Meet Me in the Middle Chapter 8

As a student in high school and middle school, I remember the idea of assessments (especially those of tests) being incredibly daunting. I had extremely bad test anxiety when in middle school and high school, I understood what I was learning, but the minute that I was left in silence to stare at a piece of paper in front of me with questions and value points indicated on the side, all the understanding went out the window. Many many times, I walked out of a test and as soon as I opened my notebook, I would remember the answer to a question that I had struggled on. Assessment was something that I, as a student, always dreaded, and I was certainly not the only one. I think, that if as a student I had been given more choices and was reminded that if I did poorly on an assessment, that it wouldn’t be the end of the world, I would have moved forward in school with much less anxiety and dread for these assessments.

One of my favorite things in this chapter was the antidote that Wormeli gives in the beginning about Danny, who composed a musical piece instead of writing a summary, because Wormeli knew that if Danny had been asked to write a summary, he would have failed, but Wormeli knew that Danny knew and understood the piece, so instead he was encouraged to do something that would properly show his understanding.

Another thing I loved in this chapter was the part that talks about how teachers should track progress, not just check at the end of the unit or semester. If we track student progress throughout a unit, and check in using conferences or small assignments, we can get a better understanding of what our students do and don’t understand, so we can help them in areas that they struggle with, before the end of the unit assessment.

Meet Me in the Middle Chapter 7

When I think about what I’m most nervous about in becoming a teacher, it’s not connecting with my students, or bonding with my fellow teachers, it’s making sure that the lesson I create can be understood by every student in my classroom. Differentiated instruction is something, that on paper, seems very simple, just insert different things into your lesson that everyone in your classroom can understand and learn, and remember. But, in reality, differentiated instruction is a beast that is hard to bring fully into the classroom and make work effectively. As a teacher, you can work for hours on a lesson, make sure that every different learning strategy has something in your lesson that they can use to absorb the information, but no matter how hard you work to include everyone, when it comes to bringing it into the classroom, it could easily fall apart at the seams.  Every year, as teachers, we’re going to have a completely new set of learners, some of them might be geniuses, with college reading levels and can compute mathematical problems way beyond their years, and others might be just starting out with chapter books, and still struggle with basic division, and we’ll have countless of students who fall somewhere in the middle.

As a teacher, this concept of not being accessible to everyone, and your lesson not being inclusive to everyone, in a scary idea. But Wormeli gives a few tips for teachers to carry with them, such as being empathetic towards all learners, be flexible with time and lessons, be willing to meet with students who are struggle, and being organized. While, this won’t automatically make us experts at differentiated instruction, it might make the whole task less daunting.

Meet Me in the Middle Chapter 6

Chapter six of Meet Me in the Middle is all about how we can hold our students accountable and how we can help them reach a higher standard of learning. There are multiple ways that Wormeli suggests doing this, and my favorite one that he talks about was the lack of extra credit assignments. By eliminating extra credit assignments, and instead encouraging students to edit work that they’ve already done, it pushes students to excel on the assignment the first time that they hand it in, instead of counting on extra credit or redoing the assignment to get the grade that they want. In that same vein, Wormeli also discusses just simply holding student work to higher value level, that way students will take their work more seriously, like telling students that their work is going to be on display, or published, they’ll work harder on it, feeling a sense of responsibility to the community.

Another thing I really enjoyed in this chapter was Wormeli’s discussion of risk taking. Sometimes by taking risks, we are betting on higher results, and sometimes it pays off. In the example he gives, Wormeli discusses an experience with a boy with Tourette’s playing the lead in the school play, and he performed the play brilliantly. As teachers, we have to take risks like these with our students sometimes, and sometimes they can pay off in our favor. By giving our students a big responsibility, or encouraging them to take a risk in which they might doubt themselves, we might get a result that we don’t expect.

Meet Me in the Middle Chapter 3 Synthesis

Chapter 3 of Meet Me in the Middle focused primarily on the brain of middle school students, something that all of us found extremely fascinating and a very interesting topic. Almost all of us talked about memorization, and how, while sometimes necessary, we need to avoid depending on it in our classrooms, and focus more on encouraging independent thinking in the classroom. Most of us said that, as teachers, we want to encourage our kids to think for themselves, and not rely on memorization, or simply just learning all the information and not think critically about the information. If students are thinking more critically, and being encouraged to come up with their own conclusions, they’ll be more likely to remember it naturally. Another way to get kids to remember things naturally, is applying different important key points to something outside of the classroom, that they can relate it to. One thing that almost all of us pointed out that we found interesting, and none of us had ever really heard of it before, was this concept of chunking. Chunking is a memorization strategy, that connects different items together, which allows easier and more natural memorization, if students can connect two things together, they might be more likely to remember it.

Student Oriented Curriculum

Before this presentation, I had never heard of student oriented curriculum, but after today's presentation, I feel like I learned a lot and would be able to implement this into my classroom. I really love the idea of letting student's decide what they want to learn and being able to create how they learn it, although I do think something like that does leave a role up to the teacher to coach the students through the process, so they can achieve the most learning. As a student, I would have loved to do something like this in many of my classrooms, countless times I would want to learn certain things within a large unit, but we would never touch on the subject, or I wouldn't be able to learn based on how the lesson was being taught. So, being able to facilitate my own learning would have been beneficial to me as a student.

There were some parts of the presentation that I wish we had gone more in depth about, like more on the process of creating a lesson, or learning more about some of the assessments, but I think we could have had an entire week on this topic and still not learn everything there is to know about student oriented curriculum. I think my favorite thing that we talked about was how much planning on the end of the student goes into creating this student oriented lesson, with weeks of planning time, and class discussions about how things are going to be taught and done in class, with everyone in the class being encouraged to participate and bring their ideas to the table.

I personally would love to go out and try and find other examples of student oriented curriculum in the classroom, while the book highlights a success story, I would be interested to know if other schools have tried to implement this in their classrooms, and know if whether or not they experienced the same kind of success that this school did. This obviously is something that we wouldn't have had to do during the book talk, but it's something that might go out and try and search for myself, because this presentation peaked my interest in something that I have never heard of before.

Overall, I feel like this presentation really opened my eyes to something that I haven't heard something about before. It's something that I think would be really rewarding to bring into a classroom, and I'm glad that I got to learn about the different aspects of it. I think it's important for all students to have a chance to participate in a student oriented curriculum, as it would encourage them to take more opportunities and chances with their learning, even after the student oriented curriculum is over.

Meet Me in the Middle Chapter 3

This chapter of Meet Me in the Middle focused primarily on how we, as teachers, can utilize the middle school brain, and give students the right amount of “mental workout.” Just because our students are young, doesn’t mean that they are incapable of stretching their minds and thinking critically. This chapter touched on a couple of things that we as teachers, should encourage our students to do, think critically, think for themselves, and think effectively. If you, as a teacher, are encouraging these behaviors in your students, and helping them hone in on these skills, then you’ll be effectively preparing them and helping them.

Thinking critically is especially important, especially from a history and social sciences point of view, if students are simply memorizing dates, they aren’t really learning about what they’re studying. Students could memorize dates every single day, but in the end, they aren’t learning anything about the actual event, because they’re so memorized on the date. Encouraging students to think critically about the things that they’re learning, will help them approach everything in their live critically, which will be beneficial to them as they go into high school and college.

Thinking for themselves is another super important thing to encourage in your students. If students aren’t thinking for themselves, then they’ll be more likely to cheat or plagiarize when it comes to important tests and papers. Students need to be encouraged about their importance of their own thinking and their own opinions, and should be taught ways to avoid plagiarizing and how to use other information and texts and form their opinions and thoughts.

Meet Me in the Middle Chapter 13

In chapter thirteen of Meet Me in the Middle, Rick Wormeli talks about how to successfully bring students on an overnight camping trip. As a student, I never was taken on such a field trip, field trips were limited to museums, hikes on local trails, and one day trip to Salem, Massachusetts to wrap up our unit about the witch trials. Although, I did go on overnight camping trips with my girl scout troop, and learned a lot about myself and the wilderness by doing so. I think there’s a lot of value in going on trips like this and it allows students to not only learn about their subjects in an environment outside of the classroom, but also teaches them other skills that they will bring with them even after they’ve left middle school.

Something that I found most interesting was how Wormeli makes arguments and gives examples for how every subject can be represented on a camping trip. Most of the time when you think about being in the wilderness, science is the first subject that comes to mind. But Wormeli gives examples like, writing about what they see around them, studying the trees and their circumferences, or doing a civil war reenactment to bring all the subjects out on a trip like this. Not only would students be learning about things relevant to their core subjects, but they’d be doing it in an unforgettable environment on an exciting camping trip.

Doing something like an overnight trip or even a complete day trip outdoors is something that I never thought I would be able to incorporate into my class, but Wormeli gives solid examples on how a camping trip can teach everything from math and social studies to leadership and trust.

Meet me in the Middle Chapter 4

The main topic in Meet Me in the Middle chapter 4 is active learning, and incorporation physical activity into your learning. Middle school students don’t really know how to stay still, and most of the time the only physical activity they get during the day is gym class, or in some schools, recess. But most of the time this isn’t enough and kids spend the rest of the day antsy and squirming in their seats. One way to help this problem is to incorporate some form of physical activity into your lesson, so that kids are getting up and moving around in the classroom, and still learning the lesson. This not only gets them up and moving, but most of the time middle schoolers have more fun moving around, so the lesson becomes more fun and engaging and they are more likely to learn the key points of the lesson.

Physical activity can be implemented into every subject, in the example provided by Rick Wormeli, he took students outside to measure and learn about ratios, using a tree and shadows, and he also mentions a physical activity to do with punctuation. And physical activity doesn’t necessarily mean just getting students up and running around, sometimes just taking them outside to do an activity, or getting them up and drawing on the board can get them stimulated in the lesson.

When kids are squirming and being forced to sit, they aren’t absorbing the lesson because they’re thinking about how they would rather be doing something else, so by getting them up and moving, and learning something, they’re much more likely to absorb the lesson.