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.