a National Movement
|
Professor of education Ed Brazee has worked with many middle schools around the country. He sees the changes taking place at Boschulte as part of a national movement that seeks to transform middle school education. Restructuring innovations such as block scheduling, team teaching, and integrated curriculum have been instituted with one aim in mind: to provide a suitable learning environment for young adolescents. Brazee is on the faculty at the University of Maine and directs the Middle Level Education Institute that Boschulte teachers have attended for the past two summers. Research bears out Boschulte's frustration with a school structure that does not serve the special needs of the young adolescent population. Brazee asserts that the old junior high school model had some good ideas in it, but over time it became a "mini high school" without any consideration of the developmental needs of very young adults. The restrictions of the old junior high school model short class periods and subjects taught in isolation are giving way to a middle school model, with much more flexible methods of teaching and learning. Schools that adopt a middle school model are seeing dramatic improvements in student achievement and overall school climate, among other indicators. Brazee is not surprised at the eagerness of Boschulte faculty to adopt other reforms like integrated curriculum. "What Mr.Farrow and his teachers are learning is that all of these things fit together. The old junior high school was more like a check-list model. You had a particular program like team teaching, so it's there and you check it off the list and go on to the next item. In the last ten years, research has shown that changing any one thing in a school, like changing the schedule, has an effect upon everything else at the school." Brazee says that, in the past, middle school curriculum was often not a priority when schools began the restructuring process; but a renewed interest in curriculum development geared to middle schools has begun to emerge. "It was neglected because schools were so interested in changing climate and changing their organizational structure that, unfortunately, curriculum got lost in the process."
|
"Integrated curriculum is an attempt to make the curriculum meaningful by dissolving the artificial boundaries between and among the different subject areas," Brazee says. "Course work is organized by topics and themes such as survival, transitions, justice, or identities. Students pursue significant questions related to those themes. They use math, science, English, and social studies as well as other ways of knowing to solve the problems they are presented with, rather than studying topics in isolation, as in the old model." - staff writer: Georgia Tucker. |