Signs were posted one morning in the corners of math teacher Carey Goldenberg’s classroom at Chicago’s Thurgood Marshall Middle School.
“Agree,” “Strongly Agree,” “Disagree” and “Strongly Disagree,” the signs read.
“We’re going to do an activity I think you’ll find interesting,” Goldenberg told the 18 pupils in his 7th-grade advisory class. Next, Goldenberg read a statement, and the pupils walked to the corner with the words that described their feelings.
“It’s more important to have fun and be popular than to get good grades,” Goldenberg said.
Ten pupils slowly walked to the Strongly Disagree corner and eight moved to the Disagree corner. Goldenberg prodded them to briefly talk about their choices.
“You have to get an education to get somewhere in life,” one boy in the Disagree group said.
Other statements involved peer pressure to smoke, fear of violence in pupils’ communities and their feelings about school.
When Goldenberg read, “I feel I have someone I can talk to at Thurgood Marshall Middle School,” all of the pupils moved to the Agree or Strongly Agree corners.
Marshall, on Chicago’s Northwest Side, is a middle school in more than just name. One tenet of the middle-school philosophy is to attend to the developmental needs of adolescents with programs such as advisory periods.
“There’s great value,” Goldenberg said, “in giving students a non-graded, positive time where someone who’s an advocate for them will listen to them. Advisory [periods] can help students feel good about themselves.”
Middle-level schools need to serve pupils emotionally as well as academically, and in the last several years there has been growing concern that middle schools aren’t succeeding at the double-pronged job for which they were designed.
When the Third International Mathematics and Science Study was released in 1996, it showed that U.S. elementary school pupils scored above average compared with their international peers but middle and high school students had fallen behind.
Sue Swaim, executive director of the Westerville, Ohio-based National Middle School Association, said she doesn’t think the problem is so much the middle-level design as how it is implemented.
“The crossroads we’re facing now is to really implement the middle-school concept,” Swaim said. “It’s a very comprehensive, integrated approach. In many places, the name over the school may have changed, the grade configuration may have changed and there may have been some things implemented, but not in a comprehensive way, so the result is a middle school by name but not by practice.”
The middle-school concept began taking root in the 1970s as 6th- through 8th-grade middle schools started replacing 7th- through 9th-grade junior high schools to relieve overcrowding at the lower levels caused by the Baby Boom. Along with the structural change came the philosophical change of creating schools specifically to serve young adolescents.
Besides advisory periods, middle schools frequently include longer class periods; interdisciplinary teams of teachers who have the same group of pupils on their “teams”; looping, where a group of pupils will have the same teacher for two years; and exploratory, elective courses.
“The junior-high paradigm was good for its time, but our clients have changed,” said Marilyn Finesilver, principal of Hadley Junior High School in Glen Ellyn.
“The divorce rate and the family structure have changed,” Finesilver said. “Society has changed. This doesn’t diminish what was done before [in junior highs], but we need to look at what can be more effective today.”
Finesilver, hired in June, plans to implement a middle-school concept at Hadley over the next few years.
Before coming to Hadley, she spent 11 years as principal of Mannheim Middle School in Melrose Park, where she oversaw the change to the middle-level paradigm. This included creating smaller schools, or teams, within the school as a whole.
“You divide the school into smaller communities for learning,” she said, “so students receive some individual attention and a team of teachers can sit with a parent and tell the parent collectively how the child is doing.”
Another piece of the puzzle is advisory periods.
Finesilver considers it one of the hardest middle-school programs to put in place, because teachers receive little, if any, training in counseling pupils of this age.
“It can be an incredibly uncomfortable piece, but there’s a tremendous amount of gratification once they’re comfortable with it,” she said.
Middle-level teachers in Illinois weren’t required to have any special training until 1997, when a middle-school endorsement of six credit hours became mandatory.
Forty-four states now require middle-level endorsements, Swaim said, but many educators don’t think six hours are enough. A panel in Illinois is studying middle-level certification, meaning a teacher could be certified specifically for Grades 5 through 8, instead of K through 8 or 6 through 12, and an answer is expected within the next year. “You can’t treat them like high school students and you can’t treat them like elementary school kids,” said Cynthia Mee, an associate professor of education at National-Louis University in Evanston, which offers a master’s degree in middle-level education. “These kids are at a turning point in their lives in terms of health, in terms of learning. They are going through all of these transitions.
“Middle schools need to have a child-centered approach, to try to make the learning authentic so it’s relevant to these kids who are trying to make sense out of the world.”
Marshall was one of four schools in the U.S. identified as high-performing and named a “School to Watch” by the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform in January 2000. The forum said it chose Marshall based on three criteria: It excels academically, responds to the developmental needs of young adolescents and provides a socially equitable environment for all pupils.
Marshall’s principal, Jose Barillas, has divided the school of 7th and 8th graders into six teams of about 100 pupils each. Each team is led by a group of six teachers.
“Each team has a different personality,” Barillas said. “Some teams go for block scheduling [longer periods for things such as science labs] and some have 45-minute periods. We empower our teachers to be leaders and to create small communities of learners.”
The teaching methodology also is different for this age group, Barillas said.
“You can’t expect 13- and 14-year-olds to sit quietly while you lecture,” he said, “so the methodology is based on group projects and activities the students can become actively involved in.”
On a recent day in Renee Robinson’s 7th-grade social studies class, pupils worked in groups of three to find the main idea from portions of the chapter they read. The groups then used an overhead projector to present their main ideas to the class.
“I try to empower them with activities like this,” Robinson said. “If I start lecturing, it can go in one ear and out the other.”
Robinson and Goldenberg do not think Marshall lacks a rigorous curriculum–or spends too much time attending to emotional needs.
“There’s always room for the affective [part of education],” Goldenberg said. “I think the rigorous part of testing and proving that you know something gets overrated.”
People need to “look at a bigger picture than just test scores,” Swaim said.
For example, she said, “We ought to look at what the pattern of those scores is over multiple years.”
The curriculum was not watered down when the middle-level program at Mannheim was implemented, Finesilver said.”When people talk about junior high versus middle school, there’s no less rigor [in middle schools] but there’s a perception that there is,” she said. “When you interject the affective part, it feels squishy. It’s not rigid. But it was never meant to imply that it’s not rigorous. There has to be balance.”
Middle-level schools in Illinois get help in achieving that balance from the Association of Illinois Middle-Level Schools. The group started 10 years ago with 12 schools and now has 120 in the network, said Executive Director Deborah Kasak, a senior educational specialist at the Center for Prevention Research and Development at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
Kasak doesn’t have an exact count of the schools in Illinois that have implemented middle-level paradigms.
“But we do have anecdotal evidence of hundreds of schools doing things differently,” she said.
“Some are partially implemented. They get so far, or they think they have this checklist of things that they’ve done and they think they’re finished. But this is something that takes a lot of effort.
“We do know from data we’ve collected that in schools that are highly implemented, where there’s active, hands-on learning, where there’s more emphasis on critical thinking skills, where they’re making connections across subjects, that those things do result in increased student performance.”
