"No! No! No!" all four of the students in my ESL class screamed simultaneously. You'd think I was announcing a test, or at least extra homework - but they were actually protesting the end of class. I let them stay an 30-45 seconds before sending them off to their next class. A teacher's dream!

The achievement was particularly sweet because the previous day's class had been one of those blah days where one student asked to go to the nurse's office, two others left for the bathroom, and of those two one girl was clearly weighing whether or not she could try for two bathroom trips in one class period. Maybe they were just tired, maybe the room was chilly. Or maybe, I had to admit, they just needed something to shake them up. Last week, they had convinced me to restructure their homework assignments so that they had short readings every night rather than longer readings twice a week. I had been asking them to hold daily literary discussions, and maybe their lives were becoming too routine. "A life with no surprises," wrote the 16-year-old author of a book I used to teach in AP French, "is no life at all."

So I decided we would set book discussions aside for one or two classes. I knew I needed to teach them about similes and personification. I scoured the Sharon Creech books we were reading, and found several examples of similes. But then I realized that would probably not be not enough of a change. So I decided to go through my CD collection that night and look for a song loaded with similes. Eventually, I found that "Round Here" by Counting Crows has five good examples, one somewhat cliché ("sleeping children got to run like the wind") but others more creative ("step out the front door like a ghost into the fog"). I developed my presentation and a series of activities, packed up my CD and my kid's CD player, and went to bed hoping the class would be just what my students needed.

They clapped their hands at the start of class, literally applauding my decision not to discuss the book every day any more. Then they figured out what similes are and came up with some good examples of their own before listening to the song, of which I remember "step out the front door like a... dog," and we discussed the mental images each simile brought. Then they listened to the song using a copy of the lyrics in which I had left five blanks for the five phrases completing each simile. They had successfully deciphered four of the five images that Adam Duritz had really written and were just coming to the fifth blank when the bell rang ending class. They needed those last 30 seconds to figure out the last image, which happened to be the sleeping children, and happily wrote down "the wind" before reloading their backpacks.

Maybe we'll go back to book groups next Monday, maybe we'll wait until Tuesday. You can overdo playful learning activities just as much as you can overdo more traditional work. But with only six weeks to go, I should be able to keep a better variety going right through the last day of classes. And really, as long as they're learning, that's all these kids ask of me.

Today at lunch, some of my colleagues and I were reminiscing about our middle school years. Our laughter was often rueful as we recounted stories of trying to remain out of sight of the gym teachers surveying the showers from their offices on high, or running headlong down corridors trying to avoid the kids who wanted to dump you in another garbage can. But as each of us spoke, you could almost see the young adolescent within peering out, still asking to be noticed, to be taken seriously, to fit in. Had our stories continued, perhaps we would have moved on to talk about the other side of middle school, about those teachers who cared, about our friends and how important they were back then. On MiddleWeb, a listserv for middle level educators, one of the teachers recently asked if our old schools had felt like jails to us. Upon reflection, I wrote that while Amherst Regional Junior High School may have looked large and forbidding from the outside, "It's where my friends and I played bridge each morning before homeroom, where I wrote a 1500-word short story, where I first learned to play French horn, where Mr. DiRaffaele opened up my mind to the world and Mr. Luippold inspired a lifetime love of French."
"They're just so endearing" one of my friends exclaimed as she fairly flew into the faculty room after 40 minutes of teaching literature to a group of lively 7th graders. I knew exactly what she meant - this was one of those classes where everyone threw themselves wholeheartedly into whatever they were doing, and if you caught their attention and got them engaged in a project, there was no holding them back. I remember asking them to work in groups to build websites presenting their detailed proposals for an extended trip to France, and spending hours in the computer room as they threw every minute of free time they had into adding to the information they had discovered, looking for just the right images to illustrate their points, finding a new coding trick that would make the webpage itself more interesting to look at. I presented their work to other secondary school language teachers at a summer technology workshop sponsored by the Connecticut Association of Independent Schools, who were just as delighted with the kids' work as was I.
It's nice to have these experiences to draw on, because when people find out we spend our days with teenagers, their reaction is often one of pity, horror, or both. While I would never pretend there aren't moments of frustration, those moments pale in comparison to the times when teachers and students are so caught up in learning that time stops, when they plan and carry off an evening coffeehouse to raise money for Children's Hospital, or when they say "We know, you love us." and let you know how much that means to them. As David Killam, who will be teaching instrumental music in Stoneleigh-Burnham's new middle school program, once observed, "Get them on your side, and they will walk through walls for you."
March is National Middle Level Education Month. Different organizations and communities will be celebrating in different ways. For members of the New England League of Middle Schools (NELMS), the month will wrap up with the annual conference, a gathering of many hundreds of committed middle school teachers who are often just as lively as their students. We attend workshops, look for new teaching materials, and listen to speakers praise our commitment and dedication. But we are ever mindful that middle level education must begin and end with those young adolescents peering out and asking us to believe in them. After all, they are the ones who give our schools a sense of being, as another one of my friends put it, "Alive with a sense of the possible."

This blog entry is based on a current discussion on the MiddleWeb listserv.

A recent report from the Rand corporation (http://www.rand.org/publications/MG/MG139/) states that middle schools are the "Bermuda Triangle of education." The report's justification for this statement is that they have been blamed for behavior problems, teen alienation, disengagement from school, and low achievement.

I find, to my surprise, that I agree with this statement as written. Middle schools HAVE been blamed for all of this, much as the Bermuda Triangle has been blamed for the mysterious disappearances and events transpiring within its limits. The more fundamental question is, do middle schools deserve this blame? Here, I'd have to give a hearty "umm, well..." On the one hand, you certainly can't isolate any one element of society and blame it for larger ills. There is plenty of responsibility for teen alienation (if indeed the problem is worse than in the past, which is arguable) to go around. At the same time, middle schools as a whole probably could be doing more to meet our students' needs. Take this statement from further on in the report's summary:

"Middle School education has long been criticized as being unresponsive to adolescents' developmental needs. Interdisciplinary team teaching, flexible scheduling, and advisory programs have been suggested as ways to address adolescents' distinctive needs. However, the effectiveness of these interventions - and all others - depends on whether they fit with a school's culture and leadership and how well they are implemented... There is evidence that advisory programs and interdisciplinary team teaching are frequently enacted at only superficial levels, often because they require fundamental shifts in the beliefs and operating modes of schools and teachers."

Three years ago, MiddleWeb held a discussion on "Reinventing the Middle School," and to veterans of that discussion, among others, the ideas in this quote should be sadly familiar. We know what to do, we know what works, we even know that there is research to back up these ideas, and yet so many of us remain stuck in older, outmoded, not altogether successful patterns. At the time of that discussion, I sympathized but did not yet empathize with the frustration expressed by Hayes Mizell and other long-time advocates of the middle school model. The flip side of that increased frustration is that I have increased admiration for teachers and principals who are finding ways to reach their students and be as true as possible to the middle school model they know will help their kids.

Here is one more reason to be thankful for my colleagues in the Stoneleigh-Burnham Middle School (now opening this coming fall, yee-ha!). We have made the commitment to enacting advisory programs and interdisciplinary team teaching, among other important aspects of the middle school model - no need for fundamental shifts in our beliefs and operating modes! Putting philosophy into practice will not always be easy, but knowing we have a common belief in the philosophy is several steps in the right direction.

It is gray and rainy outside. The grass looks brownish yellow and lifeless, and what little snow is left on campus is not apt to inspire poetry."February," wrote Dar Williams, "was so long that it lasted into March." It is that kind of a day. And yet, the mood of the school is light. After all, the grass, if not exactly awe-inspiring, is at least visible after one of the coldest winters on record. Spring is apparently really going to come. Better yet, spring break is not only coming, it is upon us. Vacation starts tomorrow, and will last two wonderful weeks. And when we return, there will be real grass, buds, probably crocus. Admittedly, this being New England, winter is not definitively over until June or so. Still...

Spring break may be coming, with real Spring soon behind, but our students are still doing a good job of staying focused on final exams. Giving a tour for prospective middle schoolers yesterday, walking through the school this morning, I saw many groups of students sitting together studying for exams, quizzing each other on key questions, themes, and more. The group of 9th graders gathered outside the library this morning excitedly shared their strategies for memorizing vocabulary with each other and the faculty proctors. And my own students in ESL? I had deliberately written a challenging exam, looking at characterization, setting, plot and themes both in books they had read and in an unfamiliar passage, and ending with an essay question wherein they had to evaluate one of three statements from their books, agree or disagree, and explain their reasoning. Reading through the tests one by one as they were passed in, I was delighted at their thoroughness and their creativity. They really have moved well beyond simply understanding the reading strategies; they are using these strategies to deepen their understanding and can explain how they are doing this. Their essays were often moving, always thoughtful, and showed a strong awareness of the complexity of moral issues. Of course, there are individual areas that need improvement - one student may need to work harder to relate the actions a character takes to the traits those actions illustrate, another student should work on relating her introduction and conclusion more closely to each other. But overall, they are clearly ready for what I had hoped would be the next step, an author study that will enable them to delve more deeply into word choice (mood and style, figurative language and imagery) as well as motivations and inspirations for writing.

This week, it's time to turn my attention to the third question that Brenda asked MiddleWebbers (see the preceding blog entry):
3) If you have your way, how will you be teaching in five years?

The short answer is I will be teaching however my students need me to - "having my way" doesn't really have much to do with it. But given my experience with what kids need, given my knowledge of middle school philosophy as it is being applied to Stoneleigh-Burnham Middle School, and given the directions I am taking this year, I have a pretty good idea of where I would like to be in five years. I could write for hours, in fact, but for the moment will focus on three main areas.

This year, I have done a good job of internalizing what the different reading strategies are according to "Mosaic of Thought" and "I Read But I Don't Get It" and ways to give kids a sense of how to use each strategy. Although I received encouraging comments and helpful suggestions from my department chair through our evaluation process, I still want to learn more about how to help kids connect strategy use to literary discussion and how to help students shape their own discussions so as to ensure they are pushing the edges of their comfort zones and are really learning the skills and concepts they will need in order to succeed as they continue on into the high school years. I would hope that in five years, I will have made significant progress in all those areas.

Five years from now, I want to feel more settled about which literacies my students will really need to function well in this world. My first draft of the Humanities curriculum for the middle school would ask students to express themselves using these forms of communication: nonfiction text (research paper, personal interpretation of a literary/informational/expository text, comparison/contrast), fiction text (poetry, short story, script), public speech, work of visual art, performance (dance, drama, and/or music), and media (Powerpoint, video, website, etc.). As with reading, I want to have have a good sense of how to ensure students have a sense that they are in control of the direction of their learning

Most importantly, I hope to have sufficiently mastered the concept of the democratic classroom and integrative curriculum (with many thanks to Chris Kingsbury for putting me in contact with Mark Springer and his work!) to be working in a team with the kids and my colleagues to design the entire year around a specific group's needs and interests. I imagine a lot of collaborative group work, conferencing, interaction with the local community, and more. I imagine my days will be lively, full, productive and enjoyable. Finally, I imagine I will love my job at least as much as I do now!

Brenda Dyck, who teaches at the Masters Academy in Calbary, Alberta, recently asked the MiddleWeb listserv the following three questions:
1) Do you attach the terms "jail" or "institution" to the classrooms of your learning past?
2) I'll bet many of you teach in old 1950's learning structures. If your school suddenly moved into a new innovative 45 million school, would the caliber of teaching found in your present school suddenly improve?
3) If you have your way, how will you be teaching in five years?

My initial reaction to the first question about attaching the terms "jail" or "institution" to the classrooms of my past was sort of flip - "Not to the classrooms - but I did have a few teachers who acted like wardens. If you get my drift." However, as I think about it, my old junior high school probably did (and does) look something like a jail, huge, square, squat and forbidding, and yet I don't remember it in those terms. It's where my friends and I played bridge each morning before homeroom, where I wrote a 1500-word short story, where I first learned to play French horn, where Mr. DiRaffaele opened up my mind to the world and Mr. Luippold inspired a lifetime love of French. Okay, it's also where I was occasionally dumped in garbage cans and spent the subsequent weeks living in semi-constant fear. But that's another story. The point is that what made me have any affection for my junior high at all was not the space but rather the people, both kids (garbage can dumpers aside) and teachers.

As for the second question, I teach in a beautiful structure originally built in 1936 which has been renovated and added on to on several occasions. When our middle school program officially starts, I will be teaching in the top floor of a beautiful new building (dedicated in 1999) with scenic views out across our equestrian fields toward Poet's Seat Tower atop a local mountain (well, it's at least a good-sized hill!). No, I have no complaints about my space. And yet... the question is provocative, to what extent can a building drive a curriculum and the caliber of teaching? My answer to Brenda was in part "That would depend on to what extent the design of the building was carried out in conjunction with teachers, curriculum review, professional development goal setting, and the like. At Stoneleigh-Burnham, as we are building the [middle school] curriculum from scratch and working on some degree of makeover of our existing classroom space, a fair amount of this kind of synergy is in fact happening. That kind of synergy could lead to improvements in teaching even before you move into the new school, in which case there might well be a sudden bump-up in student achievement when the new space supports the new teaching methods. Without that kind of synergy, there probably wouldn't be any change in student achievement." Our large classroom with the beautiful view from the top floor of the Science Center is full of possibilities - but it will take a constant focus on the needs of the kids as we design our curriculum and as we fill the room with books, bean bag chairs, laptops and more to ensure the caliber of learning in our school (and I deliberately substitute the word "learning" for "teaching") is as high as possible. People will make the school special, but we should also be able to ensure the building supports us to the best of its ability.

And within that building, how will I be teaching in five years if I have my way? That is a question for next week!

With so many parents interested in the possibility of Stoneleigh-Burnham opening up its middle school program this coming fall, it has been a whirlwind of preparation, collaborating to establish the principles on which the program will be based, looking at curricula and schedules, attending conferences and visiting schools, not to mention writing and designing press releases, newsletters, webpages, and talks for informational sessions with parents and prospective students. Reflection and reflective writing have been an almost daily part of my life, but unfortunately little of it has migrated over to this blog. It is long past time to renew my committment to making weekly to bimonthly entries here. So, let's start by checking in with my ESL class.

They are working on a unit which has multiple goals, among which are the following:
1. Give them the confidence that will come from reading their first full-length book start to finish.
2. Familiarize them with basic vocabulary of literary analysis.
3. Enable them to continue to build their vocabulary.
4. Enable them to conduct research which will add to their background knowledge relative to the book, and share this knowledge with each other and with the larger school community.
5. Synthesize elements of the knowledge they will have acquired to create something new.
Two students chose to read "This Strange New Feeling" by Julius Lester, and two students chose to read "Julie of the Wolves." Accordingly, one group is researching slavery and the other Inuit culture. Each girl has just finished developing an individual list of ten questions to guide her research. In class today, I noticed that the two younger girls have listed mostly concrete, factually-based questions, while the two older girls have listed a mix of concrete and more analytical questions. I would be tempted to wonder if this was a developmental issue, but I know from their literary discussions that all four of these students can think abstractly. So, my job as I guide them through their books and to the final written assignment will be to ensure that the concrete knowledge the two younger girls are now acquiring is eventually used to facilitate more in depth thought.

This is why continuous assessment absolutely has to be integral to one's teaching - since I was able to identify and observe the difference in cognitive levels at which the students were working, I was also able to work to push two of the students while continuing to monitor the other two. Would I have done the students irreparable harm if I hadn't noticed this? No, they still would have been learning, but on the other hand I wouldn't have been maximizing the effectiveness of the time they are putting in to the course. These girls have come thousands of miles in large part to learn English, and I owe them the chance to do their very best. Only by checking up on myself as well as checking up on them will I be able to meet that goal.

Stoneleigh-Burnham School recently announced its intention to create a new middle school program for 7th and 8th grade girls. This would extend the school's current mission of serving young women in high school into years that have become fundamentally important for girls seeking to preserve and develop their voices, ideally in the context of caring and understanding adults. This announcement coincides with the culmination of a long-term MiddleWeb project on which I have been working, and leads to the following blog entry.

During the past two months, I have been working actively with my MiddleWeb colleagues to craft an article examining the different ways in which the group has helped its members through the past three-plus years. It has been an amazing process, working with people I respect deeply but whom I have never met, brainstorming and organizing ideas, working through drafts, identifying and carrying out all the behind the scenes work such as securing all necessary permissions, and so on. One of the co-authors, Bev Maddox, is using our blog as an example for her students of how adults collaborate in writing, and how they may want to incorporate elements of what we have done into their own writing process.

The article has also been a chance to revisit the discussions which served to help me focus in on what middle school teaching is all about. Both were book chats sponsored approximately three years ago by MiddleWeb, a chance to spend a week online with the authors of some of the most important and influential books in middle grades education, luminaries such as John Lounsbury, recently cited by the "Middle School Journal" as one of the founding fathers of the middle school movement, and the usual cast of thoughtful and insightful listserv members. The addresses below, for example, will link you to discussions of "Turning Points 2000" by Anthony Jackson and Gayle Davis, and "Reinventing the Middle School," edited by Thomas Dickinson:
http://www.middleweb.com/MWLISTCONT/MSLturningpts.html
http://www.middleweb.com/MWLresources/reinventCHAT.html
These discussions focus on what responsive and developmentally appropriate middle schools must look like and the triumphs and travails of those working toward this ideal school. Imbued with excitement over what could be, they are also tinged with a certain air of melancholy - though the vision is strong and the evidence supporting the vision compelling, so few middle schools are living up to the ideal. Furthermore, change, even positive change, is difficult to bring about in the best of circumstances, and the current educational climate in the United States is far from the best of circumstances.

On the other hand, that's one more reason why I am so lucky to be at Stoneleigh-Burnham School. We do not have to reinvent our middle school - we can design it from the ground up according to practices and principles that we know will work. We can be bolstered by the knowledge that research focused on educating girls also supports our design. We envision for our students a chance to develop confidence, competence, and connectedness through hands-on, collaborative, project-oriented work, an integrative curriculum conceived and refined with student input, advisories, service projects, fitness programs and more. But, as Chris Toy wrote during one of the above book chats, "Having only the pieces and titles of programs is not enough. It's the quality and nature of the interaction among teachers and students that makes a school effective." Indeed, the quality of the relationships between and among students and faculty has always been one of Stoneleigh-Burnham's traditional strengths, and will enable us to not only design but also implement and bring to life a truly outstanding program for young adolescent girls. This is, as my colleague Rebecca Dickinson once observed, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and it is also, as both of us have frequently remarked during our conferences on the middle school, FUN!

Beyond the shorter weekly faculty meetings, Stoneleigh-Burnham's faculty holds extended meetings one evening a month. This is a chance, in large part, to focus in greater depth as a large group on the needs of specific kids, and on the philosophy and practices of our school. For November, we were asked to think about the skills and knowledge our graduates should take from SBS. Thinking back to the seven-page-long sequence of skills I once wrote for the ESL curriculum alone, I was initially overwhelmed by the question and so I simply set it aside for a time. To be fair to myself, I didn't see this as mere procrastination, as I have learned over time that a lot of my best thinking seems to happen subsconsciously. With time and often without warning, my emerging ideas flow to the surface and take me by surprise. Today was such a day.

As I was brainstorming at the computer, getting ready to note down possible ideas for this month's discussion, I briefly reflected on how what we were doing related to the principles of "Understanding By Design" - figure out where you're going and then think about how you're going to get there. With that in mind, building on my experience teaching both languages and rock band, and incorporating thoughts from Ted Sizer's"Horace's School," I typed my first skill, "Have a sense of aesthetics - how to notice and create beauty in all one does." and was surprised to discover how far I had moved subconsciously from extremely specific skills such as "Be able properly to choose between the simple past and the past continuous when telling a story about the past."

From this initial idea, other ideas flowed quickly, and eventually I found myself looking at this list of what I believe all Stoneleigh-Burnham graduates should take from the school:
An awareness of what she has to contribute to the world, and the confidence that results from this knowledge.
Resilience and persistence.
An sense of aesthetics - how to notice and create beauty in all one does.
The ability to think critically - to create, support, analyze, and react to differing ideas - mentally, orally, and in writing.
The ability to work collaboratively and cooperatively toward a common goal.
A sense of wellness and fitness and how to orient one's life toward these ends.

Once we hold this faculty meeting, I am certain my personal list of goals for SBS students will change, perhaps subtly, perhaps in broader ways. Intriguingly, as we discuss our ideas, we will in all likelihood be demonstrating and reinforcing the role these very goals are playing in our own lives, underscoring their fundamental importance. Whatever our final list looks like, I know and trust it will be of equally fundamental importance. Then it will be time to figure out how to achieve these goals, especially in a girls' school, especially with the specific individual girls we are lucky enough to have in our community. That part promises to be equally exciting.

During summer school this past July, my School for International Training instructors presented a model lesson plan for teaching productive skills (speaking, writing) called PPU. This acronym represents a sequence: presentation, practice, use. The idea is that a teacher spends the early part of a specific language lesson presenting information, designs a series of activities which initially give students the chance for carefully controlled practice and gradually allow space for more freedom and creativity, and finally design a culminating activity in which students have the chance to use their new knowledge in a real life situation (or close approximation thereof). At SIT, a PPU lesson would be self-contained within a specific day. Consistent with the philosophy that student participation should be maximized and that students should construct their own knowledge, time spent on presentation was to be minimal, and time spent on the "use" activity was sacrosanct.

During one of our teacher-student conferences, I remarked that PPU is not really all that different from the way I had been teaching the productive skills for the previous 22 years of my career, except that I would usually do my presentation on one day, spread practice over the next few days, and then design a "use" lesson as a culminating activity, meaning that on a given day the students might do a presentation activity on one point, several practice activities on several other points, and a single use activity which might well be on yet another point. We came to call the SIT model "vertical teaching" because, on a calendar where days are columns and times are rows, the entire lesson plan would fit in a single column. Similarly, we came to call the way I had been organizing my classes "horizontal teaching" because the series of activities on a specific point would occupy various spaces within a single row on this calendar. Both of my SIT teachers knew about the importance of spiraling instruction, of periodically re-examining things already learned, to recall them to mind, look at them in more depth, and anchor the learning more firmly in our students' minds. So a genuine question arose: does it matter which approach is taken, vertical or horizontal, and if so which one is better and why? It is a question we never answered to our satisfaction, though in reacting to my final reflective paper Sergei did offer the suggestion that as long as a clear goal for each day was always articulated to students the horizontal PPU model would probably work fine.

During August, as I was interested in bringing a Readers Workshop approach to my ESL teaching (yet another influence of the wonderful MiddleWeb listserv!), I purchased and read Cris Tovani's I Read But I Don't Get It and Mosaic of Thought by Ellin Oliver Keene and Susan Zimmerman. The books complemented each other beautifully, not a surprise since the three authors were all involved in the Public Education Coalition's Reading Project, and I acquired a wealth of knowledge and ideas for organizing my course and bringing these ideas to life. To my surprise, I found that in order to do this, I would need to follow yet another teaching model, the "gradual release of responsibility" model. According to this method, teachers begin by modeling the behaviors and skills they wish their students to learn, gradually inviting students to participate ever more fully in the process until the students have completely taken over responsibility for learning and have internalized the skill. As excited as I was about Readers Workshop, the notion of somehow having to balance and synthesize all these different philosophies of teaching (vertical, horizontal, spiral, and gradual release of responsibility) was more than a little daunting. I determined to move forward with a pure Readers Workshop model, and deal with questions of integrating approaches once I saw how the students were doing in real life.

What I soon realized is that gradual release of responsibility is not so very different from horizontal PPU. The most obvious difference is that you would spend much more time in presentation during the gradual release of responsibility model than during PPU. Of more fundamental importance, I also realized that my students were learning and enjoying the process of learning for all the right reasons. After I worked on being more aware of when students were ready to take complete responsibility for using a specific skill (see my earlier blog entry for October 13, 2003 - was that only 10 days ago?!), it was wonderful to see what they could do.

What is best for each student and for each specific group of students is a complicated question, and one for which the answer is continually changing as the students themselves grow and evolve. Maybe that's the true answer to the question of vertical PPU, horizontal PPU, or gradual release of responsibility: quite simply, go with what works.