Instead of trying to imitate high school programs, staff at many U.S. middle schools are working to transform school climate, become more sensitive to adolescent needs, and experiment with team arrangements, new schedules, advisory programs, and other organizational patterns. This article uses three case studies to illustrate new approaches to…

Drama in middle-school classrooms can provide action, experimentation, and exploration of character, motivation, and text. Because it provides expanded contexts for language learning in a cooperative social setting, drama has numerous educational benefits for young adolescents. Short drama activities for middle schoolers include story reading,…

Introduces five articles on teachers' role in curricular change, stressing commonalities and research needs. The foremost commonality is giving voice to teachers, middle schoolers, university students, and researchers. Other common threads are the social construction of knowledge, examination of questions related to our intellectual heritage, the…

Since students are facing an ever-increasing number of stressful personal, social, and emotional problems, classroom guidance must be made an integral part of the middle school's guidance program. This should be accomplished through a well-integrated, overall strategy incorporating daily homeroom advisement, guidance-related units,…

Narrative texts create a more relevant, personal, and individualized learning context than content textbooks while uniting adolescents' concerns with the school curriculum and the world. Narrative texts build on prior knowledge, helping students identify and assimilate different world views and more complex knowledge. This article presents a model…

Teacher-directed content, immovable subject divisions, and rigid scope and sequences perpetuate mismatch between middle school curricula and young adolescents' needs. Teachers at one Florida middle school are experimenting with Coalition of Essential Schools processes such as backward curriculum design and units of joy. Curriculum becomes an open…

Briefly reviews the development of core curricula and interdisciplinary teaming in junior high/middle schools from the mid-1950s to the present. A recent study of 15,000 Maine eighth graders shows that schools using the middle-school, interdisciplinary approach outscored their junior high school peers enrolled in single-discipline subjects by 58…

Teacher teams add new dimensions to learning and a much- needed sense of family and community. Teams have four domains: response to student needs, curriculum integration, teaching strategies, and flexible scheduling. Barriers include scheduling problems, insufficient planning and implementation time, sporadic cooperation among core and elective…

Demonstrates use of a threaded model of integration to promote collaborative learning across the middle-school curriculum. By beginning the year with literature portraying characters who feel richly rewarded by working together, teachers can promote collaboration as a social necessity and reading for pleasure and social growth. The spirit of…

Cooperative learning is a developmentally appropriate tool that enhances subject relevancy and real-life learning for adolescents. When coupled with an interdisciplinary curriculum, cooperative learning can add instructional variety, help students show consideration for others, involve students in decision making and problem solving, provide…

Describes a thematic, interdisciplinary, middle-school curriculum that integrates visual and language arts. Curriculum embodies three principles: (1) visual and verbal responses depend on meaningful interaction among the artist (writer), the art object (text), the viewer (reader), and the environment (context); (2) visual and verbal thinking are…

Consists of three sections bound together by a common theme and reference list. The first section, by Gail Burnaford, addresses teacher action research as essential for motivating students and giving teachers a voice in curriculum. Section 2, by James Beane, explores common assumptions behind action research and integrative curriculum. Section 3,…

Research over four decades supports the learning effectiveness of interdisciplinary curricula. Emphasizing interrelationships across the curriculum creates powerful learning opportunities that help students find relevance in course content and become more actively engaged in learning. This special issue addresses teacher preparation for…

Restructuring efforts, including curriculum integration, require that teachers exercise intellectual skills transcending craft wisdom and recipe exchanges. This article explores the tension between teamed middle-school teachers' technical interest in seeking recipes and their deliberationist interest in engaging in fruitful dialog. Teachers…

The intellectual disciplines comprising the traditional curriculum are actually territorial spaces carved out by academic scholars for their own purpose. Although middle-level educators have been engaged in reform efforts for two decades, the interdisciplinary, integrated curriculum is still rare and a working definition of a middle school…