To gain a deeper understanding of young adolescent motivation and developmental needs as the nation plunges ahead with the national Common Core Standards and their implications for writing instruction, the authors of this article pondered five questions as they studied their own middle school writing team: (1) What intrinsic motivators drive these…

Educators have long recognized that parental and community supports are important underpinnings for children's success in school. With respect to the teaching of writing, however, little research has been conducted to provide evidence of effective practices teachers use to involve parents and communities. As part of a national Canadian study of…

Multimodal learning clubs link principles of motivation and engagement with 21st century technological tools and texts to support content area learning. The author describes how a sixth grade health teacher and his class incorporated multimodal learning clubs into a unit of study on human body systems. The students worked collaboratively online…

Wayside teaching focuses on building and maintaining positive relationships with students. Teachers can implement certain wayside teaching practices to end the year in a positive way and begin preparing for the next school year.

School systems often implement character education initiatives in reaction to a violent event. Following the school shootings that occurred in the 1990s, many school systems started to implement character education and violence prevention programs. Unfortunately, because the efforts were reactive, little thought was given to sustainability…

Many students struggle with reading as they transition from the elementary to the middle grades and the literature becomes more complex. Many students may also have personal experiences that interfere with them seeing any importance, value, or enjoyment in reading literature, especially books assigned in school. As a result, "struggling readers…

Fifty-one sixth graders participated in three rounds of online literature circles and three face-to-face literature circles. The authors describe how the online literature circles were introduced and organized in the classroom and discuss the tensions, struggles, and successes from their implementation. An analysis of qualitative data yielded…

This article describes how the teachers in a sixth grade mathematics inclusion class used differentiated instruction to better meet the needs of all learners in the classroom. In an inclusion class with students of mixed abilities, differentiated instruction allows the teacher to meet the needs of every learner by providing students with multiple…

The middle school team project described in this article was part of a larger district initiative, started in 2001 by the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL) to create a systemic model of school improvement for increasing student achievement in low-performing schools. Academic teams were established as the conduit for ensuring that…

For the middle school students in a Virtual Reading Group (VRG), it was easy to see their virtual discussion peers and their virtual teacher; all participants appeared simultaneously on a screen, with a separate box for each participating site. In this article, the authors offer an account of how the "realness" of virtual others was constructed by…

For six weeks, middle school students gathered information about peanuts from a variety of text and media sources to create an original informative book, thereby combining goals in both technology and language arts. By conducting authentic research about one topic for a concentrated period of time, students were able to develop and fine tune their…

In this article, the authors discuss how learning contracts can motivate students. "A learning contract is simply a written agreement between teacher and learner in which the learner undertakes to complete mutually agreed upon tasks in a specified amount of time on his or her own initiative" (Greenwood, 2003, p.1). Contracts are designed to…

Parental involvement comes in various forms and will differ as a child moves through primary and secondary school. Epstein's (2002) classic six-types model captures the potential scope of parental involvement: (1) basic obligations of parents as care-providers; (2) schools communicating with parents about school programs; (3) parent volunteering…

There are those in the school community who believe that the anxious feelings and heightened sense of anxiety experienced by sixth graders as they transition from elementary to junior high school constitute a rite of passage. Teachers and school administrators in the Indiana Area Junior High School in Pennsylvania believed differently. During the…

This article deals with using formative assessments to individualize instruction and promote learning. Formative assessment serves the dual purpose of giving the teacher information on the effectiveness of the lesson and giving students information on the current state of their learning. Such information can guide future instructional decisions.…