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A Middle School Culture Supporting Standards-Based Education

Adapted from Taking Center Stage, California Department of Education, 2001, pp. 116-119.

Teachers and principals working to build a school culture that promotes academic excellence and rich pedagogy within a standards-based teaching and learning environment will give a high priority to ensuring that the following norms, beliefs, practices, and routines are in place. In high impact schools, students:

Are involved with issues they regard as important and that have meaning in their own lives. When the importance of specific learning tasks is not immediately evident, time should be allowed in class to discuss relevance and meaning. Knowledge and skills do not exist in an intellectual or experiential vacuum. Middle grades students are helped to understand that content standards represent the efforts of specialists and scholars to identify the most important things that students should know and be able to do.
Engage in exploring human differences. Ideally, learning should take place within a rich, heterogeneous context of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural variables. Middle grades students need to understand as much as possible about the deeper meaning of such learning experiences and recognize that human diversity can contribute to enriched understanding of nearly any learning activity.
Participate in planning many of their learning experiences. Participation, cooperation, and collaboration are essential elements of a rich middle school culture. Consequently, students should participate in the implementation and continued development of standards-based education. For example, they should be involved in helping to develop performance tasks used to evaluate their academic performance levels and become thoroughly knowledgeable about the scoring criteria developed for that purpose.
Can apply such ideals as fairness, equity, and justice to their school and classroom relationships and to the larger world about them. Many middle grades students may be confronting complex issues outside their immediate school environment for the first time as they explore local, state, national, and global challenges—whether economic, social, or political. The ideals of fairness, equity, and justice cut across all areas of the curriculum and content standards and lie at the heart of efforts to inculcate honor, civility, and service.
Are actively involved in their learning. They may conduct an experiment, act in a play, construct a model, write an essay, or otherwise creatively and productively engage in various active learning assignments and assessments. The activities provide evidence of the connection between knowing and doing. Bringing critical elements of the curriculum together, active learning often produces a powerful synergistic effect. For example, students move from knowing musical notes to playing an instrument; from identifying a problem to solving it; from developing a hypothesis to testing it; from using color theory to painting a canvas; or from using knowledge of specialized software to designing a building or retrieving original documents for a social studies project.
Are involved in real-life situations that bring them into direct contact with adults in many different walks of life. In the minds of some critics, standards-based education has acquired a reputation for intellectual sterility—a by-the-numbers approach to curriculum and instruction. To the contrary, standards-based education helps teachers to make relevant connections and to engage students in diverse, real-life, field-based learning that helps students develop academic proficiency.
Are actively involved in inclusive classrooms that value divergent questioning strategies, multiple assignments in the same class, tiered instruction, and activities that allow for alternative responses and solutions. Heterogeneous grouping remains a hallmark of middle grades education. Standards-based education recognizes that students learn in many different ways and at different rates of speed and promotes flexibility in adapting to those expectations. Strategies include effective, purposeful, differentiated instruction and fluid grouping of special needs students at both extremes of the learning continuum (e.g., GATE students and students needing remediation). (An extensive discussion of learning styles and differentiated instruction can be found in Chapter 8 of this publication.)
Are urged to consider ideas together with reasoning that includes the ability to compare, contrast, analyze, synthesize, evaluate, and generalize. Middle school students typically experience major developmental breakthroughs in their ability to engage in tasks that require complex reasoning. Teachers should, therefore, provide ample opportunities for the students to demonstrate their expanding ability and develop assignments that require students to use demanding intellectual processes.
Redo, polish, or otherwise strive to perfect their work. Evidence of good student work and rich pedagogy lies at the heart of developing and implementing standards. The knowledge and skills students possess must be refined so that they can reach the elusive goal of excellence. Prime examples of practicing until perfect include participating in sports, solving problems, playing a musical instrument, composing a work of art, using effective oral and written expression. Only through repeated efforts to refine the quality of significant assignments can students improve their level of academic performance.
Know how to access and use information. Good work and rich pedagogy include the ability to locate and use sources of information (e.g., the library, CD-ROMs, DVDs, the Internet) needed to complete assignments. Gaining access to information also includes the ability to know what questions to ask, to determine the integrity of sources of information, and to distinguish between documented and undocumented data.
Engage in reflective thought. Middle grades students need to understand the processes involved in using their developing intellectual abilities effectively. They can do so by reflecting on their own experiences, thereby gaining an understanding of others. Standards-based education pays specific attention to the knowledge and skills and the core values on which a democratic society must depend, including tolerance, honesty, and respect for others.4

Taking Center Stage – Act II (TCSII)

A Portal for Middle Grades Educators

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A Middle School Culture Supporting Standards-Based Education