Middle School


Understanding your Middle School Student

Adolescence can be a very challenging time for your student. Not only are they trying to navigate a new educational setting, they are trying to navigate a new physical, psychological, emotional, and social world. I was once told that as children go through this pubescent stage of life, they may exhibit toddler tendencies. What I mean by that is your child now seems like a toddler(think back to those fun years of teaching your child basic skills, giving one direction at a time, and clarifying boundaries on what sometimes felt an hourly basis) where you notice that you can't give them multiple tasks at a time and expect them to be completed. You feel like you are constantly reiterating the same thing over and over again.

Don't worry! You aren't alone in feeling like you have a toddler in a teenage body. Your child's brain is truly going through an incredible developmental stage. "This period of brain growth marks the beginning of a person's ability to do problem solving, think critically, plan, and control impulses. This brain development cycle also impacts short-term memory. A middle school student can generally retain from 5 to 7 bits of information at one time, so teachers should not try to cram too much information into one lesson. The more engaged and "rich" the new information, the more likely it is that the new information will be retained. The short-term memory maintains information until it moves into another area of the brain (long-term memory) or until more, new information is introduced."(nea.org)

Jay Giedd, a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Mental Health, uses the principle, "Use it or Lose It" to explain this brain growth. He states, "Those cells and connections that are used will survive and flourish. Those cells and connections that are not used will wither and die. So if a teen is doing music or sports or academics, those are the cells and connections that will be hard-wired. If they're lying on the couch or playing video games or MTV, those are the cells and connections that are going [to] survive." Giedd refers to adolescent brains as blocks of granite, waiting to be sculpted.

This is where my role as an educator comes into play. It is super important for me to remember what my students are experiencing during this critical time of growth. The following section outlines how I teach, why I utilize varied strategies, and why at the end of the day, I feel mentally exhausted!


Teaching Implications (nea.org)

Given what we know about brain development and the other changes taking place in the young adolescent, teachers can improve student learning by doing the following things:

1. Present limited amounts of new information, to accommodate the short-term memory.

2. Provide opportunities for students to process and reinforce the new information and to connect the new information with previous learning. (Encourage students to talk with their classmates about the new information; have them debate or write about it; create small group discussions.)

3. Provide lessons that are varied, with lots of involvement and hands-on activities. Brain stimulus and pathways are created and made stronger and with less resistance if they are reinforced with a variety of stimuli. (Create projects; use art, music, and visual resources; bring guest visitors into the classroom.)

4. Provide lessons and activities that require problem solving and critical thinking. Brain growth is enhanced and strengthened through practice and exercise.

As with other developmental changes, students reach the "starting point" of this brain growth cycle at different times and progress through it at different rates. Some students will be ready for problem-solving activities, while others may still be working at their best when dealing with concrete information. Given these facts and the fact that students learn in different ways and respond to different stimuli, the direction is clear: The middle school classroom should be an active, stimulating place where people talk and share, movement is common and planned for, and the teacher uses a wide array of approaches to introduce, model, and reinforce learning.

When planning lessons, middle school teachers must keep the goal clearly in mind and make sure that students can reach the goal in multiple ways. Teachers must check in with students along the way to keep them working toward the learning objective. As thinking and learning become more abstract, students need predictable and safe environments so that they can risk, explore, and grow. Teachers must structure and facilitate these experiences. Students need to learn how to problem solve, think critically, and develop processes for learning. Teachers need to structure and facilitate these, too. Teachers should:

  • Teach students how to study.

  • Establish, teach, and practice consistent expectations and routines. Don't expect to tell students once and have them remember and follow the "rules."

  • Use process charts to detail steps on a long-term project and revisit these steps periodically.

  • Use graphic organizers to assist in visualizing problem solving.

  • Distribute assignment sheets that clearly articulate benchmarks, timelines.

  • Color code materials (e.g., assignments in blue, new information in red, long-term project information in violet) to help students put the material into a context and take away the thinking and categorizing work to orient the brain as to what should be done next.