When middle school teachers and leaders commit themselves to being responsive to the personal concerns of adolescents and the social concerns of their community, it results in opportunities to build capacity in students to be agents of change. This article captures the story of one school's process in designing and implementing a yearlong…

This dissertation explored the roles schools can play in the successful outcomes of large carnivore or keystone reintroduction projects. Schools are more than centers for knowledge acquisition--they connect their community and disseminate information quickly to a wide audience. This study took place in California's Eastern Sierra Nevada, a…

In this article, the author discusses how she developed an innovative, interdisciplinary unit in eighth-grade English that links with the history teacher's Civil War studies. When constructing lesson plans, the author needed to rely on her sympathetic connection with students. To determine the best way to help students learn, the author had to ask…

"We are on the eve of total contamination," said an eighth grade "toxicologist" at a mock town meeting at Mount Baker Middle School in Mount Vernon, Washington. The meeting was the culmination of a month-long investigation by students to determine why some of the townspeople were getting sick. During the unit, students used skills from several…

A time of upheaval and innovation, the American Colonial Period (1600-1775) was marked by New World settlers' struggles to adapt to a life that lacked anything familiar or prefabricated. The period provides a rich opportunity to study the contributions of the colonists across multiple disciplines. In the fall of 2003, a team of eighth-grade…