional choices of the kinds of work they do (p. 18); The students should have choice, personal responsibility, [and] belonging (p. 19);

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• • •

The students should have free electives and a wide range of electives, exploration and guidance (p. 21); The studies should be student centered with flexible scheduling, differentiated curriculum, unified concepts, exploratory education (p. 22); Within the school day, attention should be paid to physical, intellectual, emotional, and ethical characteristics. (p. 32)

The commission also recognized the importance of teachers in the process of reorganization of the school structures by stating, “progress of this new way depends on the professional training of teachers” (p. 32). Reorganization also included textbooks, resources used in classrooms, and administrator mindset toward the new way to educate adolescents. Shortly after the Cardinal Principals, Briggs (1920) published The Junior High School. This text provided an historical overview of what he called the junior high movement, connecting the foundational principals to the COT and CFEE as well as the Cardinal Principals of Secondary Education. Briggs not only provided definitions and descriptions of a junior high school, but also presented empirical data about when, why, how, and by whom junior high schools were established in the United States. Briggs outlined the critical aspects of educating young adolescents and focused on the main components he identified in order for the changes to be successful and fulfill the expectations of leaders advocating for change. Below we have summarized these components, but full statements on these aspects of the education of the young adolescent in early 20th century can be found in the text. The first component Briggs (1920) described was organization (p. 93), and included the “distribution of grades and affiliations” (p. 93), “relation to elementary school” (p. 97), and “relation to senior high schools” (p. 113). This aspect of educating students in grades seven through nine focused on the logistical issues surrounding the physical reorganization of the school systems in our country as well as the articulation of the curriculum. Briggs highlighted the tensions between perspectives on which grades should be included in the junior high school and described the importance of content articulation between the grades and schools to ensure students were prepared for the next level of education. The second critical component of the successful reorganization of the nation’s schools brought attention to the “special function of the junior high school” (Briggs, 1920, p. 127) and included the discussion of “departmental teaching” (p. 127), “individual differences” (p. 133), and “promotion” (p.152). Briggs outlined the benefits of departmental teaching for both the teachers and students. The impetus for this change was grounded in having teachers better prepared in their content areas. While Briggs cautioned against departmentalization for all areas, he did suggest that this type of organization would provide teachers the opportunities to expand and enrich the curriculum for students who were ready and able to explore more difficult topics. Consistent with Bunker (1913, 1916) and Thorndike (1914), Briggs (1920) highlighted the importance of understanding the various individual differences in young adolescents. He suggested the intermediate school should “systematically seek to ascertain the nature and extent of individual differences in its pupils” (p.136) and “adopt a definite policy as to providing education suitable of those differences” (p. 136). Finally, the special function of the junior high was to take what was understood about the development of the young adolescent and apply it accordingly through a system of support. Briggs identified differentiated curriculum, flexible class promotion options, and consideration of outside experiences as ways to meet the needs of early adolescent students. Briggs called for “variety and continuity” within the curricula focused on the general purposes of education as put forth in Reorganization of the Public School System (Bunker, 1916). Within this curricula the options for exploratory coursework would be necessary to provide offerings “for a rounded life” (p.162) and to “satisfy pupils’ important immediate and assured future needs” (p. 163). Additionally, the curricula for this level “should explore the interests, aptitudes, and capacities of 385

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pupils” (p. 167) while helping students see “possibilities in the major fields of learning” (p. 169). These recommendations brought about a more student focused curricula in junior high schools. Briggs (1920) noted one of the main purposes for “the establishment of junior high schools was the improvement of instruction for pupils of early adolescence” (p. 200). His focus on methods of teaching for the junior high school brought attention to the important shift in teaching from traditional methods of “drill and memory and formal analysis” (p. 201) to “methods capable of adaptation to individual differences and methods that shall reveal to the pupil his capacities and develop power in expression” (p. 201). Referencing the critical nature of student differences, Briggs (1920) called for the “adaptation of teaching to the peculiar characteristics of pupils of twelve to fifteen years of age” (p. 202). These changes would only be realized with additional training of teachers, changes in textbooks and resources in the school, and the expectations for students outside of school hours. Finally, Briggs (1920) recognized the critical nature of transitions from the elementary/intermediate period to the high school period. As he made recommendations for alleviating the strain that accompanies such transitions, he focused on social organization and control. First, Briggs gave attention to self-governance and described the partial and gradual increase of opportunities for the early adolescent to participate in student government through “school council” and organization of representatives from classes and groups (p. 252). Further, he said this organization would be supported through guidance programs and advisors with dedicated time during the day for an “advisory system” (p. 254) that focused on helping students develop an understanding of roles and responsibilities outside of school. These recommendations and descriptions of the developing junior high school were the result of the reorganization of schools in the United States. They highlighted important features of the education of the young adolescent and would be foundational to the development of junior high schools and the middle schools of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The Junior High Era The Modern Junior High School (Gruhn & Douglass, 1947) was published 27 years after Briggs (1920), expanding the historical work to include the various perspectives of the pioneers of the junior high movement and providing additional layers of complexity to the evolving organizational structures of the American school system. It was clear by 1947 that the junior high movement had taken hold, and the numbers of junior high schools had grown steadily across the nation. The literature from this time period reflected how the struggle for the junior high was complicated by the growth in the school population both in increased attendance as well as rapidly changing societal demographics. Gruhn and Douglass (1947) offered thirty-one recommendations for the field to ensure “the continued improvement of the junior high school program” (p. 455). They organized the recommendations into five specific categories, which are here shortened and paraphrased from the original list (Gruhn & Douglass, 1947, pp. 455–459).

Recommendations Concerning Philosophy, Aims, and Functions Recommendations in this category included: • • • •

specially prepared educators for this age group, agreement and alignment of faculty with the philosophy of junior high principles, a clear mission statement focused on the appropriate functions of the junior high, and a commitment to examine and ensure the consistency of enactment of the stated mission by all stakeholders. 386

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Recommendations Concerning Curriculum Recommendations in this category included curriculum that: • • • • • • •

is developed to meet the needs of junior high students exclusively, considers areas of study beyond the basic core, provides individualized and remedial instruction, assures mastery of fundamental skills and knowledge, provides adequate provision of exceptional children, includes more integration of subject areas and cooperation among teachers across subject areas, and offers closer articulation of curriculum for school units, grades, and subjects.

Recommendations Concerning Teaching Materials and Methods Recommendations in this category included: • • • • • • •

techniques developed to implement the junior high philosophy, teaching methods that develop problem solving skills, desirable pupil attitudes, wholesome personality traits, and effective character qualities, more emphasis on individualized instruction, classes to prepare youth to participate in democratic society, more use of audio and visual teaching materials, more use of community resources, and programs to teach students study techniques and skills.

Recommendations Concerning Guidance Recommendations in this category included: • • • • • •

planned and organized activities that give due consideration to the educational, vocational, and personal problems of youth; teachers prepared for guidance responsibilities; more guidance workers with specialized training; schedule that allows for guidance activities between pupils and home-room teachers, counselors, and other guidance specialists; recognition of the teacher’s load including guidance work; and effective use of student information to assist in guidance activities.

Recommendation Concerning Extra-Class Activities Recommendations in this category included activities that: • • •

are part of a well-coordinated and well-integrated education program, have well-formulated statement of objectives for extra-class programs, and contribute to the educational growth of the pupils concerned by considering logistics such as the amount of time allowed for activities; the policies concerning fees, eligibility, and prerequisites; and provisions for faculty sponsorship.

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Recommendations Concerning Organization, Administration and Supervision Recommendations in this category included: • • • •

type of education program developed most important, irrespective of the plan of grade organization; closer articulation in administrative policies and practices between schools to improve transitions; modified administrative practices with respect to length of class periods, report cards, marks, and classroom organization and equipment; and a program of professional education that prepares teachers at the junior high school level.

As evident in the recommendations above, Gruhn and Douglass (1947) worked to provide structures for a more effective and supportive program for young adolescents. While they recognized the junior high as a “relatively new unit in our educational system,” they believed these recommendations would add stability and sustainability for the education of this age group (p. 459).

The Middle School Era As the 1960s approached, the United States was grappling with numerous social and political events (e.g., Sputnik, civil rights). People were frustrated and ready for change. In an effort to bring about change to the junior high school approach and invigorate the educational experiences for young adolescents, William Alexander described the need for a school to bridge the gap between the elementary and high school and place more emphasis on the specific learning needs of young adolescents. Thus, the middle school was born (Alexander, 1963). Building on this idea, Eichhorn (1966) proposed the first middle school model grounded in meeting the developmental needs of young adolescents—specifically the physical, mental, and cultural needs of students. He highlighted the need to implement a flexible daily schedule and grouping practices that addressed the needs of the individual child to deliver an integrated, relevant, and exploratory curriculum. Alexander and colleagues (1968) further expanded on these ideas and outlined the organizational structures and curriculum plan needed to address the specific developmental characteristics of young adolescents. As the middle school model gained support and spread throughout the 1970s and 1980s, more advocates and researchers contributed to the literature calling for a specialized educational approach focused on the developmental needs of the young adolescent (DeVita, Pumerantz, & Wilklow, 1970; Gatewood & Dilg, 1975; Lounsbury, 1978; Toepfer, 1973; Vars, 1969). In 1973, National Middle School Association (NMSA, now Association for Middle Level Education [AMLE]) was established and provided valuable opportunities for advocacy and professional development focused on educating the young adolescent. In 1982, NMSA felt the time had come to clearly articulate the essential elements of middle school education. In This We Believe (NMSA, 1982), NMSA Past-President John Swaim, stated: Because the middle school concept has been implemented in a variety of different ways across the nation, the Association felt that a clear and relatively complete statement was needed which would reflect the consensus views of the Association regarding the essential elements of middle school education. (p. 1)

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NMSA charged a group of middle school leaders—William Alexander, Alfred Arth, Charles Cherry, Donald Eichhorn, Conrad Toepfer, Gordon Vars, and John Lounsbury—with producing a position paper that clearly and concisely outlined the essence of the middle school. This We Believe (NMSA, 1982) was a simple, unifying document that provided direction for the middle school movement and NMSA. The writers acknowledged the junior high school, and even some early middle schools, were focused on administrative organization, particularly grade levels. The authors stated, The history of the junior high school and even the early history of the middle school indicate clearly that a title or grade level designation without a focus on the needs of the learners to be served, does not make for an effective school. (National Middle School Association, 1982, p. 3) Therefore, when creating This We Believe, their goal was to adhere to a simple premise: “If we know the nature of the learner, then we must provide a school program to match that nature and thus nurture the adolescent” (NMSA, 1992, p. v.) To that end, This We Believe provided the following 10 essential characteristics of middle schools: • • • • • • • • • •

educators knowledgeable about and committed to transescents, a balanced curriculum based on transescent needs, a range of organizational arrangements, varied instructional strategies, a full exploratory program, comprehensive advising and counseling, continuous progress for students, evaluation procedures compatible with nature of transescents, cooperative planning, and positive school climate. (p. 19)

While the list of 10 characteristics may appear to be a list of characteristics from which school leaders may choose, the authors of This We Believe emphasized the importance of implementing all 10 characteristics to some degree because the characteristics are all interrelated. By the 1990s, the middle school movement, as we know it, was firmly established in the United States educational system. Many school districts across the country had transitioned, at least in name, from a junior high school to a middle school, and there were increasing attempts to adhere to the philosophical underpinnings articulated by the early proponents of the middle school concept. During this time period, several influential documents shaped the thinking of many middle school educators, providing a framework for the programs and practices deemed essential for the “true” middle school. Since the publication of This We Believe (NMSA, 1982), there have been three revisions, each with subtle changes to reflect changing times and each with a different sub-title to distinguish it from previous editions. This We Believe: Developmentally Responsive Middle Level Schools (NMSA, 1995) and This We Believe: Successful Schools for Young Adolescents (NMSA, 2003b) reorganized the essential characteristics but continued to emphasize the importance of the characteristics working in harmony. The most recent edition of the NMSA position paper was titled This We Believe: Keys to Educating Young Adolescents (NMSA, 2010b). Though the heart of the document remained the same—a middle school that was responsive to the developmental needs of young adolescents—this edition saw the most significant reorganization. The document proposed four essential attributes for the education of young 389

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adolescents—developmentally responsive, challenging, empowering, and equitable—supported by 16 characteristics organized into three broad categories: curriculum, instruction, and assessment; leadership and organization; and culture and community. The essential characteristics included the use of varied and ongoing assessments, leadership knowledgeable about this age group and middle school practices; and ongoing professional development reflecting best educational practices. Possibly reflecting changing times in the educational landscape, both the 2003 and 2010 editions of This We Believe included a significant “call to action” encouraging educators to be advocates for effective middle level practices. Additionally, both of these editions had a companion book outlining research to support the recommendations of This We Believe (NMSA, 2003a, 2010a). Much like NMSA’s This We Believe (NMSA, 1982, 2003b, 2010b), Turning Points: Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century (Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1989) and Turning Points 2000: Educating Adolescents in the 21st Century (Jackson & Davis, 2000) have become two of the most commonly cited works outlining the practices of effective middle level schools. The initial Turning Points report (Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1989) recognized not only the challenges faced by adolescents, but also the immense opportunities available to them. However, as the Carnegie Task Force on Education of Young Adolescents stated, “A volatile mismatch exists between the organization and curriculum of middle grade schools and the intellectual and emotional needs of young adolescents” (Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1989, pp. 8–9). The Task Force called for the immediate transformation of middle grade schools led by principals and teachers with the support of superintendents and boards of education. To achieve this goal, the Task Force called for middle grade schools that: • • • • • • • •

create small communities for learning, teach a core academic program, ensure success for all students, empower teachers and administrators to make decisions about the experiences of middle grade students, staff middle grade schools with teachers who are expert at teaching young adolescents and who have been specially prepared, improve academic performance through fostering the health and fitness of young adolescents, reengage families in the education of young adolescents, and connect schools with communities. (p. 9)

By enacting these recommendations, the Task Force believed schools would address the moral and economic imperative to properly educate young adolescents and help ensure their bright future. Drawing on lessons learned since the publication of Turning Points: Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century (Carnegie Council, 1989), including the findings of the Middle Grade School State Policy Initiative (MGSSPI) and other middle grades improvement efforts, Turning Points 2000 “provide[d] much more ‘flesh on the bone’ to guide practitioners in their efforts to implement the model” outlined in the original Turning Points framework (Jackson & Davis, 2000, p. xi). Jackson and Davis (2000) called for middle grades schools that: • •

teach a curriculum grounded in rigorous, public academic standards for what students should know and be able to do, relevant to the concerns of adolescents and based on how students learn best,; use instructional methods designed to prepare all students to achieve higher standards and become lifelong learners;

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• • • • •

staff middle grades schools with teachers who are expert at teaching young adolescents, and engage teachers in ongoing, targeted professional development opportunities; organize relationships for learning to create a climate of intellectual development and a caring community of shared educational purpose; govern democratically, through direct or representative participation by all school staff members, the adults who know the students best; provide a safe and healthy school environment as part of improving academic performance and developing caring and ethical citizens; and involve parents and communities in supporting student learning and healthy development. (pp. 23–24)

In refining the Turning Points recommendations, Jackson and Davis (2000) sought to strengthen the connection between academic research and practice and diminish the belief of some that middle grades education had failed. At nearly the same time as the Turning Points 2000 recommendations, the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform sought to bring together middle level stakeholders to share a common message regarding the educational experiences of middle grades students. In 1999, the National Forum launched Schools to Watch, a national program that would recognize middle schools that are academically excellent, responsive to the developmental needs and interests of young adolescents, and socially equitable within a school that has supportive organizational structures in place (National Forum, 2018). The Schools to Watch program does not expect perfection; rather, it recognizes schools that are on a “continuous trajectory towards success” in the four Schools to Watch domains (National Forum, 2018). The national program does not list specific structures or practices that must be in place to receive the designation, but it does provide a rubric that allows schools and site visitors to determine progress toward each domain. The first four middle schools were nationally recognized in 1999–2000; however, by 2002, the program had become a state-level recognition program. Currently, there are 17 states participating (National Forum, 2018). In 2006, the middle school movement received support from outside the traditional middle school ranks. The National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) published Breaking Ranks in the Middle: Strategies for Leading Middle Level Reform (NASSP, 2006) in consultation with NMSA, the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform, and a number of middle level researchers. NASSP published a similar volume in 2004 offering strategies for high school reform; however, it became evident there would only be pockets of success in reforming high schools if the middle level and high school efforts were not aligned. Breaking Ranks (NASSP, 2006) identified the following nine cornerstone strategies for middle level schools and principals to consider. Middle level schools should provide • • • • • • • • •

rigorous essential learnings to be mastered before high schools, dynamic teacher teams with common planning time, structured planning time to align curriculum across grades and schools, comprehensive advisory or adult advocates, teachers who assess learning needs and tailor instruction to those needs, flexible schedules to accommodate teaching strategies, involvement by everyone in school leadership (e.g., teachers, students, community), open access for all groups (e.g., social, economic, racial), and comprehensive, ongoing professional development. (p. 8)

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To achieve these cornerstone strategies, NASSP also provided 30 specific recommendations (NASSP, 2006). The cornerstone strategies and recommendations were closely aligned with the recommendations presented by NMSA, the National Forum, Turning Points 2000, and others; however, NASSP emphasized the importance of relationships and connections for achieving these ideals. Also, as a professional association focused on school leadership, NASSP stressed the important role of the building principal in achieving these goals.

Moving Forward: Key Principles for Re-Energizing Middle Grades Education For more than a century, educators have had access to key information specifically highlighting the importance of providing a unique educational experience for young adolescents. Both the junior high school model and the middle school model highlighted a need to provide an educational experience different from the elementary and secondary school due to the unique developmental needs of people in this age group (Alexander, 1963; Briggs, 1920; Bunker, 1913, 1916; Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1989; Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, 1918; Eichhorn, 1966; Gruhn & Douglass, 1947; Jackson & Davis, 2000; NMSA, 2010b; Thorndike, 1914). Young adolescents need an educational experience that both challenges their academic development and addresses their social and emotional development, allows opportunities for exploration of various curricula, and fosters a love for lifelong learning. Moving forward, it is essential the educational community embraces this notion and provides high-quality, meaningful educational experiences that celebrate young adolescents and prepare them to be successful citizens. For far too long, too many outside influences and distractions (e.g., emphasis on high-stakes testing, narrowing curriculum for test preparation, budget decisions) have removed the focus from young adolescents in favor of the needs and demands of adults. The following principles are intended to provide a focus as the education community moves forward to reenergize middle grades education and ensure the educational needs of every young adolescent are met.

Foster a Middle Grades Mindset in All Stakeholders Young adolescents experience unique intellectual, physical, emotional, and social changes during this developmental time period that warrants a specialized educational approach. AMLE clearly advocates for specialized preparation that highlights the importance for middle grades educators to value working with young adolescents, understand and appreciate the age group, serve as advocates, and be specifically prepared to work with this age level (NMSA, 2010b). In essence, middle grades educators must have a middle grades mindset and embrace a developmentally responsive educational approach. This means students and their developmental needs must remain the central focus in all decision making as leaders work to address the core tenets of the middle school model (e.g., active, purposeful learning; relevant, integrative, challenging, and exploratory curriculum; multiple learning and teaching approaches; academic and personal development guided by adult advocate NMSA, 2010b). It is critical for every teacher, administrator, and stakeholder connected to making decisions for middle grades schools to reflect a mindset that the goal is to educate the whole child. They have just as much responsibility to address social and emotional learning needs as they have to address academic needs. To accomplish this, all stakeholders (e.g., teachers, administrators, schools boards) should be committed to working with young adolescents and ensuring that all decisions being made are in the best interest of this age group. It is essential for stakeholder dispositions and professional 392

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behaviors to represent this middle grades mindset. Unfortunately, many decisions made in schools are for the convenience of adults and cost-saving measures rather than for the ideal educational outcomes for young adolescents. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for middle grades teachers and administrators to fall into the middle grades by accident. They may have intended to work at the secondary level (grades 9–12), but the job opportunities they found were in the middle grades (grades 6–8). While some teachers adapt and successfully work with the middle grades students, ensuring these individuals are committed to working with young adolescents and are specifically prepared to do so is critically important. Regardless of the pathway to teaching in the middle grades, it is imperative for educators who work with young adolescents to receive the appropriate teacher preparation or professional development in young adolescent development and effective middle grades pedagogy before assuming any job responsibilities. While the fundamentals of effective teaching are consistent across all age groups, meeting the educational needs of the 10 to 15 year-old child is much different than meeting the needs of a 16 to 18 year-old child and demands a specialized approach.

Establish a Clear Middle Grades Identity in the Educational Community Historically, the establishment of public education in the United States has been grounded in elementary and secondary schools. Since the mid-20th century, most children in the United States have begun formal schooling in an elementary school and progressed into the secondary school. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was passed in 1965 and has been reauthorized every five years. In 2015, the legislation was reauthorized under the title the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) (United States Department of Education, n.d.). Though both the junior high school and middle school movements were started to provide a different educational experience than the high school, both have continued to be embedded within the field of secondary education and struggled to establish an identity separate from secondary education. Moreover, in most states teacher licensure for secondary grades was often 6–12, encompassing the majority of the middle grades. There was very little pressure for teacher preparation programs and state licensing agencies to adjust and establish a unique, stand-alone program or license. Everything could continue as already established. As such, this has made it more difficult to break from the secondary mindset and establish a stand-alone middle grades identity. Even today, the majority of teacher preparation programs in the country do not provide any specialized middle grades teacher preparation; rather, they embed it within the secondary grades (Howell, Faulkner, Cook, Miller, & Thompson, 2016). Only about 25% of the teacher preparation programs in the country provide a specialized middle grades course or program. How can teachers be expected to intentionally meet the developmental needs of young adolescents if they are not specifically prepared to do so? To help the middle grades establish a stand-alone identity, the education community should establish a specific grade band structure (e.g., elementary, K–4; middle, 5–8; and secondary 9–12), ensure teacher licensure matches the grade bands, and provide teachers who are specifically prepared to work with each age group.

Acknowledge Middle Grades Education Is Not a One-Size-Fits-All Model Both the junior high school and middle school models offered important approaches to educating the young adolescents. Each highlighted the importance of educating the whole child and embracing an educational experience that challenged students academically, but also gave more emphasis on their social and emotional development to help them be successful in life. Overall, both models had a positive impact on the education of young adolescents, but each model 393

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struggled to be embraced and effectively implemented in schools throughout the country. Schools often struggled with implementing a specific structure of the model (e.g., teaming, advisory, common planning time) and would dismiss the model and return to the standard practice already in place. Further, most teacher preparation programs did not tailor their programs to address the fact that many teachers and administrators did not have an adequate understanding of effective middle grades pedagogy because they were prepared to work in an elementary or secondary setting. Naturally, this made it difficult to effectively implement and maintain the recommended structures of the middle school model. Moving forward, it is essential for all middle level stakeholders to understand that educating young adolescents is not a one-size-fits-all model; the specific outcomes and experiences offered to young adolescents are more important than the various structures or programs used to achieve those outcomes. As such, it is critical all middle grades educators and stakeholders possess a deep understanding of the tenets of the middle school model and are accountable for delivering those experiences. For example, the concern is not whether a school has a formal advisory program, but rather what the school is doing to ensure that every child has an adult advocate and their social and emotional learning needs are also being met. Far too often, the middle school model is simply considered to be a collection of organizational structures (e.g., interdisciplinary teaming, common planning time, advisory programs) that middle schools should have in place. In reality, schools need to view these organizational structures as possible approaches to meeting student needs and providing a developmentally responsive educational experience. If a specific approach does not effectively work for a particular school, then the school needs to explore a different approach while remaining focused on the specific tenet or outcome it is trying to achieve.

Embrace, Celebrate, and Address the Diversity Present in Schools Public schools in the United States are becoming more culturally, linguistically, and ethnically diverse than ever before. For the first time in U.S. history, the majority of students enrolled in public schools are now students of color (Maxwell, 2014); almost 7 million students, or 13% of all public school students, receive special education services (National Center for Education Statistics, 2018); and the majority of K–12 public school students (51%) come from low-income families (Layton, 2015). This changing student population presents more individualized learning needs, larger numbers of students living in poverty, increases in non-English speaking students, and tremendous variety in culture and customs. As such, schools must be preparing students to function in an ever-changing world. Unfortunately, addressing the diverse demographics of the middle grades student population has largely been ignored by both the junior high and the middle school movements (Beane, 2005). As we move forward, it is critical that all middle level educators, administrators, and teacher educators develop a repertoire of culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies that acknowledge differences and celebrate an expanding world view of culture and society (ed. note: see, e.g., Kulow & Caskey; Stormer, Brown, & Correll; and Williams & Long in this volume). This necessary and critical focus will challenge the current tenets of middle level education whose roots are “almost entirely in data gathered from young adolescents who were white and lived in affluent suburban communities” (Beane, 2005, p. xiv; Gay, 1994) and situate the education of young adolescents within the sociohistorical and sociopolitical contexts of schooling (Brown, 2005).

Learn from the Successes of the Past and Implement Reform for the Future Examining the history of the education of young adolescents reveals it has long been evident that children entering early adolescence would benefit from a specialized educational approach that 394

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addresses academic as well as social and emotional learning needs (Briggs, 1920; Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1989; Eichhorn, 1966; Gruhn & Douglass, 1947; Jackson & Davis, 2000; NMSA, 1982). Since the late 1800s, advocates for young adolescent education have called for an educational experience that emphasizes all aspects of development, a curriculum that allows students to explore a variety of disciplines while establishing a solid foundation of basic skills, and the creation of a learning community where children can become responsible citizens in a safe and supportive learning environment. It is also evident that both the junior high school approach (1909–1965) and the middle school model (1965–2018) did not have complete success in implementing the models in schools and ensuring all stakeholders had the appropriate understanding and preparation to work with this age group. Too much inconsistency in implementation and variability in teacher preparation and practice exist to know how effective either school model truly could have been. However, the beauty of where we are now is that we have a solid foundation to build on to ensure all middle grades educators and stakeholders speak with a common voice. We must provide a developmentally responsive educational experience that highlights the academic, social, and emotional development for every young adolescent in this country. As we move forward, it is important we work with more urgency to ensure the middle grades mindset is present in all middle grades teachers, administrators, and schools. We must celebrate the progress we have made, and we can no longer hide behind the fact that this is a relatively new concept. We have known for more than a hundred years how to best educate this age group. We have just failed to deliver. It is time to stop hiding behind logistical excuses, limited budgets, and bureaucratic minutia. This is what matters for young adolescents!

References Alexander, W. (1963). The junior high school: A changing view. Presentation at the Tenth annual conference for school administrators. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Alexander, W., Williams, E., Compton, M., Hines, V., & Prescott, D. (1968). The emergent middle school. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston. Beane, J. A. (2005). Foreword. In E. R. Brown & K. J. Saltman (Eds.), The critical middle school reader (pp. xi– xv). New York, NY: Routledge. Briggs, T. H. (1920). The junior high school. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Brown, E. (2005). Introduction. In E. R. Brown & K. J. Saltman (Eds.), The critical middle school reader (pp. 1– 13). New York, NY: Routledge. Bunker, F. F. (1913). The functional reorganization of the American public school system. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). New York, NY: New York University. Bunker, F. F. (1916). Reorganization of the public school system. (Bulletin No. 8). Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development. (1989). Turning points: Preparing American youth for the 21st century: The report of the task force on education of young adolescents. Washington, DC: Author. Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education. (1918). Cardinal principles of secondary education. Bulletin 1918, No. 35. Washington, DC: U. S. Department of Interior, Bureau of Education. DeVita, J., Pumerantz, P., & Wilklow, L. (1970). The effective middle school. New York, NY: Parker Publishing Company. Eichhorn, D. H. (1966). The middle school. New York, NY: The Center for Applied Research in Education. Eliot, C. W. (1869, February). The new education. The Atlantic Monthly, XXIII. Eliot, C. W. (1886). Public school problems. Cleveland, OH: Plain Dealer Publishing Company. Gatewood, T., & Dilg, C. (1975). The middle school we need: A report from the ASCD working group on the emerging adolescent. Washington, DC: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Gay, G. (1994). Coming of age ethnically: Teaching young adolescents of color. Theory Into Practice, 33(3), 149–155. Gruhn, W. T., & Douglass, H. R. (1947). The modern junior high school. New York, NY: The Ronald Press Company.

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Howell, P., Faulkner, S., Cook, C., Miller, N., & Thompson, N. (2016). Specialized preparation for middle level teachers: A national review of teacher preparation programs. RMLE Online, 39(1), 1–12. doi:10.1080/ 19404476.2015.1115322. Jackson, A., & Davis, G. (2000). Turning points 2000: Educating adolescents in the 21st century. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Layton, L. (2015, January 16). Majority of U.S. public school students are in poverty. The Washington Post. Retrieved from www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/majority-of-us-public-school-students-are-inpoverty/2015/01/15/df7171d0-9ce9-11e4-a7ee-526210d665b4_story.html?utm_term=.eba4dbdcbe46 Lounsbury, J. (1978). A curriculum for the middle school years. New York, NY: Harper Collins. Maxwell, L. (2014). U.S. school enrollment hits majority-minority milestone. Education Week, 34(1), 1, 12, 14–15. National Association of Secondary School Principals. (2006). Breaking ranks in the middle: Strategies for leading middle level reform. Reston, VA: Author. National Center for Education Statistics. (2018). Children and youth with disabilities. Retrieved from https:// nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cgg.asp National Education Association. (1894). Report of the Committee of Ten on secondary school studies with the reports of the conferences arranged by the committee. New York, NY: American Book Company. National Education Association. (1895). Report of the Committee of Fifteen on elementary education with the report of the subcommittees: On the training of teachers; On the correlation of studies in elementary education; On the organization of city school systems. New York, NY: American Book Company. National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform. 2018. Schools to watch: About schools to watch. Savoy, IL: Author. Retrieved from www.middlegradesforum.org/schools-to-watch National Middle School Association. (1982). This we believe. Columbus, OH: Author. National Middle School Association. (1992). This we believe. Columbus, OH: Author. National Middle School Association. (1995). This we believe: Developmentally responsive middle level schools. Columbus, OH: Author. National Middle School Association. (2003a). Research and resources in support of This We Believe. Westerville, OH: Author. National Middle School Association. (2003b). This we believe: Successful schools for young adolescents. Westerville, OH: Author. National Middle School Association. (2010a). Research and resources in support of This We Believe. Westerville, OH: Author. National Middle School Association. (2010b). This we believe: Keys to educating young adolescents. Westerville, OH: Author. Thorndike, E. L. (1914). Mental work and fatigue and individual differences and their causes, Educational Psychology (vol. III). New York, NY: Teachers College, Columbia University. Toepfer, C. (1973). No greater potential: The emerging adolescent learner. Middle School Journal, 4(1), 3–6. United States Department of Education. (n.d.). Every Student Succeeds Act. Retrieved from www.ed.gov/essa? src=ft Vars, G. (1969). Common learnings: Core and interdisciplinary team approaches. Scranton, PA: International Textbook.

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29 MATURATION OF SCHOLARSHIP IN MIDDLE LEVEL EDUCATION David C. Virtue

During the last four decades, researchers, policy makers, and practitioners have devoted focused attention to the challenges, issues, and practices associated with educating young adolescents. Professional organizations and learned societies have organized conferences and created journals, book series, and websites as vehicles for the production and dissemination of knowledge in the field. By the time the Carnegie Corporation of New York released Turning Points: Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century in 1989, National Middle School Association (NMSA) had published more than 100 research studies and organized a series of research seminars at its annual conference (Strahan, 1989), and work accelerated in the decade that followed. In 1993, McIver and Epstein observed that middle grades research was “not yet mature” but “no longer a child” (MacIver & Epstein, 1993, p. 519). Now, a generation later, where is middle level education research in its maturation?

A Maturing Field Middle level education as a field of study has entered adolescence. Though the knowledge base has grown considerably over the past four decades, some questions remain unasked or underexamined. As middle level education scholarship matures, the field must, for example, define its own identity and wrestle with the existential question: What is the field of middle level education? Is a particular research study an example of middle level education research simply because it occurred in a sixth grade classroom, or because it involved 13-year-old students? How have entities engaged in the generation and dissemination of knowledge about middle level education (e.g., Adolescent Success, Association for Middle Level Education [AMLE, formerly NMSA], Middle Level Education Research Special Interest Group [MLER SIG]) defined middle level education research and set parameters on the phenomena it investigates? As middle level researchers define their collective identity as a community of scholars, they must also critically examine the ways in which researchers in the field frame problems from various perspectives. These perspectives include: • •

Developmentalist perspectives: Middle level education research as the study of school programs for young adolescent students. Institutional-organizational perspectives: Middle level education research as the study of middle grades school programs that bridge primary and secondary education. 397

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Critical perspectives: Middle level education research as the study of inequity, injustice, and social control in school settings for young people. Philosophical Perspectives: Middle level education research as the study of school programs grounded in progressive education philosophy.

Each of these perspectives, or scholarly traditions, in the field carries with it certain paradigmatic assumptions that inform the research enterprise. As the field matures, middle level scholars must ask critical, self-reflective questions: What can we know about middle level education? What are the underlying assumptions upon which scholars have based their research? How have the assumptions changed over time or varied across researchers at a specific point in time? How have theory; folklore and tradition; and tacit, practitioner knowledge informed middle level education research? Whose knowledge is valued in middle level education research? Middle level education research is poised to grow in the decades to come in ways that will improve educational experiences and outcomes for people during early adolescence. The field has a rich body of work upon which to build; a community of committed, passionate, knowledgeable scholars and practitioners; a network of professional organizations at international, regional, and local levels; and academic journals and book series with rigorous review processes and wide readerships. Two ideas that may help move the field forward are (a) a grassroots epistemology for middle level education that grows knowledge from the classroom out, and (b) a translational approach to research that bridges basic science and educational practice.

A Grassroots Epistemology for Middle Level Education There is some consensus in the field about the big areas of inquiry that command the attention of researchers and the specific questions that scholars should ask (Mertens et al., 2016). The Middle Level Education Research Special Interest Group (MLER SIG) drafted a research agenda with research questions and rationales and conducted reviews of literature focused on eight key areas: • • • • • • • •

Developmental aspects of young adolescents. Cultural responsiveness in the middle grades. Special populations in middle level classrooms. Educator development. The state of curriculum in the middle grades. Social and emotional learning in the middle grades. Digital technologies in the middle grades. Middle grades schools and structures. (Mertens & Caskey, 2018, pp. vii–viii)

The agenda offers a solid starting point for moving the field forward, but it does not define a methodology or overall strategy for pursuing the answers to the questions it raised. In Literature Reviews in Support of the Middle Level Education Research Agenda, Caskey (2018) identified middle grades teachers and principals as actors who “hold unique positions in middle grades schools” and “have the potential to dive deeply into [their] own practice and/or collaborate with [their] colleagues” (p. 237). Middle grades classrooms and other educational settings serve as the laboratories in which new knowledge about educational practice is constructed, enacted, and reflected upon daily. Teachers test new teaching ideas and interventions, or, more often, they modify ideas they borrow and customize them to the unique conditions of their classrooms. Principals and counselors experiment with schedule configurations, advising structures, and organizational arrangements. Change is a constant in middle level schools, and the daily practice of middle grades education 398

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may best be characterized as a complex, problem-solving activity. How can these professional problem solvers at the grassroots level contribute to advancing knowledge in middle level education? What might a “grassroots epistemology” for middle level education look like—an iterative program of discovery, dissemination, and praxis that begins with practitioners in middle grades schools? Scholarship in middle level education has a rich tradition of valuing practitioner perspectives and voices (e.g., Carpenter et al., 2017; Caskey, 2005). Baker, Dresden, Nylin, and Thompson, in this volume, describe how preservice teachers, school personnel, university faculty, and doctoral students construct knowledge together—“research done for and with the school rather than to the school”— within the context of a professional development school. The AMLE Research Advisory Committee has sponsored sessions featuring teacher research at the annual conference (Wenzel, Pugalee, Cline, Cline, & Heikila, 2018). Pendergast and Main (2018) coordinated a nationwide action research project in which middle years teacher from schools throughout Australia conducted inquiry related to the theme “student well-being.” These are just a few examples of ways practitioner research is supported and valued in middle level education, but the question remains: How can the field leverage these grassroots inquiries and research activities in a systematic way to advance knowledge? One approach might be to use the principles of improvement science and a networked improvement community (NIC) concept developed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Bryk, Gomez, Grunow, & LeMahieu, 2015). The NIC model has been used successfully in other areas of education, such as mathematics teacher education. In 2012, the Association of Public and LandGrant Universities created the Mathematics Teacher Education Partnership (MTEP) to address the shortage of well-prepared mathematics teachers in the United States. Using the NIC model, the MTEP initiative has grown to a national consortium of more than 90 universities and more than 100 school systems. Martin and Gobstein (2015) identified four defining characteristics of NICS: • • • •

Focused on a specific aim, Guided by a deep understanding of the problem and the system that produces it, Disciplined by the rigor of improvement science, and Networked to accelerate the development, testing, and refinement of interventions and their effective integration into varied educational contexts. (pp. 482–483)

The MLER SIG research agenda could serve as a framework for organizing networks and providing focus (Mertens et al., 2016), and the literature reviews that emerged from the research agenda project could help provide deep understanding of the problems and systems in which they are embedded (Mertens & Caskey, 2018). Networks of practitioner-researchers, guided by the methods of improvement science, could engage in inquiry that would be deeply contextualized, but could be connected across contexts through different nodes on the network. A networked approach, grounded in a grassroots epistemology, may be a way to leverage inherent strengths and characteristics of the field to advance knowledge. Howard Johnston captured the essence of grassroots epistemology in middle level education in his foreword to Literature Reviews in Support of the Middle Level Education Research Agenda (Mertens & Caskey, 2018): In no other educational field has the relationship between practitioners and researchers been so close and mutually respectful. Practitioners raise questions about what they see, and researchers help investigate these questions and put accurate, useful, and feasible results in the hands of those who do the real work of schooling in America—teachers, counselors, and administrators. The field’s publications, conferences, collegial relationships, and even deep professional friendships serve to span what in many other areas is a gulf between researchers and practitioners. In this world, it is a shared enterprise. As 399

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a result, middle level researchers are “activist-scholars;” they can be certain that someone will turn their scholarship into real, situated action. In addition, school-based professionals are “practitioner-scholars,” committed to creating research-based best practices for young adolescent learners. It is in this way that research in human endeavor is supposed to work. (Johnston, 2018, pp. ix–x) Indeed it is.

A Translational Research Approach Kiefer and Ellerbrock, in this volume, endorsed a suite of applied approaches to research—action research and community-based participatory research, applied developmental science, improvement science, and translational research. Translational research, which is common in medical and health sciences, takes discoveries from basic science, develops and tests therapies or treatments based on those discoveries, and then translates those treatments into clinical practice (i.e., “bench to bedside”). According to Mitchell (2016), translational research “attempts to bridge the gap between basic research and the world of practice” (p. 3). In the learning sciences arena, Brabeck (2008) characterized the gap in this way: [M]ost basic research on learning is being conducted by neuroscientists who are located in medical schools, and by cognitive- and learning-science faculty members who reside in colleges of arts and sciences. Most of these scientists are ignorant of the work of their applied-research colleagues in the departments and schools of education. Those applied colleagues, in turn, … too often regard with disdain the teacher education professors who work with aspiring teachers. Of course, many of the teacher education faculty members are epistemologically at odds with the researchers, basic or applied, who conduct empirical, quantitative studies. And to complete the circle that maintains the stalemate, those who do not believe that research findings based on inferential statistics have any relevance for children, youths, and aspiring teachers will only encounter impatience and dismissal from empirical researchers. (pp. 1–2) Brabeck called upon funding agencies, academic leaders, and the general public to shift resources in educational research toward collaborative, large-scale programs that produce usable knowledge for practitioners, mirroring the translational research that occurs in the health sciences. Mitchell (2016) summarized the key activities of translational research in the following way: • • • • •

Review existing research; Disseminate findings to make them accessible; Engage with the wider community; Collaborate in teams of researchers and practitioners to develop and trial interventions; and Measure impact. (p. 6)

“The common element of all translational research,” Mitchell (2016) observed, “is translation” (p. 6). What might a translational research agenda for middle level education look like? It would certainly involve close collaboration and planning with schools, institutes, and research centers in health, human sciences, and perhaps social sciences. The collaborative and interdisciplinary aspects of translational research are the hallmarks of middle level education. Research that informs, or has the potential to 400

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inform, policies, programs, and practices in middle level education occurs in many fields and communities of inquiry—education, psychology, sociology, medicine, to name a few. In this volume, for example, Daniels offers an understanding of young adolescent learners and their classroom environments informed by knowledge at the intersection of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and pedagogical science. Kiefer and Ellerbrock use knowledge from cognitive and developmental psychology to conceptualize an adolescent-centered community of care framework for middle level schools. These contributions reflect the theoretical and methodological eclecticism that is a characteristic of middle level education scholarship, and this eclecticism is a defining strength of the field. As Kleine, Previts, and Mizelle observed, middle level scholars tend to seek integration and to harmonize diverse ideas and viewpoints, and through this process they help theory and research make sense to practitioners and policymakers, thereby narrowing the “clinical lab to classroom gap” (Brabeck, 2008, p. 1).

Conclusion Middle level education scholarship is maturing at a deliberate pace. To advance from here, the field must adopt a Janus-faced posture and at once look inward, growing knowledge systematically from the grassroots, and outward, joining scientists, scholars, and practitioners in the translation of discoveries “from concept to classroom” (Mitchell, 2016).

References Brabeck, M. (2008). Why we need ‘translational’ research: Putting clinical findings to work in classrooms. Education Week, 27(38), 28, 36. Bryk, A. S., Gomez, L. M., Grunow, A., & LeMahieu, P. G. (2015). Learning to improve: How America’s schools can get better at getting better. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. Carnegie Corporation of New York. (1989). Turning points: Educating American youth for the 21st century. New York, NY: Author. Carpenter, J., Lutz, A., Samek, L., Caskey, M. M., Greene, W. L., & Musser, M. (Eds.). (2017). Imaging a place. Stories from middle grades educators. Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Caskey, M. (Ed.). (2005). Making a difference. Action research in middle level education. Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Caskey, M. M. (2018). Next steps: Discussion and recommendations. In S. B. Mertens & M. M. Caskey (Eds.), Literature reviews in support of the Middle Level Education Research Agenda (pp. 231–241). Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Gray, D. L., Hope, E. C., & Matthews, J. S. (2018). Black and belonging at school: A case for interpersonal, instructional, and institutional opportunity structures. Educational Psychologist, 53(2), 97–113. Johnston, J. H. (2018). Foreword. In S. B. Mertens & M. M. Caskey (Eds.), Literature reviews in support of the middle level education research agenda (pp. ix–x). Charlotte, NC: Information Age. MacIver, D., & Epstein, J. L. (1993). Middle grades research: Not yet mature, no longer a child. The Elementary School Journal, 93, 519–533. Martin, W. G., & Gobstein, H. (2015). Generating a networked improvement community to improve secondary mathematics teacher preparation: Network leadership, organization, and operation. Journal of Teacher Education, 66(5), 482–493. Mertens, S. B., Caskey, M. M., Bishop, P., Flowers, N., Strahan, D., Andrews, G., & Daniel, L. (Eds.). (2016). The MLER SIG research agenda. Retrieved from http://mlersig.net/mler-sig-research-agendaproject/ Mertens, S. B., & Caskey, M. M. (2018). Literature reviews in support of the Middle Level Education Research Agenda. Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Mitchell, P. (2016). From concept to classroom: What is translational research? Retrieved from https:// research.acer.edu.au/professional_dev/9 Pendergast, D., & Main, K. (2018). Action research project. Retrieved from www.adolescentsuccess.org.au/ ARP2018 Strahan, D. B. (1989). Preface. Middle School Research Selected Studies, 14(1), iv. doi:10.1080/ 08851700.1989.11670295 Wenzel, A., Pugalee, D., Cline, C., Cline, J., & Heikila, T. (2018). Teachers as researchers. In Presentation at the annual meeting of the Association for Middle Level Education. Orlando, FL.

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academic excellence 15, 19–21, 24-26, 195; see also National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform accountability systems 357–59; and ESSA 360; recommendations for design 360–61; research recommendations 363–64; and school quality 361-63; in teacher preparation 144; in the United States 360 active learning: in American Samoa 76; in Hawai‘i 75; and neuroscience 98–99; in Republic of the Marshall Islands 77 Adolescent Success 309, 321, 397; see also Middle Years of Schooling Association advocacy 388; student 243; teacher (for student) 167, 325, 373 Agar, M. 294–96; see also The Professional Stranger Alexander, W. 42, 166, 388 American Samoa: culture and community 80–81; education in 68–69; geography and history 65, 66; middle grades curriculum 76–77; nurturing students 72–73 assessment (student performance) 187, 188, 189, 210–11, 214, 361; and accountability 361–62; authentic 75, 76, 77, 324; dispositions and 154–56; and ESSA 362–364; in Norway 337; summative 32; varied 360, 390 assets-based teaching 59, 250–51; defined 253–58, implications of 266–67; model of 258–65 Australia, middle years reform in: capacity building 311–14; challenges to 308–9; history 305–7 Bakhtin, M. 13, 18, 25 Beane, J. A. 17, 21, 41, 76, 145, 241, 262, 319, 322, 324, 394 Black Lives Matter 19, 27 boys (in school): disengagement 132–33; history of 131-132; motivation 172; risk taking 126; same-

sex grouping 75; school engagement 134–35; and social power 132–33; supporting 135–37 Briggs, T. H. 16, 42, 385–86, 392, 394 caring 50–59, 61, 391; community 50–51, 167–69, 256, 264; culturally relevant 50–54, 57, 243, 245; culturally responsive 53–54, 57, 59; culturally sustaining 53–54; disposition of 148–49, 230; as a humanizing process 54–57; implications of 173–74; and relationships 53–54, 56, 96, 167, 372–73, 375; and student wellbeing 307 Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development 13, 14, 42, 67, 116, 251, 319, 390, 392, 394 Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching 41, 43, 399 Chadbourne, R. 305, 306, 308, 313–14, 324 citizenship education 343–51, 54; in Turkey, history of 345–51 cognition 97, 106–7, 183, 254; and metacognition 104; and multitasking 123; and schema 107 cognitive apprenticeship 103–4 cognitive dimension 106, 111 cognitive flexibility 108 Committee of Ten 384 Common Core State Standards (CCSS), in mathematics 68, 204, 252, 261, 337 community of care 163–64; elements of 165; peer relationships 169–70; rationale for 164–65; research implications 172–73; teacher characteristics and instruction in 167–69; teachers’ role 170 community resources 14, 84, 257, 387 complexity theory 283–84, 287; and educator preparation 290 continuing professional development (CPD) defined 220, 221–22; need for 220; research about 230–32

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creativity 275, 287, 310; defined 208; in music education 210; and music performance 201–11; and play 198, 200; and technology use 121 Csikszentmihalyi, M. 7, 95, 185, 196, 208, 323 cultural wealth 54, 58–60, 257, 261, 263; see also community resources culturally relevant caring 5, 50, 52 culturally relevant teaching 53–54, 240, 267 culturally responsive teaching 53, 59, 240, 267; and critical consciousness 243–44; and middle level school environments 243–44; research and 245–46 curriculum, and dehumanization, indigenous perspectives 5, 21, 51–53, 57–58; Australia 324; South Pacific 65, 81, 83 Davis, G. A. see Turning Points 2000 Deci, E. see self-determination theory decolonizing pedagogy 51–54, 57–58 dehumanizing practices 17, 51, 53–56, 58 Delpit, L. 53, 243 democracy and democratic education 211, 241, 252, 322, 324, 334, 344, 349, 351, 353, 387, 391; signature pedagogy 17, 45–49, 52; teacher dispositions 145, 148–49 developmental responsiveness 15–16, 22–23, 25, 144, 157, 195 developmentalist perspective 16, 25, 397; critique 26–27; see also developmental responsiveness Dewey, J. 16–17, 44–45 dialogic theory see Bakhtin, M. dispositions 6, 44, 46, 48; assessing 149–51, 154–57; culturally relevant 239–41, 244–45; defined 47; Pedagogy of Dispositions Observation Form 154–57; responsive and technical see Dispositions in Action; student 32, 38, 261–62, 323 Dispositions in Action (DIA) 6, 144–151 Dweck, C. S. 6–7, 148–49, 182, 185, 323 Eccles, J. S. 7, 162–66, 169, 171–72, 180, 185, 255, 274, 322–24; see also stage-environment fit theory educator preparation 3, 7, 48, 150; accreditation 240; assessments of 149–51, and clinically-intensive settings 282–89, 290–91; music education 212; Norway 331, 333, 339; Turkey 351–53 Eichhorn, D. H. 388–89, 392, 394 Eliot, C. W. 14, 384 engagement (student): and at-risk students 320–22, in Australian schools 318–20; see also motivation (student) English education in Norway 332–23 ethnography 293; criticality and power 294–95; ethics 295; and marginalized students 300; in middle grades settings 296–99 Eurocentrism 27, 52 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) 7, 117, 358–64

Freire, P. 17–18, 27, 58, 82, 294, 322 funds of knowledge 6, 60, 243, 258, 268n4; see also community resources Gay, G. 6, 52–53, 57, 59, 61, 239–45, 267, 394 George, P. 17, 166 Hall, G. S. 16, 116 Hargreaves 4, 311–12, 323–24, 339 Hattie, J. 140, 220, 221, 223, 323 Hawai‘i: culture and community 78–80; education in 67–68; geography and history 65; middle grades curriculum 74–76; nurturing students 70–71 homelessness 7, 65; defined 368–69; and education 373–74; literature review 371–73; and middle grades students 374–77 humanities-forward education reform in Norway 7, 334–37, 340 humanizing practices and pedagogies 51–58, 367, 377 i-MARSI 105–6, 112 International Baccalaureate see Middle Years Programme Jackson, A. W. see Turning Points 2000 Junior high schools 16, 42, 297, 385–89, 392–95 Ladson-Billings, G. 6, 27, 53–54, 59, 239–44, 246, 267 learning communities 5, 22, 25, 30, 321; professional 328, 338 Lesko, N. 13–14, 16, 22 Lipsitz, J. 15–16, 116, 251–52, 254 Lounsbury, J. H. 13–14, 16–17, 42, 144, 388–89 mathematics education programming 251–53; assets-based model 258–63; middle grades recommendations 252; and play 204; research recommendations 266; rural 275 McKinney-Vento Homeless Education Assistance Improvements Act 367, 369 metacognition 5, 38, 103, 114, 138, 145; defined 104; effects of technology 125; skills and strategies 104–13; see also cognition Middle Grade School State Policy Initiative (MGSSPI) 3, 14, 390 Middle Level Education Research Special Interest Group Research Agenda 4, 100, 266, 282, 398–400 middle school movement 16, 42, 91, 145, 388–92 Middle Years of Schooling Association (MYSA, now Adolescent Success) 181, 306, 309–10, 313 Middle Years Programme (International Baccalaureate) 31–32; adoption of 34–36; alignment with This We Believe 40; in Australia 32, 37–38; curriculum 33–34; history of 32–33; outcomes and perceptions 36–38 Midgley, C. see stage-environment fit theory

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Mizell, H. 15 motivation (student) 6, 94, 103, 109, 112, 115, 180, 243, 257, 274, 318, 322–23, 335, 372, 375; classroom management 155, 183; and development 161–62; enhancing 76; influences 97; intrinsic 72, 101; and place-based education 274–76; and play 200, 208–10; research 171–73; self-regulation 185–87, 189; teachers and 170–71; theories of 162–63 music education in the middle grades 215; informal 211–12; non-traditional 212–14 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 68, 105, 201 National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) 250, 252–54, 261, 263–64, 266–67 National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform 3, 5, 15–16, 18, 250, 254, 391; Schools to Watch 21, 98, 195, 251; vision statement 15, 18–19, 23–26, 30 National Middle Schooling Project 181, 306, 320, 324 neuroscience 5, 91–94, 98, 401; active learning 98–99; research recommendations 100–1; and teaching strategies 99–100 No Child Left Behind Act 15, 17, 68, 358, 369 Noddings, N. 52, 54, 166–68 parent involvement 23, 326 Piaget, J. 252, 323 place-based education 6, 64, 67, 271–73; framework for middle level career development 276–77; research basis 273–76 play, adolescent 195–96; cognitive development 199–200; in English language arts 203–4; in mathematics 204; and physical development 196–97; in science 202–03; in social studies 200–2; socio-emotional development 197–99 The Professional Stranger 294 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 121, 332 progressivism 16–21, 23–27, 348, 398; in American Samoa 73 psychology 5–6, 91–92, 127, 298, 344, 349, 401; and active learning 98; and pedagogy 94–95, 99; research recommendations 99–101 Republic of the Marshall Islands: culture and community 81–82; education in 67–68; geography and history 69–70; middle grades curriculum 77–78; nurturing students 73–74 Ryan, R. see self-determination theory Schools to Watch see National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform

self-determination theory 95–96, 162–63 self-regulated learning (SRL) 179; assessment principle 187; and behavior management 183; capabilities of life principle 186; design principle 184; diversity principle 186; engagement principle 184–85 Shulman, L. S. 41, 43–48; apprenticeship model 44–45 signature pedagogy: background and history 41–45; defined 43–45; and middle level education 45–46 signifying practices (in middle schooling) 166, 306, 324–25 sleep and technology use 120–22, 125–26, 128 social equity 3, 15, 19, 24–27, 251–52, 391 social justice 13, 16, 18–19, 23, 27, 171, 241, 243, 253, 261, 274, 276, 320, 322, 374–75 Spindler, G. 296, 298 Spindler, L. 296, 298 stage-environment fit theory 162, 274, 323–24 standardized testing 67, 245, 357; and accountability systems 357–59; and ESSA 360–63 stress 119, 274, 321, 369; management of 96–98, 137, 199; technology use and 123, 126–28; testing and 359 teacher autonomy in Norway 337–38 technology: access 82; effects of 122–28; and learning 5, 105–8; student perceptions 99; use of 77, 83, 111–12, 117, 143–44 This We Believe (position paper for the Association for Middle Level Education [formerly National Middle School Association]) 41, 45, 52, 64, 70, 74, 78, 84, 145, 148, 195, 207, 213, 252, 285, 306, 337, 360, 367, 375–76, 388–90; alignment with IB Middle Years Programme 31, 35, 40 transitions (school) 285–86, 324–25, 386 Turkey, citizenship education: developments 353–54; educator preparation for 351–53; history 345–51 Turning Points 2000 14, 20, 252, 375–76, 390–91 Turning Points: Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century (Carnegie Corporation report) see Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) 194 Vars, G. F. 17, 145, 388–89 young adolescent development: cognitive growth 119–20; developmental characteristics 117–21, 180–81; self-esteem 118; socioemotional changes 117; see also engagement (student) and motivation (student)

404