Is It Time to Remake Middle School?
February 11, 2019
By: Linda Jacobson
Source: Education Dive
Between ensuring more young children have school readiness skills and raising high school graduation rates, the middle school years are often overlooked in the push to improve education policy and practices.
“Middle-level students are generally in the early stage of puberty and this affects the development of their brain, which in turn affects how they learn and how they process the world around them,” Winsome Waite, the vice president of practice at the Alliance for Excellent Education — who also leads the organization’s Science of Adolescent Learning work — wrote in an email. “Their curiosity and their natural tendency to want to take risks and seek peer attention and rewards should be viewed by the adults in their world as a great time of opportunity to connect and teach with a positive lens about this time of development.”