play

Wieden and Kennedy's brilliant "tag" advert for Nike from 2002

We took the "grandnephew" to a great playground today. He's four, but the people there who caught my attention were older - 10 years older, 12 years older. They were teens, but while the "teen" spaces in the park - the basketball court, the soccer field, even the skate zone - sat empty, the "Timber Town" playground held them all. Oh sure, two girls, working at being 'too cool,' sat swinging and gossiping, but all the rest, boys and girls, raced through the playground's features playing tag.

Timber Town, Zeeland, Michigan

They were no danger to the little kids. Not at all, and many of the kids were very young. Nor did they ever collide with a parent. Nor did anyone get hurt. But they played and played - inventing the rules, changing the rules as needed - but racing on and on.

And so once again I thought, why don't we have these playgrounds at middle schools and high schools? I know I'm not the only one who asks this - when I brought it up on Twitter, Royan Lee from Ontario mentioned taking his Middle Schoolers on a field trip to a playground, Chris Wejr mentioned how, in his community, when they converted an elementary school into a middle school, they very quickly removed the playground. I understood. Earlier in the day I had passed Holland (MI) New Tech High School (grades 6-12), also a converted elementary. Same thing there, the great playground that had sat behind the building has vanished. Turn 12 kids, and play time is gone, you're an adult now... unless, of course, you want to go to a movie, or choose your own class, or go out at night, or, or, or...

Secondary school playground design from Superblue Design of London (UK)
check out Knitting Nancy and this climber/shelter

Just last summer a Middle School Principal in Frankenmuth, Michigan had told me that virtually every one of his students had signed a petition asking for an "adventure playground" like those built at all the area's elementary schools.

Check out this "mobius strip" playground piece

Why? Where is recess between age 11 and age 18 when you get to university? Where are the playgrounds which encourage healthy play, healthy large muscle use, imagination, and adventure?

or this "ant farm for all ages"

Why do we keep on insisting that kids "grow up" so quickly? And why do we keep insisting that "growing up" means being stuck in a chair - an awful chair - all day?

- Ira Socol

Re-thinking the Middle School

We tend to do everything wrong for kids between 12 and 15. We pretend they are "adults" in terms of care needs and responsibilities, which they are not. We pretend they are children intellectually and physically, and in terms of rights, which they are not. We dismiss their capabilities and hype their potential as threats. We are cruel to them, and we send every possible message that we don't care about them.

And then we're surprised that they don't like us, or do what we want them to do.

We need to stop denying who these kids are..

I wonder if "we" - that collective we - are looking at these kids at all. Sometimes I wonder if we are interested at all.

I begin by being stunned that every teacher of teens has not read this National Geographic article on the New Science of the Teenage Brain. This was not written in "journal speak," it is not long, and yet, it captures the essence of contemporary brain research regarding teens, and a professional educator not reading it (since it is free to read), smacks of malpractice.

Here is a key passage from that article: "We're so used to seeing adolescence as a problem. But the more we learn about what really makes this period unique, the more adolescence starts to seem like a highly functional, even adaptive period. It's exactly what you'd need to do the things you have to do then." Followed by a critical analysis: "Let's start with the teen's love of the thrill. We all like new and exciting things, but we never value them more highly than we do during adolescence. Here we hit a high in what behavioral scientists call sensation seeking: the hunt for the neural buzz, the jolt of the unusual or unexpected ... Although sensation seeking can lead to dangerous behaviors, it can also generate positive ones: The urge to meet more people, for instance, can create a wider circle of friends, which generally makes us healthier, happier, safer, and more successful. This upside probably explains why an openness to the new, though it can sometimes kill the cat, remains a highlight of adolescent development. A love of novelty leads directly to useful experience. More broadly, the hunt for sensation provides the inspiration needed to "get you out of the house" and into new terrain, as Jay Giedd, a pioneering researcher in teen brain development at NIH, puts it."

National Geographic photo by Kitra Cahana

That teenage brain is supposed to be both sensation-seeking and dismissive of adult opinion. If, in evolutionary terms, the teenage brain did not do those things, ten-year-olds would remain ten-year-olds - emotionally, socially, cognitively. 

The problem is that, despite claims to the contrary, many, or most of the actions of "middle schools" seem to be designed to keep kids at age ten, and seem designed around only the idea of training compliance. But that is not what our kids need, and it really is not what our society needs.


The Re-Think

What kind of "school" would these early teenagers really need? What could it look like? How would it work?

Middle School often begins with the definite division of learning into so-called "content areas," an idea pushed firmly into law in the past twenty years with the myth of the "highly qualified teacher." Of course being a "highly qualified teacher" is not about subject/content knowledge, as anyone who has attended a university lecture can testify, it is about being a leading learner for a group of kids. But this "qualification" mentality - "subject area" mentality - is exactly the opposite of what kids, especially 12-14-year-olds, need. They need a holistic view of learning which encourages them to build bridges across knowledge areas, and across areas of the brain. 

no comment necessary...

Middle School also introduces an absurdly false concept of "adult responsibility" which tells kids that the adults in the school are clueless.We insist that every middle school kid "act like an adult" when it suits us, but never when it suits them, and if you have any memory at all, you know that every middle school kid knows this. "You're old enough to be responsible for yourself," counts when it comes to being marked "late" for class, but not if you are ever out of direct line of sight for a seated librarian. It counts when you get a grade but not when you ask to do something. It counts when they charge you adult admission to a theatre, but not when you want to see a film about high school. Of course it counts if you commit a crime, not if you want a drink.And Middle School starts with violating all sense of teenage time and space. The adolescent brain struggles with contemporary temporal standards - actually - most humans do, but 13-year-olds haven't yet been fully beaten into submission.

'"Bully," an documentary about the nation's teen-bullying epidemic, would exclude much of its intended school-aged audience if the Motion Picture Association of America refuses to ease its R rating"

So teens are either, depending on need and mood, in a great rush, or moving very slowly. Sometimes they run to things without much forethought, other times they need 15 minutes with a mirror, or staring out a window. Sometimes they're up at dawn, more often they really are not functioning before 10 in the morning. And in space, teens seem - to both my observations and memory - to need equal parts touching each other, and being quite isolated. They, and this seems especially true of today's more global teens, are not likely to tolerate the nonsensical Puritan "American Distance" (always an imposed value, never a natural one for most). They want real physical (not necessarily sexual) contact - perhaps because they do not get much of it from adults these days - and they need distance - "alone time" - for private processing.

Our Middle Schools frown on all of these needs. "We" don't tolerate time flexibility. "We" don't want kids touching. "We" don't want them off on their own.

In all, our Middle Schools are a recipe for disaster. And the recipe works in most places.

Our early adolescents need something completely different. They need schools designed for them, not for us. Schools designed for growth and learning, not compliance and conformity. Schools designed to build the skills teens need, not designed to be the holding cages we have created.

First of all, teens need ownership, they need to believe that spaces and programs are "their's" not "our's." Is that really such a foreign concept?

Well, begin by stopping your references to how your middle schoolers don't respect "your things" or "your room." I'm sorry folks, few prisoners respect their prison - and prison, according to Barack Obama's State of the Union speech and the statements of many other "leaders," is exactly what school is for most adolescents.

School as a learning studio suite... Brussels, Belgium

If your school is not a "prison," if students are in control of their time, space, comfort, academic choices, tools, and methods - like adults - then students will have "ownership" of their environment, and like most of God's creatures, they will respect that environment. And you know what? These kids have nothing to prove to you... it is you who have to prove your trust and value to them. Remember, their brains are already designed to ignore the older generation, so it might be wise to stop giving them reasons to do just that.

Classroom furniture from Herman Miller

Second, teens need comfort. Really. Comfort. Just put that word at the top of your list. Not your comfort, teachers - administrators - legislatures, their comfort. ""We too often consult our own convenience, rather than the comfort, welfare, or accommodation of our children," William Alcott wrote in 1832. This means choices in seating - real choices - including standing or lying down. It means choices in work surfaces, choices in tools, choices in time.

William A. Alcott
"the comfort, welfare, or
accommodation of
our children"

If this was 1832... and it was, in the book which "designed" the American classroom: "Again—no provision has been made for the pupils standing at higher desks a part of the time, because it is believed they may sit without injury for about half an hour at a time, and then, instead of standing, they ought to walk into the garden, or exercise in the play-ground a few moments, either with or without attendants or monitors. Sitting too long, at all events, is extremely pernicious...

"The relative position of each pupil should occasionally be changed from right to left, otherwise the body may acquire a change of shape by constantly turning or twisting so as to accommodate itself to the light, always coming from a particular window, or in the same general direction.

"If a portion of the play-ground is furnished with a roof, the pupils may sometimes be detached by classes, or otherwise, either with or without monitors, to study a short time in the open air, especially in the pleasant season. This is usually as agreeable to them, as it is favorable to health. A few plain seats should be placed there. A flower garden, trees, and shrubs, would furnish many important lessons of instruction. Indeed, I cannot help regarding all these things as indispensable, and as consistent with the strictest economy of space, material, and furniture, as a judicious arrangement of the school-room itself.

"Sensible objects, and every species of visible apparatus, including, of course, maps, charts, and a globe, are also regarded as indispensably necessary in illustrating the sciences. They not only save books, time, and money, as has been abundantly proved by infant schools, but ideas are in this way more firmly fixed, and longer retained. In the use of books, each child must have his own ; but in the use of sensible objects and apparatus, one thing, in the hands of the instructer, will answer the purposes of a large school, and frequently outlast half a dozen books," how have we gotten so stupid in the 180 years since?

Finally, adolescents need a curriculum which engages. If you read that National Geographic article you will learn all about adolescent decision making, and, you'll realize that every kid in that Middle School is making perfectly logical decisions about what you, the teacher and administrator, are offering.

Is there any reason that any adolescent would care about what you are offering?

This is a microeconomic decision. For anything we do, there is an opportunity cost. Even the decision to pay attention to the teacher for five minutes has to be weighed against the other things you might be doing during that five minutes - daydreaming about the boy/girlfriend, wondering who'll get into the NCAA tournament, imagining tonight's soccer game, considering a more interesting subject. If what you are "selling" isn't understood as worth that five minutes, your students would have to be fools to listen to you. And they are not fools.

In a favorite school moment, a math teacher walked up to a school librarian and complained, "This kid drives me crazy, he'd rather go to Saturday School than come to my class." The librarian looked at the teacher and said, "Well, you have to think about that."

Indeed. As I once wrote in a short story, "They all say I "make bad decisions." Everybody says that. But they're wrong about that too. I make decisions they don't like, but they're not bad." Keep in mind, there are two sides to decision-making, and "reasonable alternatives" lead to better decisions.

So if you offer adolescents project-based learning which connects with their passions, you may suddenly find a bunch of kids lined up and ready to work. If you offer them pointless arithmetic, or books no one really wants to read, they will - they should - make other choices.

The time to change is now. Every year, in almost every place, 5th graders doing great work turn into sullen, unhappy 6th graders who fail those high-stakes tests. That's not genetics, and its not hormones, that is "us," with our high-school-styled, classroom-changing, grim-corridoring, bell-ringing, subject-divided, planner-driven, recess-missing Middle Schools.

So before another school year begins, if you are in the business of Middle School, there is probably damn little that you are doing that shouldn't be changed. And there are really no good excuses for not making those changes.

You're the adults, right?

- Ira Socol

Schools that matter

People who've heard me talk about middle schools have probably heard me say something like, "this age group has a million legitimate things to worry about every day, and none of them are in our curriculum."

I say this repeatedly because (a) I believe it to be true - that the evolutionary purpose of adolescence is unrelated to our program of schooling - and that (b) those who misunderstand this drive kids between, say, 12 and 25 crazy - and not in good ways - with special damage happening to the 12-16-year-old group, many of whom lose complete interest in what we call "education" and never really return.

I sometimes put this in microeconomic terms. Attending school, just "paying attention" in school, has an opportunity cost for kids. If what we offer is not perceived as having sufficient value to them, they will either not show up - if their community culture tolerates that - or they will mentally 'check out' and drift through the school day - investing in other thoughts - until they can leave.

What do adolescents need to work on? Primarily understanding themselves and their place in their future society. Understanding their bodies and brains, and how those will work for them or limit them in that future. Understanding the social webs which will define them. Discovering their passions through trial and error. And sucking in information in ways the typical educated adult can no longer remember.

Adolescence is not a problem, it is a human necessity. (Photos by Kitra Cahana for National Geographic)

This month's National Geographic Magazine - which is one of those things everyone should support, by the way - offers a must read for adolescent educators. The New Science of the Teenage Brain debunks most of what has been said about adolescents in the past fifty years, and offers those of us in education a new way to begin comprehending our work.

"[The "unfinished brain" studies of the past two decades] help explain why teens behave with such vexing inconsistency: beguiling at breakfast, disgusting at dinner; masterful on Monday, sleepwalking on Saturday. Along with lacking experience generally, they're still learning to use their brain's new networks. Stress, fatigue, or challenges can cause a misfire. Abigail Baird, a Vassar psychologist who studies teens, calls this neural gawkiness—an equivalent to the physical awkwardness teens sometimes display while mastering their growing bodies.

"The slow and uneven developmental arc revealed by these imaging studies offers an alluringly pithy explanation for why teens may do stupid things like drive at 113 miles an hour, aggrieve their ancientry, and get people (or get gotten) with child: They act that way because their brains aren't done! You can see it right there in the scans! [this also provides an easy excuse for both a legal system and school discipline codes which deny adolescents rights and privileges but holds them responsible for their actions - is]

"This view, as titles from the explosion of scientific papers and popular articles about the "teen brain" put it, presents adolescents as "works in progress" whose "immature brains" lead some to question whether they are in a state "akin to mental retardation."

"The story you're reading right now, however, tells a different scientific tale about the teen brain. Over the past five years or so, even as the work-in-progress story spread into our culture, the discipline of adolescent brain studies learned to do some more-complex thinking of its own. A few researchers began to view recent brain and genetic findings in a brighter, more flattering light, one distinctly colored by evolutionary theory. The resulting account of the adolescent brain—call it the adaptive-adolescent story—casts the teen less as a rough draft than as an exquisitely sensitive, highly adaptable creature wired almost perfectly for the job of moving from the safety of home into the complicated world outside."

As I worked my way through this article - celebrating the kind of "confirmation bias" we all love - I thought about another bit of research I recently read. Neuroscientist Alison Gopnik writes that, "there are more synaptic connections in baby brains than in adult brains," and shows that as our ability to "focus" in what we see as "traditional ways" (the ways of the Industrial Age) strengthens, our ability to perceive all the rest of our environment, truly our ability to learn, diminishes. "As we know more," she says, "we see less."

This is essential stuff. Basically, Gopnik reports from fMRI work, that the rationalist modern educational structure is all about taking humans who see "everything" and turning them into focused or hyper-focused workers capable of doing just a few things very well.

"...in the psychological case even more than the physical one, what counts as a problem depends on the context. When nobody read, dyslexia wasn't a problem. When most people had to hunt, a minor genetic variation in your ability to focus attention was hardly a problem, and may even have been an advantage. When most people have to make it through high school, the same variation can become a genuinely life-altering disease. To say this doesn't imply, as [author and New York Times blogger Judith] Warner seems to think, that these are made-up problems, rather than real neurological ones. But it does suggest that changing the social context in which children grow up can be as important as directly changing their brain chemistry." (Gopnik, 2010)

"As we know more, we see less."

For me, this suggests why adults working in schools, all schools, often fail to perceive either the physical or the human environment surrounding them in real ways. The adults have been trained relentlessly in what "school" means. They come for a purpose - no, it is not usually a paycheck Mr. Gates and Mr. Duncan - to "educate" children, and they have also been trained relentlessly in what "educate" means. The adults see the task in front of them, and they see the impediments to that task, but they do not see the rest.

If your focus is on delivering content,
you will see nothing else

This is why school adults "see" much less bullying than kids see, in study after study. And why adults think they intervene to stop bullying far more than their students see them doing that. It is why adults stop seeing how depressing most school entries and corridors are, or how distracting fluorescent lighting can be, or how uncomfortable kids are in school chairs. It is why adults have no idea what is happening in classrooms below the desk level, or why I have been in middle school and high school classrooms where the only students awake and asking questions were called "ADHD" by teachers. Those teachers - you know the ones - who view themselves as UPS drivers delivering content - are focused on only that, and even questions seem impediments to what they believe their job focus is.

These two sets of brain studies come together in a critical way in how we educate children. Especially in our "secondary schools."

Why would you move here..

There was a reason the world of the Protestant Reformation and the Industrial Revolution wanted single-focus individuals. As Max Weber suggested long ago, one of the missions of nascent Protestantism/Capitalism was to break the complex ties between a person and their community and their environment. Labor could not "move freely" to where it needed to be concentrated if people were deeply committed to their families, communities, and the natural world they had been born into.

How could you get folks to move from places where everything they see is important to them - their extended families, their neighbors, the way their church bells sound, the way the sun rises over the eastern rim, the way the salt smells in the air - and get them to move to London and Newcastle-upon-Tyne or Hamburg and Berlin or to the mines of Silesia and Pennsylvania - unless you dramatically narrow their focus to (a) money, and (b) a single task which allows them to work all day doing one thing?

...from here, unless single-focus became important?

The secondary education system we live with today is designed to still do exactly this. The reward isn't money, but it is the same reductionist kind of currency, grades. And the focus isn't quite yet single, rather it is "serial single focus" - we work on one thing at a time, blowing our factory whistles to indicate the changes.

And we continue this despite knowing that the world, and even the capitalist world of work, has changed beyond the comprehension of most in education, despite all those who fight back by trying to claim bizarre things like "multitasking is a myth."

Which creates two problems - first, we continue to prepare coal miners, tens of millions of coal miners - and second, this means that we fight every day against the natural evolutionary means for which adolescence was created in the human genome.

While we want to "focus" them through sensory deprivation, the brains of our kids want to learn focus through the processes of risk and experimentation.

"[This drive for the new learning experiences] explains why an openness to the new, though it can sometimes kill the cat, remains a highlight of adolescent development. A love of novelty leads directly to useful experience. More broadly, the hunt for sensation provides the inspiration needed to "get you out of the house" and into new terrain, as Jay Giedd, a pioneering researcher in teen brain development at NIH, puts it.

"Also peaking during adolescence (and perhaps aggrieving the ancientry the most) is risk-taking. We court risk more avidly as teens than at any other time. This shows reliably in the lab, where teens take more chances in controlled experiments involving everything from card games to simulated driving. And it shows in real life, where the period from roughly 15 to 25 brings peaks in all sorts of risky ventures and ugly outcomes. This age group dies of accidents of almost every sort (other than work accidents) at high rates. Most long-term drug or alcohol abuse starts during adolescence, and even people who later drink responsibly often drink too much as teens. Especially in cultures where teenage driving is common, this takes a gory toll: In the U.S., one in three teen deaths is from car crashes, many involving alcohol.

"Are these kids just being stupid? That's the conventional explanation: They're not thinking, or by the work-in-progress model, their puny developing brains fail them.

"Yet these explanations don't hold up. As Laurence Steinberg, a developmental psychologist specializing in adolescence at Temple University, points out, even 14- to 17-year-olds—the biggest risk takers—use the same basic cognitive strategies that adults do, and they usually reason their way through problems just as well as adults. Contrary to popular belief, they also fully recognize they're mortal. And, like adults, says Steinberg, "teens actually overestimate risk."

"So if teens think as well as adults do and recognize risk just as well, why do they take more chances? Here, as elsewhere, the problem lies less in what teens lack compared with adults than in what they have more of. Teens take more risks not because they don't understand the dangers but because they weigh risk versus reward differently: In situations where risk can get them something they want, they value the reward more heavily than adults do." (National Geographic)

"Cars and parties, first cigarettes and first dates, school demands and free time—teens encounter risks both large and small every day, and their choices can be puzzling at times. Think of it as an equation, says psychologist Laurence Steinberg, where consequences aren't given the weight they should be. And when teens are around friends, that throws off the equation even more."  Really? "should be"? If humans worried more about consequences than rewards, we'd still be living in the jungle with the bonobos.

This, of course, is both good and essential, as well as completely at odds with the "safety" we prize in our secondary schools and our middle class homes. We need big rewards to push us out of childhood, whether we are the Decorah, Iowa eagles (who hung around the family nest getting fed by their parents for a full season after learning to fly) or humans. And we probably need huge rewards if we are to give up the beauty and possibilities of "seeing everything" in exchange for any kind of focus.

The approval of our peers may be part of a "big enough" reward, but neither grades nor adult approval are going to touch that status for most kids. ("...teens gravitate toward peers for another, more powerful reason: to invest in the future rather than the past. We enter a world made by our parents. But we will live most of our lives, and prosper (or not) in a world run and remade by our peers," says David Dobbs in National Geographic)Which is why, whatever "we" say, most kids simply don't care - we are just not compelling enough in any way.

Now, on Monday, as you re-enter your secondary school, especially your middle school, try to bring your brain back - try to see as if you are ADHD yourself - try to take in the whole scene and see it as your students do. Are you offering their evolutionary brains anything they crave?

- Ira Socol

A Middle School that Works

Matt Groening, of The Simpsons and School Is Hell, describes middle school as "the lowest circle of hell." And that is generally true. No, most are not as in need of implosion as the one Principal Anthony Orsini made famous in 2010, but our way of education tweens and early teens is both awful and awfully ineffective.

At a New Years Eve party last night an elementary school principal friend bemoaned the middle school "her kids" would end up attending, and she is right. All over I see fifth graders doing brilliant, creative stuff and sixth graders sitting in rooms bored to death.

So, for Dave Britton's Part Two of Blogging for Real Reform, I want to suggest an option.

See the Links Collected Here at Cooperative Catalyst.

Let's create a new kind of Middle School. Let's try changing everything. After all, walk into your nearby middle school next week, and ask, honestly, what have we got to lose?

Project-Based Everything

The middle school is really just the junior high school continued, and that was always a bad idea. Kids stumble through a bizarrely carved up yet age-dependent curriculum, and nothing could be less appropriate. There is no age range with a greater range of individual skills no matter the birth date, and there is no age range where getting kids interested in school is harder. After all, kids 11-14 have a million things, really important things, to learn - about themselves, society, life, their bodies, and almost none of those things are taught in schools.

Meanwhile, the grades, the subject areas, the sports teams, the honor rolls - even the corridors - of middle school are essentially designed (a) to encourage bullying, and (b) to make kids see school as worthless and irrelevant.

So I want to divide the Middle School Grades - 6, 7, 8 - into 9 large, and 3 "mini" project-based experiences. Project-based experiences which kids choose. Completely interdisciplinary experiences.

Kids would pick three 10-week experience and one shorter experience for each year, and that is what they would do all day. Teams of teachers would join together to offer these options. It could range from building a Habitat for Humanity house to making videos to putting on The Oresteia. Or you could be restoring a 1959 Studebaker, watching vampire movies, or studying the planets. In everyone you can easily include language, history, math, sciences, foreign languages, physical exercise, music, art. If you can't, you need to re-think your career path.


In each case students should stay in project teams, and teachers should come to them, or teachers (preferably) should lead the students beyond the school's walls, both virtually and in reality.

Individually crafted

But none of this could be "industrially designed." In every team you'd have 11-year-olds and 14-year-olds. In every team you'd have mature kids and immature kids. In every team you'd have varying capabilities. And in every team you'd have kids with various prior experiences. If you were building that Habitat house, some kids might need measuring, others would need algebra. Some might need the local history of the neighborhood others might need a complex investigation of human housing options. Some might need to write letters to the future homeowners, others to email the materials suppliers.

Team-based, project-based learning allows this - a classroom full of desks with a common curriculum does not.

Team focused

Nothing is more important in this age range than learning how to build effective interpersonal relationships while learning how to appreciate different types of people and different skillsets. So the team-based school, rather than encouraging bullying, encourages interdependence. Kids will need each other, work with each other, form "tribal" links across patterns.

And students would be seen in very different ways by teachers, who would see these students across circumstances and skill capabilities.

Individual Education Plans for all

Within all this, each student needs an individual plan and portfolio, tracking what they've accomplished, and what they need to do. We should not choose projects for the students, that's their's to do, but within projects teachers would need to help students grasp the skills they need. This would be true for every student, not just "special ed." And speaking of special ed, of course this school creates an atmosphere built on full inclusion for virtually all students.

"Extra" curricular

It is vital that the "extras" - athletics, band, orchestra, Odyssey of the Mind, chess club, whatever - be treated fully equally by the school. No cuts in sports, no auditions for band. If you need four basketball teams, go for T-shirts instead of uniforms and have four teams. Don't let boosters/parents support one extra-curricular activity over another. Don't allow one team's lockers to get decorated without the same treatment for every kid doing anything beyond the "school day."

Hard to do?

This is a massive change, but it is neither expensive nor difficult beyond the very hard concept of re-thinking. You don't need new walls, you don't need new teachers, you may not even need much new equipment - consider mixed and handheld technology and especially allowing/encouraging student-owned devices. You needn't change bus routes or build charter schools...

And yet, within those existing walls, with that existing staff, you will have changed education completely, and offered real choice - student choice, not parental choice.

And if you wanted to, I guarantee, you could be up and rolling with this by Fall 2011.

- Ira Socol

A Half-Dozen Things Your Middle School Should be "Teaching"

My experience in school from the age of, say 11 or 12, to 14 often leads me to the conclusion that the best "middle school" would be almost no school at all. Kids have so much to learn during this period of their lives, but almost none of "that" is academic. They need to learn how to function as independent "adults." They need to learn their bodies. They need to discover the world. They need to pursue passions of all kinds. They need to learn how to hurt and how to recover. And they need to begin to imagine their future.

With all that to do there is precious little time for reading nonsense like A Separate Peace or caring about Algebra, and even less time for putting up with the arcane rules and schedules of early secondary education.

So "middle schools" don't work. They are way too often brutal places of boredom mixed with terror.

If summer (and, not counting Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, etc, it is summer) is a "rethink" time, let's rethink some of this. We won't tear these buildings down before September, we can't even reconceive the whole curriculum, but here are six things we could do for the next school year.

Middle School

One: Teach kids how to "hide" when they need to. This seems counter-intuitive for schools which are constantly trying to get kids to "man up" and "pull yourself through it," but we all need to hide at times, to escape, and whether we're good at that or not has a big impact on our success in life.

How and when to disappear, to tune out, to self-protect, is a crucial adult skill. We learn to do via various tabs on our laptops - flicking between what we're doing and what we're "supposed" to be doing. We learn to do it by closing our office doors or putting the phone on "private." We learn to do it with long walks to the toilet, or copy machine. We learn to do it with tasks around the house. If we have nothing else (and we usually give these young teens nothing else), we learn to do it through cigarette time (nurses and doctors all used to smoke simply because this "required" you to leave the patient floor) or by disappearing into alcohol or marijuana hazes.

So let's get better at this. I think every middle school classroom needs three things it doesn't usually have: (A) A big soft chair facing the window, (B) A small tent, (C) "Do Not Disturb" signs kids can put in front of them ("No being called on, no being asked to read, no involvement in the moment's class activities"). All of these are escape options, chances to hide, to take the pressure off, without needing to flee the classroom. They shouldn't be used constantly, and they shouldn't be used inappropriately, but, of course, that's what we're teaching.

Remember, they need to hide. Sitting in class for 45-90 minutes is almost impossible for these kids (or for me), and middle school hallways are no break in a tension-filled day.

Two: Teach kids how to dream big. Subject learning in these years does not work unless it feeds into a framework built on a student's imagined sense of the future. They will, in effect, learn what they think they need to know. So the only way to encourage diverse learning is to encourage big, diverse dreams. Dreaming big requires project-based-learning where students can chase their passions and discover what lies along the path to that future. And project-based-learning, in most middle schools, requires faculty cooperation so kids can work on one project across the curriculum. I don't care if the passion is video games, I can bring math, history, language, biology, chemistry, physics and more into play, if you just toss out "textbook order" and start working from the learner's perspective.

Three: Teach kids how to manipulate their world. Chris Lehmann of Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy still thinks "technology should be like oxygen, invisible." I could not possibly disagree more. I believe Heidegger was right, and that "technology is how we manipulate our world." And if technology is how we manipulate our world, we have to understand how technology works, or we have no hope of ever producing students who will invent new technologies.

So students need choices, and time to investigate, and time to play. Toolbelt Theory is not just a "special needs" thing - it is a fundamental vision of how to help all students become better tool users, because the thing which makes human's special on this planet is our constant invention of new tools (many animals use tools, but their tools do not evolve).

So, toss out that pre-designed middle-school-planner. Stop buying all of one kind of computer. Consider different kinds of desks and chairs. Give kids choices and help them find what works for themselves, for each given task.

Four: Teach kids real skills. The old American "Junior High" used to have lots of different curricular components. For many of "us," shop was the best part of the day. In my Junior High I learned to been wood, to wire electricity, to arc weld, to replace sparkplugs, and to cast aluminum. I built a radio and a coffee table. Barry Gundelach built a rowboat. Other people ("girls") learned to cook and sew and stuff.

At some point we decided that none of that was important, and now we have a nation which needs a class at Home Depot in order to replace a light switch.

I think these skills were, and are, important. Not just as survival skills - I not only know what to do if I have to do it myself, I know whether someone doing the job for me is ripping me off or not - but also as windows into possibility. Why can't our students aspire to be chefs? Or electricians? Or welders? Or auto repair techs? Or fashion designers? Or whatever? By refusing to include these skills in our middle school curriculum we rob our children of this moment of introduction and this moment of aspiration.

So skip those silly study hours, or even some "enrichment" hours, and get your kids outside and dirty.

Five: Teach kids how to control their day. Young teens are caught in a bizarre middle ground. Remember when you were old enough to pay full price but too young to do "anything" without a parent? It not only sucks, it is a really bad training system. Kids learn that life is totally unfair. And if life is totally unfair then choices like cheating or giving up are perfectly acceptable decisions to make.

So let's begin to help kids be responsible for their world. Not through negative grading practices ("You forgot your homework!"), but through real world choices. Do I want to listen to my music while I work on stuff? Do I want to work in a group or on my own? Do I want to hand in assignments on paper, or via email, or via Google Docs? Do I want to sit on a chair, or sit on the floor, or stand up? Do I want to read on paper, on a computer, or on my phone? Do I decide that "I know this" and can thus "tune out" this lesson and work on something else?

Life not only becomes fairer when the critical comfort decisions are in your own hands, it becomes a valid learning experience as well. Kids learn what works for them and what doesn't. And the payoff for that learning is huge.

Six: Teach kids the value of global communication. I'm probably overly optimistic when I imagine a "post-nationalist" future, but sometimes when I see young Europeans gather, or I watch online teen conversations, I can see it - boundaries matter much less to this next generation, and ideas flow around the globe. We can encourage that, and we can offer it to all kids, even if their homes/families are disconnected.

Bring the globe into your classroom. If your school filters it (and you have tenure) tether your computer to your phone and bring the globe in. Introduce them to Twitter, to social bookmarking, to foreign newspapers and radio. Have people Skype into your class from other nations. Do Google Apps projects with schools across the sea. Visit history sites and museum sites from other continents.

And most of all, encourage the kids to do more of this on their own. They will not only grow up better educated and more prepared for their economic future, they will be much more open and tolerant.

That's my quick half dozen, feel free to add your own in the comments...


- Ira Socol