Negotiating the ‘range of the strange’: what we can learn from the US middle school system
Students moving from primary classrooms to a secondary timetable suffer from a kind of culture shock when their expectations of school are radically challenged by the pace and siloed structures of faculty education. Students may find school overwhelming, disorienting and alienating. Student engagement suffers and potentials for the development of life-long learning dispositions are diminished. Our two-tiered approach to schooling is sometimes a strange thing. Up until Year 6, we keep our kids together in one room, with a single teacher but from Year 7 on, we throw them into the timetable, mixing it in the locker bays and corridors of secondary school. We know that student engagement declines sharply as students enter secondary school, so perhaps it’s time for us to rethink the model and begin to explore ways to maximise schooling for students in the middle years.
Please login below to view content or subscribe now.
Thank you for this article. If you are even in Canberra, please come and visit our middle school at Burgmann Anglican School. We don’t have dragons and castles, but we do have a vibrant middle school that strives to achieve many of the outcomes you have written about.