Too Much Caffine...

Keynote Speaker
This conference was headlined Linda Perlstein, author of Not Much Just Chillin’: The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers. Perlstein was a journalist with the Washington Post for ten years before leaving to write NMJC. The book follows the lives of five middle schoolers and focuses on five different aspects of middle school life - Lily and friendship, Eric and schoolwork, Jimmy and puberty, Elizabeth and her parents, and Jackie and her ‘crushes’.

Perlstein had a lot of interesting things to say about the development of students during this time period, which is the greatest period of development other than infancy. For instance, because their muscles are growing faster than their bones it physically hurts for students to sit still in their desks for the entire class period. Also, the frontal lobe of the brain is still developing which means that middle schooler’s ability to reason, organize, and make judgements is also still developing.

The most interesting piece of advice for dealing with middle schoolers that I thought Perlstein had was that students need to be learning to take responsibility for themselves during this time and that parents who constantly try to make life easier for their children are not teaching them to be able to do things for themselves. She gave the example of a parent who on most levels seemed like a teacher’s dream: supportive, interested, and actively involved in their child’s education. On multiple occasions Perlstein observed a parent asking the teacher, “What are you doing to help my child learn this? What else are you doing? What you’re doing isn’t working for her...” Sounds nice...however, Perlstein also witnessed the teacher in question try multiple techniques and spend a great deal of time with the student, while the student either didn’t pay attention, didn’t try to learn, and simply blew-off the teacher’s extra work. When the teacher tried to explain this to the parent, the parent was unwilling to see that the problem was with the student not taking responsibility for any part of their learning. The teacher said this happens often in middle to upper-middle class schools and that when parents teach their children that nothing is their fault, or their responsibility, or force them to work for anything in their academic lives, it produces a heightened sense of entitlement in every aspect of the student’s lives.

I’d never thought of a problem with parents a that end of the spectrum. So often teachers are taught to expect uninvolved parents. I never realized the other end could provide challenges too.

Breakout Session
One of the breakout sessions I went to focused on differentiation strategies in the classroom. The presenter, Jacque Melin, defined differentiation as the recognition of and commitment to plan for student differences. She stressed that the commitment to planning for differentiation is more important the being able to recognize differences in students.

Melin identified the three pieces of differentiation as; on-going assessment, flexible grouping according to readiness, interest, and learning profile, and choices of content, process, and product.

Assessment is important to know where each of is with each new subject being studied. Students that have a great deal of previous knowledge about a subject should be held to a higher standard than students who have no knowledge of the subject. That way, each child is learning something new.

Flexible grouping, Melin stressed, is not tracking in any way, shape, or form. Groups are made up of all different levels of skill, interest and learning styles. That way students can both learn from each other and teach each other while working together.

Giving students choice is necessary for amount of student interest, and the more a student is interested in a project, the harder they will work. Students can be differentiated by choice of subject studied, the way a subject is studied, or the finished product a student will turn in.

A handout was given during this session with internet resources on differentiation such as:
www.piecesoflearning.com
www.ascd.org
http://www.lakelandschools.org/EDTECH/Differentiation/hom...
http://www.wilmette39.org/cd39/definition.html



Breakout Session
Another breakout session I attended focused on encouraging writing in all subjects. The presenters suggested that writers, “learn to write by writing and then reading what they have written”. They shared strategies on incorporating writing into the classroom as well as outlined the importance of process writing and writing workshop.

One suggestion that the presenters gave was to have students keep a reflection journal. This would be a place for students to practice writing and get out ideas in a non-threatening way and could be used for each subject. They could be prompted with things such as, “What did you learn? What did you find interesting? What are you still confused about?” Students could partner up to share their reflections with each other.

Another suggestion was to use current events, which speaker Linda Perlstein observed students are extremely interested in, to teach students to summarize, give an opinion, and examine why. Writing a letter to the newspaper, or to a city official or politician were other suggestions for writing within the social studies subject.

In science students could write lab reports and directions for procedures. In math students can write explanations of how they reached an answer, write investigations of how math relates to their lives (music, money, sports stats etc.) or write word problems for each other.

The presenters suggestion the website www.readwritethink.org to find lesson plans that work to incorporate writing in all subjects.