Ashley Rogers - AEDU 335 Teaching in the Middle Grades

One of the biggest takeaways from this week's reading both in AMLE and from the Five Key Responsibilities online article, is the importance of working as a principle while engaging your teachers as a team.  AMLE discusses the importance of a shared vision, and from personal experience, this is absolutely huge in corporate America.  Without bringing people together to create a vision where everyone has an opportunity to participate in creating that vision, it can not be successful.  People need to know they are a part of something in order for them to buy in.  If they, in this case, teachers, participate in building a mission/vision statement for a school, then they feel their opinions are valued, their voices are heard, and they are a true part of a team, and therefore more willing to work together and support one another, rather than making it a competition against one another.  The best meetings I've ever run during my time at Kellogg's have been those that...

My favorite part of this week's reading was the "In their own words" section of the online article, "Middle School - Are they ready to move up?"  I thought the teacher advice was great, but I really enjoyed reading the advice directly from the students.  It put into perspective their needs and wants for their teachers, and I found a few pieces of advice in particularly touching.  The one piece of advice that really stood out to me, and will probably stick with me for awhile, was: "I would really, really like it if my teacher would call home for a good thing that I do. My dad never seems to realize any good thing that I do; it’s like he’s blind. So if my teacher, instead of calling home whenever I do a bad thing, she would sometimes call home and let my dad know that I actually try hard, then I would do better.” -- Amelia I do believe this could become a huge undertaking - trying to call every parent expressing something really positive or good about ...

The readings for week 1 provided an introduction to the history of middle school and how it was developed.  It also expressed the importance of middle school education, as well as major goals for this grade level of students. Students at this age are experience a great amount of physical and cognitive development.  According to the textbook, This We Believe, "Young people undergo more rapid and profound personal changes between ages 10 and 15 than at any other time in their lives" (AMLE, 2010, p.5).  Infants also go through an extensive amount of change at this time, but they are not aware of themselves.  Within middle school, there's a huge amount of variability among students of the same gender and ages.  Everyone is developing at a different pace, some much sooner than others.  The first time I ever really witnessed this myself as an adult, was when I recently observed at a high school earlier this year.  I visited a freshman intro to business ...