At Mayfield Middle School, in order to create personalized and more meaningful learning experiences for the students, it was realized that a typical, traditional schedule was not always conducive to the types of learning experiences teachers wanted to create. Teachers had great ideas for projects and practices that would incorporate more critical…

In this article, the author shares her experience with a student whose parents had immigrated from China. One parent spoke English, but the other parent did not--which led to them sometimes feeling isolated from their child's educational experience. This understanding enabled the author to adapt her school's communication methods to better meet…

The importance of student engagement in schools is ever-increasing, particularly in the middle years area. Student achievement is directly linked to a student's level of engagement. Middle years teachers have a responsibility to work hard to understand the needs of their adolescent students, establish connections with their students, and provide…

Many teachers use problems set in real or imaginary contexts to make mathematics engaging, but these problems can also be used to anchor conceptual understanding. By constructing an understanding of mathematical ideas through solving problems in contexts that make sense to students, they have a better chance of actually understanding those…

Data-based individualization (DBI) is a framework that allows educators to make timely and informed decisions about student progress in academics or behavior. In this article, we focus on the DBI framework as applied to math intervention within a tiered support model for students experiencing math difficulty. We review how DBI starts with an…

Fostering a sense of belonging is fundamental to recommended organizational structures in middle grades schools including interdisciplinary teams, advisory relationships, flexible instructional schedules, and heterogeneous grouping. Middle grades educators must ensure that organizational structures support a sense of belonging and also…

Many preservice teacher candidates enter the classroom with limited understanding of their students' communities and neighborhoods. In this article, the authors share how they endeavored to support their candidates' understanding of community assets in one middle level teacher education (MLTE) course. The authors share the background for this…

Middle level scholars and educators have begun to examine dominant narratives and conceptual traditions around middle level history and philosophy with careful attention to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) (Harrison et al., 2018). Across these critical shifts in focus for middle grades education, myriad questions have arisen about…

In 2016, the Middle Level Education Research Special Interest Group (MLER SIG) of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) published "The MLER SIG Research Agenda," a white paper identifying critical issues and concerns facing the field of middle level education. Since its release, much has changed. This manuscript is a…

"Middle School Today" is clustered into major themes: adolescent development and identity, the adolescent learner, curriculum and instruction, and the contemporary middle school. The book describes the components related to adolescent development starting with simple principles from psychology regarding the physical, cognitive, and…

This evaluation brief describes how a district in receivership (state takeover) invested in PBIS to (a) enhance their systems to support staff, (b) implement evidence-based practices to support students, (c) use data to guide their implementation, and (d) ensure equitable supports for all students, including students with disabilities, to…

This article will simply expose tools and tricks for the reader to use if they so choose. The hope is that the reader relieves their fears of implementing the sports education model, applies this simplified model, and creates their own version to fit their specific classroom needs. This is not a one size fits all recipe for sports education, as it…

Since data collection technologies has become a part of daily life, measurement and data requirements now permeate many state mathematics standards, beginning as early as kindergarten and extending through high school. For example, the Standards for Mathematical Content, recommend that kindergarteners "describe and compare measurable…

With a renewed commitment to systematic efforts as school leaders use multi-tiered systems of supports to meet students' multiple needs as educators navigate through the pandemic era, it is helpful to learn from implementers who screened successfully prior to the pandemic. This model demonstration paper features the experiences of four middle and…

One of the greatest conceptual difficulties faced by middle level mathematics students is developing a rich understanding of irrational numbers that includes recognizing that irrational numbers are truly real numbers with an exact value and an exact place on the number line. Developing a deep conceptual understanding of irrational numbers is…