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Great Transitions: Preparing Adolescents for a New Century

Chapter Four: Educating Young Adolescents for a Changing World

If it were possible to reach any consensus about high-priority solutions to our society's problems, a good education throughout the first two decades of life would be a prime candidate. Every modern nation must develop the talents of its entire population if it is to be economically vigorous and socially cohesive. A well-educated young adult is rarely found in our nation's prisons. In the past two decades, however, the achievement levels of American adolescents have virtually stagnated. The performance of our students is too low to support adequate living standards in a high-technology, information-based, transnational economy.

A persistent misconception among many educators is that young adolescents generally are incapable of critical or higher-order reasoning. Many school systems do a disservice to middle grade students by not offering challenging instruction. Education to capture the young person's emergent sense of self and the world, and to foster inquiring, analytical habits of mind, is not only feasible but constitutes essential preparation for life.

FACILITATING THE TRANSITION TO THE MIDDLE GRADES
In the move from elementary school, where a student has spent most of the day in one classroom with the same teacher and classmates, to the larger, more impersonal environment of middle school or junior high school farther from home, an adolescent's capacities to cope are often severely tested. Such an abrupt transition coincides with the profound physical, cognitive, and emotional changes of puberty, a juxtaposition that for some students can result in a loss of self-esteem and declining academic achievement.

Middle grade education was largely ignored in the education reforms of the 1980s. With the publication in 1989 of the Carnegie Council's report, Turning Points: Preparing Youth for the 21st Century, however, the nascent movement to reorganize middle schools to make them more developmentally appropriate for young adolescents was powerfully reinforced.

Middle grade education, said the report, should be more intellectually challenging, in line with young adolescents' new appreciation for the complexity of knowledge and ideas, and supportive of their desire for individual attention. Schools should have curricula that provide the information, skills, and motivation for adolescents to learn about themselves and their widening world. They should promote a mutual aid ethic among teachers and students, manifest in team teaching and cooperative learning. They should integrate students of varying ability levels in a single classroom, and they should provide opportunities for academically supervised community service.

EIGHT PRINCIPLES FOR TRANSFORMING THE EDUCATION OF YOUNG ADOLESCENTS
At the heart of Turning Points is a set of eight principles for transforming the education of young adolescents. These rest on a foundation of knowledge from current research and from the experience of leading educators, policymakers, and advocates for children and youth.

Create Communities For Learning
Large schools should be brought to human scale through the creation of smaller units, or schools-within-schools, where stable relationships between teachers and students and among students can be cultivated and smaller class sizes can ensure that each student is well known and respected.

Teach a Core of Common Knowledge
In many middle grade schools, the curriculum is so fragmented by subject matter that students have few opportunities to make connections among ideas in the different academic disciplines. A primary task for middle grade educators, especially as part of teaching teams, is to identify the most important principles and concepts within each discipline and concentrate their efforts on integrating the main ideas to create a meaningful interdisciplinary curriculum. The current emphasis on memorization of a large quantity of information must yield to an emphasis on depth and quality of understanding of the major concepts in each subject area as well as the connections between them.

Provide an Opportunity for All Students to Succeed
Numerous studies of cooperative learning approaches, in which students of varying ability learn together, have demonstrated their efficacy for everyone. Cooperative learning helps high achievers to deepen their understanding of the material by explaining it to lower achievers, who in turn benefit by receiving extra help as needed from their peers. Students master course material faster, retain the knowledge longer, and develop critical reasoning powers more rapidly than they would working alone. Cooperative learning also enables young people to get to know classmates from backgrounds different from their own, which sets the stage for them to learn the requirements for living together in a pluralistic society.

Prepare Teachers for the Middle Grades
At the present time, there are only a few graduate education programs that prepare middle grade teachers, as opposed to elementary or secondary school teachers. Yet the early adolescent transition is a distinct phase requiring special understanding of the conjunction of changes that a young person is undergoing and that have a bearing on learning. To orient teachers effectively for the middle grades, professional education programs must incorporate courses in adolescent development, team teaching, and the design and assessment of demanding interdisciplinary curricula. They must also offer special training to work with students and families of different economic, ethnic, and religious backgrounds.

Improve Academic Performance Through Better Health and Fitness
Middle grade schools often do not have the support of health and social service agencies to address young adolescents' physical and mental health needs. Developmentally appropriate adolescent health facilities, in or near schools, are urgently needed for middle and high school students, especially in areas where there is a high proportion of uninsured families. Such school-related health centers should be linked to health education programs and a science curriculum that helps students understand the biological changes they are experiencing and the impact of various health-damaging as well as health-promoting practices. (These issues are discussed further in chapter five.)

Reengage Families in the Education of Adolescents
As discussed in the previous chapter, schools must involve parents of young adolescents in all aspects of their education. As it is, they are often considered as part of the problem of educating adolescents rather than as a potentially important educational resource.

Strengthen Teachers and Principals
States and school districts should give teachers and principals the authority to transform middle grade schools. They and other members of the school staff know more about how to do their jobs than those far removed from the classroom. Teachers, especially, need control over the way they meet curricular goals. The creation of governance committees composed of teachers, administrators, health professionals, support staff, parents, and representatives from community organizations is one way to make schools more effective.

Connect Schools with Communities
In the 1980s, social service professionals and community organization leaders began moving their youth services into the schools, where the young people are. The result is a major innovation called "full-service schools." Led by individual states, full-service schools offer a variety of social and health services to young people and their families, paid for and rendered by outside agencies. As an example of a school-community partnership, these interventions are showing that they not only can help to reduce high-risk behavior in adolescents, but they enhance the environment for learning.

THE MIDDLE GRADE SCHOOL STATE POLICY INITIATIVE
Turning Points' comprehensive framework became the basis of a Carnegie Corporation effort to stimulate widespread middle grade reform beginning in 1990. Called the Middle Grade School State Policy Initiative (MGSSPI), it is a program of grants to fifteen states (usually the state department of education) whose schools are adopting promising practices in line with Turning Points' principles. Included are schools using approaches that are effective with young adolescents from disadvantaged communities, who make up a growing proportion of the nation's public school enrollments.

To improve curricula, instruction, and assessment under MGSSPI, the states have developed week-long summer institutes on interdisciplinary instruction, portfolio-based assessment, on-site professional development seminars facilitated by university faculty, formal networks to exchange information and resources between schools, systems for deploying expert consultants, and many other forms of assistance. At the local level, MGSSPI has stimulated improvements in curricula, instruction, and assessment in more than one hundred middle schools, some of which have worked to integrate education and health services for young adolescents and anchored health education firmly in the middle grade curriculum.

A group of Illinois middle grade schools, first as part of a federally supported effort called Project Initiative Middle Level, and now as part of the MGSSPI, has been implementing Turning Points' recommendations. Results thus far from an evaluation of the Illinois project show that, in forty-two schools participating at least one year, students are showing significant improvements in their reading, mathematics, and language achievement. They have higher self esteem and are less likely to feel alienated, fearful, or depressed in school than they otherwise would, as a result of the implementation of reforms.

These promising findings demonstrate that, although most schools do not now meet the needs of young adolescents, the potential is there and can be readily tapped. With the support of schools redesigned expressly to prepare youth for the future, all adolescents will have a better chance at educational and personal success.

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Creating Powerful Interdisciplinary Curricula

The creation of thoughtful interdisciplinary curricula and learning strategies is time consuming and intellectually challenging. It requires significant effort by the middle grade interdisciplinary teaching team. Teachers may be fearful that important concepts from their subject of specialization will be lost within an integrated approach or that they will be unable to satisfy state and local requirements to cover masses of information.

Despite these difficulties, many middle schools have created effective interdisciplinary curricula, including some remarkable schools serving disadvantaged students. One example is the Graham and Parks School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which focuses on interdisciplinary project learning and portfolio assessment. Its humanities program, which combines language arts and social studies, builds the curriculum around concepts that are important in students' lives--for example, power and authority, individual and group responsibility, and conflict.

The school's humanities curriculum is structured around some overarching questions: What is courage? What does it mean to be a hero? Why do individuals take action to change and improve the world around them? To explore these questions, students focused in depth on the Holocaust and the civil rights movement, as well as historical and present-day issues in the local community. The curriculum strongly emphasizes primary source material, oral history, journal writing, process and peer review writing, small-group and individual project construction, media use, and other interactive approaches.

Students at Graham and Parks also study acting and write plays. The last months of a recent school year were spent creating a student-written and -acted play that highlights the concepts and themes studied within the interdisciplinary approach. The play was performed for the school, parents, and other middle school students and educators across the city. All students are required to maintain a portfolio containing draft and finished written work, photographs of three-dimensional projects (such as sculptures), videotapes of all presentations and exhibitions, and art work. At the end of the year, students assemble their portfolios, create a table of contents, and write a cover essay explaining their portfolio's contents and reflecting on their learning for the year. Students present their portfolios to a panel consisting of one or two prominent people from outside the school and their teacher. The portfolio and presentation are rated according to a previously agreed upon scale.

The Graham and Parks School continues to have the highest scores on state tests and the widely used California Achievement Test of any middle school in the city. The school also has the largest waiting list of families wishing to enroll their children.

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