Page 13 - Priorities #22 2003-April

that each student gets the target skill of the lesson, you have to be sure you cover what the other teachers in the Middle School will expect. For example, when I teach sixth grade English, I know what the seventh grade English teacher expects. Following on that, we know as a Middle School what the High School expects.
What precipitated this interest in differentiated learning?
M—Tim (Molak, headmaster) asked the Middle School faculty two years ago to do a self-study. It involved a lot of things, but one outcome is that teachers wanted to look at contemporary teaching methods to maximize learning among a group of students who are at very different places developmentally. Where students are developmentally makes a big difference in how they learnbest. So,whenShawnaintroduced differentiated learning this spring, there was a reaction of "Hey, this is great."
Middle school has received a lot of attention in the past few years. Are you making use of any educational models?
S—We’ve looked in the Middle School guides— (the Carnegie Commissions’s) Turning Point 2000 and the National Middle School Association reports, which address these same issues. I have books by Mel Lavine and Robert MacKenzie in my office. We’ve used Robert McKenzie’s classroom management strategies; we use these in an effort to promote learning through logical consequences.
We are building our own program. Ours won’t look like anyone else’s. We are always re-evaluating our programs. Every year, we will get better and be more effective.
A special class was created last fall for these students, who wanted to create and perform their own rock music. Opportunities to occasionally explore interests without comparison and competition help young teens define the older person they wish to become.
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Sixth grade teachers use class meeting time to build a sense of community. It is designed to be a time when students can feel comfortable bringing up issues they want to clarify or talk about.
Middle School is a natural time for young teens to develop academic problem-solving and collaborative skills.