More about Middle School - an article for Dunia

This is a recent article I wrote for Dunia, a magazine published by UWCSEA. You can find the digital version here. The version below is the original which was clipped slightly to fit into Dunia.

It follows nicely from my reflections in my last post about the changing nature of teaching and learning in Middle Schools.

Reading and Writing Workshop in the Middle School at East

“Do you like the rhythm of this?” asks Ali, as he turns to his partner.

“Yeah, but the mentor text is shorter, maybe you could cut out a few words.”

The two boys look again at the lead they’ve been using as a model: There’s no dignity in poverty. They compare their writing to the mentor text discussing what they’ve been learning about meter and rhyme and the need for a catchy phrase to help anchor their audience’s attention. After a moment more of discussion, they return to the speeches they are writing as a part of their study of the Grade 6 Development Unit.

This style of learning will be familiar to parents who have had children come through the Primary School as UWCSEA East. The “Workshop” approach uses a combination of very structured “mini-lessons” mixed with sustained periods of time for students to write and conference with their teacher and student partners. At the heart of “Workshop” is the belief that ‘children want to write’ and that instruction around writing should be very focussed and succinct leaving time for students to apply and consolidate skills.

In our Primary School, reading instruction takes a similar form with focussed lessons on particular skills and an emphasis on building student’s reading volume and stamina. The teacher’s key objective is to help the students find the right book for their reading ability and interests and to keep them reading.

Learning in High School English classes can look quite different to this. In High School students will spend sustained periods of time in whole class discussion around one common novel and teaching points will often come organically from this discussion. Writing becomes increasingly focused on the essay form and feedback will focus as much on the student’s ideas as it does on the craft of writing. This transition from learning in Primary Schools to High Schools is sometimes described as the difference between “learning to read and write and reading and writing to learn”.

What should reading and writing instruction look like in the Middle School?

Middle School is, of course, in the middle and we need to do a bit of both. Middle School students have a very particular set of developmental needs and learning instruction needs both to recognise what is unique to early adolescents and also where students are in their journey through the curriculum. Over the past twelve months, Middle School English teachers have been working with our colleagues in Primary and High school to decide how best to build on the success of the Workshop approach in Primary School as we prepare students for High School. UWCSEA’s English Standards and Benchmarks describe what we should teach; our discussions have centered on articulating how best to deliver this curriculum. What has resulted is a plan to extend the Columbia University “Workshop” approach up through Middle School but with modifications to meet the needs of our particular circumstances here at UWCSEA East. We have been trialling many of the teaching strategies from Workshop already and parents will already notice many similarities in the way writing is taught between Primary and Middle Schools.

The big challenge in our planning has been around reading. By Grade 6 or 7 students are classified as “independent” readers meaning that, whilst they need guidance in their reading choices, they don’t need the same kinds of support in learning how to read.

A lot of our discussion has been about how to encourage good independent reading habits when the diversity of demands on students’ time are increasing. The establishment of a dedicated Middle School section in the Senior Library has certainly helped, but we have also decided to establish classroom libraries in all Middle School English classrooms and High School is exploring a similar approach. The emphasis here is on maintaining stamina and engagement in a wider range of novels to supplement the common class texts that students study in Grades 7 through to 12.

As you can see in the photograph accompanying this article, students still share texts in the Middle School. One important insight into the complexities of Development comes from the novels that describe the experience of poverty and these Grade 6 students are sharing their understandings through their Literature Circle discussion. They will use what they are learning in their writing as well, building both from the ideas in the text and also learning from the skills the writer uses to construct his narrative.

Reading and Writing Workshop supports a rich environment for learning; we believe it provides the best foundation for building readers and writers who are skilled, confident and capable - ready to face the many complex communication challenges they have ahead of them.

More about curriculum - the what, how and why of subject English

The last two years have been the only two years in my teaching career when I haven't taught Grade 12 English or Literature alongside my Middle School classes. I miss the energy and momentum of this final year; it's hard work keeping up with the kids and making sure that I have given them the best chance to demonstrate their skills in the final exam, but it's very rewarding.

What has surprised me about teaching only Middle School (G6, 7 and 8) at UWCSEA is how much harder it has been. At Grade 12 I had to think deeply about texts and how to connect students to the ideas but what I taught and what the students needed to be able to do was clearly defined - this part of the learning didn't require much thinking at all.

At Middle School we have to think not just about the "what" of our teaching, but also the "how" and the "why". Over the last 15 years, Middle Schools around the world have been going through a curriculum revolution and it occurs to me that only now are the many pieces of the new understandings about what it means to teach young adolescents coming together. We began with research into the unique developmental needs of adolescents. Concurrently curricula authorities began looking at benchmarking and sequencing K to 10 curricula. As these two pieces come together, Middle School teachers find ourselves at the pointy edge of a new set of curriculum understandings. Grade 12 students have a skill-set not too far from my own; thinking my way through how a Grade 7 student might best grasp an idea takes considerable imagination and energy.

I  articulated some of these ideas this week in response to a question from a parent about why we don't do more essay writing in Middle School. Here's what I wrote:

As you may know, UWCSEA made the decision a few years ago to review our curriculum and develop Standards and Benchmarks for a unique UWCSEA curriculum. What we found as we compared English curricula from around the world and looked at our own teaching practice, was that, from Primary to IB, we were doing a good job of teaching students many of the writing skills associated with essays but that we needed more emphasis on the thinking skills. The students who are most successful with essay writing in Grade 12 and University are those who see the form as a media for thought and have the confidence to adapt and build their writing to match their own insights and the needs of their audience.

Writing a good essay is about a lot more than putting pen to paper. If students are to do this writing part well, they need some complex reading and thinking skills so that they have something meaningful and engaging to say. We know from the research into how Middle School students learn, that this is an important time for building student's thinking skills and autonomy. Students want to think for themselves but we also have to teach them how to support their ideas and arguments and how to engage critically and respectfully with the wider cultural world.

What our review of the curriculum has shown us is that students need this greater emphasis on critical reading and developing the confidence and autonomy to make claims about the underlying ideas in texts; equally important is the close attention to detail to find appropriate supporting evidence for the things they want to say. When students are able to do these things - and they have been doing a lot of them in G6, 7 and 8 - they are doing the very important "pre-writing" component of the essay writing process. As adults, we sometimes form the misconception that having an opinion about a text (or about a topic in Humanities or Science) is a relatively easy process. Reading deeply, independently and widely and finding meaningful and appropriate evidence to support your arguments is a difficult skill that requires significant time and effort to learn.

Which isn't to say that the writing component of an essay isn't also important. Knowing how to craft your words to say what you want to say clearly and appropriately is also a skill that needs to be taught and practiced. We do this mostly in smaller pieces of writing in the Middle School and often focus on forms other than essay writing recognising that students will have less and less space in the curriculum ahead to develop their capacity for creative writing and for writing in forms other than the essay, but that the best writers are those who can paint from a wide palette of skills. 

The writing mechanics for producing an essay are not, of themselves, terribly difficult but if we focus on them too early, students write essays that are hollow and dispiriting. If we can prepare our Middle School students to be careful thinkers who are learning to experiment and craft language, then our High School colleagues have the foundations they need to build strong academic writers in the final years.

As I sit here working on the next unit to teach my Grade 6 students, it occurs to me that it is no wonder it takes so much time and seems like such hard work. At UWCSEA we've articulated a clear and thoughtful description of what we think needs to be taught from K to 10. Translating these understandings into meaningful units which really prepare students well for each next step requires creativity, imagination and lots of time.

I miss the relative simplicity of Grade 12 but I'm relishing the challenge of Middle School.