A team of former middle school teachers have been hosting weeklong professional development workshops with students as the stars. The results have made great--and lasting--change in schools.

"The Successful Middle School" builds upon many decades of commitment to the middle school concept. The fifth edition of AMLE's landmark position paper amplifies the importance of responding both to young adolescents' developmental needs and to their social identities. The edition's release amidst a global pandemic and increasing…

"Personalized Learning in the Middle Grades" shows how teachers in grades 5--8 can leverage the use of personalized learning plans (PLPs) to increase student agency and engagement, helping youth to establish learning goals aligned with their interests and assess their own learning--particularly around essential skills that cut across…

Reforms to support and expand personalized learning increasingly are being introduced in middle schools across the United States. Personalization, as enacted in response to these reforms, encourages teachers to implement many practices that long have been recommended by advocates of middle grades philosophy. To better understand the practices of…

Although middle grades proponents call for specialist teacher preparation, and often herald student voice as critical to successful middle grades programs, young adolescents are rarely provided a role in teacher education. In this article, we explore the potential of student involvement in middle grades teacher education. We first briefly examine…

As school districts, major cities, and entire states in the United States adopt personalized learning as a reform strategy focused on the co-construction of learning opportunities between teachers and students, educators face shifting roles. This study examined the roles of teachers in personalized learning environments within a policy context of…

The integration of social and emotional learning into school curricula has been linked to a number of positive student outcomes, including increased academic achievement, the development of healthy relationships, and improved emotional self-regulation. Rarely, however, has research considered students' perspectives on which social and emotional…

Technology's rapid evolution applies constant pressure to educational organizations, suggesting a need to continually re-envision schools for the digital age. Yet educators often struggle to understand the growing chasm between students' out-of-school and in-school technology lives. This gap is particularly noticeable during the middle grades…

Reforms to support and increase personalized learning approaches are increasingly being introduced in middle schools around the country. Personalization as enacted in response to these reforms encourages teachers to implement many practices that have long been advocated for among middle grades reformers. However, middle grades teachers working…

Although the idea of responding to learners' individual needs is far from new in the middle grades movement, there have been renewed efforts in recent years for schools to tailor programs and practices to students' unique interests and needs through "personalized learning" (Bingham, Pane, Steiner, & Hamilton, 2016). To date, little…

Since middle school is a critical time for literacy learning in general and comprehension in particular, educators are left to ponder how best to teach these students. In addition, what role might student perception of reading strategies through visual depictions have in order to help teachers decide how best to guide their students with…

As of March 31, 2020, the closure of schools in 192 countries due to the COVID-19 pandemic had resulted in over 1.6 billion learners being temporarily forced out of school buildings. New educational inequities arose, and existing ones were exacerbated. Acknowledging that disruption may also stimulate innovation, the purpose of this qualitative…

For the past several years, leaders in middle grades education research have strengthened their call for more methodologically robust quantitative research to address important questions in the field. Recently, two important routes towards addressing this call have emerged: the Middle Grades Longitudinal Study from the National Center for…

This article illustrates the critical need for middle level preservice teachers to be explicitly prepared to engage in reform-oriented advocacy. To illustrate this point, we present the experiences of four reform-minded student teachers who attempted to enact developmentally responsive curriculum, as defined in "This We Believe"…

The number of middle level schools adopting 1:1 laptop programs has increased considerably during the past decade (e.g., Lowther, Strahl, Inan, & Bates, 2007; Storz & Hoffman, 2013; Texas Center for Educational Research, 2009). The cornerstone practices of the middle school concept (National Middle School Association, 2010), therefore,…