Expert Teaching and Successful Learning at the Middle Level: One Teacher's Story

Abstract

Reform proposals and educational treatises frequently focus on middle years as a time when schools should work to recapture students' interest in schools, shape young people's decisions about their future, and provide much needed guidance during what often are difficult, challenging times. Today's young face increasingly diffi cult conditions. Pressures to acquiesce to high-risk behaviors and to deal with the onset of puberty, frequent and pervasive threats of violence, impoverished living conditions, and dissolution of family and community are but a few of the challenges to a successful and smooth passage from adolescence to adulthood. Despite the fact that early adolescence is so crucial in determining the future success or failure of youth, a large number of today's middle level are simply unprepared for the challenging task of understanding, coping with, and effectively educating young adoles cents (McEwin, 1992, p. 369). Many middle level teach ers, who often see their assignment as a temporary one on their way to in a high school, lack teacher preparation specifically focused on young ado lescents. Turning Points, the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development's (1989) reform report, acknowledges the unique nature of middle level schools, teaching, and students and calls for middle grades schools that are staffed with teachers who are expert at young adolescents (p. 54). Although Turning Points makes some suggestions for teacher education, it does not attempt to define this requisite expertise; it merely acknowledges that dramatically improved out comes for young require individualized, responsive, and creative approaches to teaching (p. 54). Turning Points' authors call for schools (and implicitly teachers) that provide caring, supportive envi ronments that address the needs of the students they serve. They also define the I5-year-old which they envi sion as a result of their proposed transformation of mid dle level education. young person whom they pro pose would be intellectually reflective, en route to a life time of meaningful work, a good citizen, a caring and ethical individual, and a healthy person. authors write that, The challenge of the 1990s is to define and create the of and for young adolescents. . .that will yield mature young people of competence, compassion, and pfomise (p. 17). With that challenge in mind, I undertook a year long study to begin to define teachers who are expert at young adolescents and the structures of and learning that they employ. One avenue for clarifying that definition is by from and about excellent who already are addressing the needs of young adolescents, those who, by all accounts, are doing what needs to be done. In completing the study, I assumed that have a broad range of knowledge that guides their work and derives from practice. I also assumed that there is value in knowing and situations from the perspective of the class room teacher; therefore, the theoretical perspectives in which the study is grounded surround issues of class room teachers' personal practical knowledge (Connelly & Clandinin, 1986).