A new approach to the difficult middle school years
I once attended a back-to-school night where the school principal asked a big group of parents if anybody, given the chance, would return to middle school and take the chance to redo their lives. Not a single hand went up — and it’s not just because of bad memories of those difficult years. Parents know that even today nobody has figured out exactly how to educate middle schoolers, who are changing developmentally in unique ways. Iwrote a post about this issue last year, and here is a piece on a new approach to educating these students. It was written by Patrick Tolan, director of Youth-Nex at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.By Patrick Tolan
There is a troubling bias that most adults hold about adolescents, particularly in how we overlook the importance of the transition from elementary to middle school. It is a bias that goes beyond insensitivity and creates serious consequences — impeding education, styming
