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The Middle School Movement began as a response to William Alexander's address "The Junior High School: A Changing View" at Cornell University in 1963. He recognized the need for a school that would be developmentally responsive to the needs of young adolescents. James Beane is a widely recognized expert on middle level curriculum. He had a proposal for an authentic curriculum that would "combine the common and shared concerns of young adolescents and their larger world."
This book outlines the curriculum and James Beane's ideas for its implementation in the new Middle School.

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What should be the curriculum of the Middle School?

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What should be the curriculum of the Middle School?

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Beane suggested that while schools and classrooms may vary, the curriculum should have certain qualities:

A focus on general education

The exploration of self and social meanings

Respect for the dignity of young people

Grounding in democracy

Prizing of diversity

Personal and social significance

Life-like and lively content and activities

Rich opportunities for enhancing knowledge and skill

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1. While the middle school movement was successful in reorganizing the middle school organizationally from a “junior version of high school” to an actual school with middle school aged students in mind, little thought had been given to designing a curriculum that was developmentally appropriate and developmentally responsive to young adolescents. The current curriculum was influenced by political parties, interests of subject area specialists and tradition.

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3. Now that Beane had an a proposal for a new curriculum, how would he envision this curriculum being implemented? This implementation would be tougher to imagine as the subject-centered present curriculum was deeply embedded in the schools at that time. Implementation would entail including volunteers who were passionate, teacher education, heterogeneous groupings of students and changes in the roles of teachers and students.

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Much can be learned from reading about James Beane's ideas for including curriculum that is developmentally responsive and appropriate, relevant and engaging. Teachers should create lessons that include active, engaging learning and exploratory themes . Young adolescents learn best when they can make connections between what they are learning and their real world.

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Absolutely! I can appreciate James Beane and his passion for young adolescents to have a curriculum that is developmentally appropriate and responsive to them with regards to their learning. I like his concepts and themes of self and social meaning and how they are encompassed in his ideas for a middle school curriculum. He did not want these concepts to be combined with other interests and felt the importance of young adolescents being able to make personal and real world connections to the material they were learning in school.

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2. Beane proposed an idea of a general education that would be democratic and contain thematic units “whose organizing centers would be drawn from the       intersecting concerns of early adolescents in the larger world.” These areas would be based on the themes that emerge from personal and social concerns intersecting, skills that would be necessary to explore those themes and democratic concepts, cultural diversity and human dignity.