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Color is key

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If you've ever taught middle school, you know it can be challenging. But you also know what a special place being in the middle can be. Middle schoolers enjoy laughter. They're curious. They're starting to think like adults, but still enjoy being a kid. They're ready to take on new challenges, but they're also anxious about them. And, they're full of emotions! I spent ten years of my education career teaching middle school and loved every minute of it, but I definitely needed to develop a thick skin, a small ego, and a hearty laugh. And I was always looking for materials and strategies specifically for middle school, since it really is its own world.

Teaching Channel, in partnership with Educate Texas, is excited to launch a new video series: Creating Success in Middle School. In part one of the series, we visit classrooms in Texas to see teachers using strategies to engage students in the social, emotional, and academic learning that happens in middle school. After watching these videos, we hope you'll walk away with a few new ideas to implement in your own classroom, whether middle school level or not. And if you're a new teacher, this series is a great way to see how others are creating cultures of success in their classrooms.

1. Embrace Their Social Nature

Middle school students thrive on relationships with each other, and - believe it or not - even with teachers. Seventh grade math teacher Jeremy Yager understands and embraces his students' need to be social. In Relationships, Routines, and Rethinking the Lesson, we see students exploring the mathematical concept of slope with partners, in groups, and with the help of peers who have mastered the content. Jeremy feels that his students respond well to learning from peers, and that the peer coaches grow from this leadership challenge.

When pairing and grouping students, Jeremy uses formative and summative assessments to make decisions, but he also intentionally groups students with their friends. Watch Assess and Group to learn more about how Jeremy harnesses the energy and relationships of middle schoolers into cooperative groups. In both videos, it's wonderful to hear Jeremy acknowledge that he is always growing in his practice, and that some days he has to adjust on the fly when things don't go quite as he planned. Having a growth mindset is so important when teaching middle school!

2. Develop Growth Mindsets

Teaching Channel recently launched two new videos that show teachers using growth mindset practices with their elementary students. Creating Success in Middle School lets us take a look at growth mindset practices for the upper grades. In Growth Mindsets for STEM Careers, Adriane Davis engages her eighth grade students in an engineering design challenge to teach them about the importance of learning from mistakes and persevering through challenges. Throughout class, Adriane makes deliberate language choices when speaking to her students, such as referring to them as scientists or engineers, or reminding them of the power of iterating and collaborating, so that her language empowers them. Watch this video to hear Adriane talk about the power of language in developing an equitable classroom, and a training she attended that helped her grow in this area of her practice.

3. Provide Structure

Classroom routines can help the sometimes-frantic middle schooler feel safe and comfortable. But too many routines and structures can also stifle the independent spirit of a middle schooler, so it's important to strike a balance. Daniel Knoll, a fifth grade teacher at KIPP Truth Academy, uses roles and protocols to keep his literature circles on track, but builds in options and rotations to keep his middle schoolers on their toes. In Rising to the Challenge with Literature Circles, you'll see how Daniel uses specific roles for sharing out what students learned during their reading of a chapter. Daniel also uses two graphic organizers, one for the share out and one for character analysis.

Down the hall at KIPP Truth Academy, Brittany Williams uses lab stations to engage her students in an exploration of energy transformations. Watch Building Character with Lab Stations to see how this structure gives students the freedom to explore concepts collaboratively while providing an opportunity for them to further develop their own leadership skills.

4. Take Time to Breath

The middle school years can be tumultuous - especially socially and emotionally. Fifth grade teacher Anne Mechler uses mindfulness practices such as deep breathing and guided relaxation to help her students be present in her classroom. In her lesson video, you'll see how she uses what's going on in her students' lives as a way to plan these social emotional lessons, so that they truly meet the needs of her students.

If you're looking for a simple way to start incorporating mindfulness in the classroom, watch Anne lead her students through a short guided relaxation exercise. Anne says that these deep breathing activities are good for the students - and for the teachers! You can read more about Anne's mindfulness practices in her blog post.

Whether you're a new or experienced teacher, middle or another level, there are many strategies to foster student success in these videos. Which resonate with you? What do you hope to try in your classroom next? Let us know! And stay tuned for more strategies from middle school classrooms in part two of the series.
Gretchen Vierstra taught middle school for ten years in the San Francisco Bay Area. During her 15+ years in education, she's also been a department chair, new teacher coach, curriculum developer, and policy analyst. She is an Education Content Manager at Teaching Channel. Follow Gretchen on Twitter: @gretchenvee. Educate Texas is a member of Teaching Channel Teams. Learn more.

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Four Strategies To Create A Culture of Success in Middle School

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If you've ever taught middle school, you know it can be challenging. But you also know what a special place being in the middle can be. Middle schoolers enjoy laughter. They're curious. They're starting to think like adults, but still enjoy being a kid.

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Teach like a Champion: Technique 12

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Teach Like a Champion Technique 12 - The Hook

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The world is full of knowledge

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Strive for excellence

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The hardest thing, but the most important. 

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The hardest thing, but the most important. 

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This is a great article about ways to manage you classroom

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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Create a culture of teamwork

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Christopher Emdin: Teach teachers how to create magic

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Response to the Dream Class

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My classroom needs to inspire my students

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Behavior is everything

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By relying on concise rules and frequent rewards, principals say the PBIS approach to school-wide behavior management drastically reduces discipline problems and improves academic performance among all students. Included: Examples of successful PBIS programs.

Over a four-year period, principal Andrew Krugly saw office referrals and suspensions at Dewey Elementary School decrease, test scores climb, and the achievement gap in math shrink to almost nothing.

The primary reason, according to Krugly, is students' hunger for Tiger Tickets. Students receive the tickets from their teachers and other staff members for obeying school rules and meeting and exceeding expectations. Kids can trade the tickets in for rewards. And there is no excuse for not knowing the rules: the expectations for every occasion and every location are very specific and on display in hallways and classrooms.

The rules and rewards strategy is at the core of Positive Behavior Interventions & Supports (PBIS), a school-wide approach to behavior management.
"The whole climate [of the school] is different," since adopting PBIS, said Krugly, who has been using PBIS at the K-5 school in Evanston, Illinois, since 2002. "Before, more kids were sitting in hallways or outside my office. We had no real system in place to deal with consequences for behavior."
Several principals who use PBIS told Education World that they were elated to see that when student behavior improved under the system and teachers had more time to focus on instruction, academic performance shot up as well.

GETTING EVERYONE ON BOARD

The Office of Special Education Programs of the U.S. Department of Education created and funds a PBIS technical center to disseminate information about effective school-wide disciplinary practices and provide support to schools and districts to implement them.

"We conducted a review of best practices and consolidated them to the fewest number of things educators can do to have the greatest impact," explained Dr. George Sugai, who is the co-director of the national Center on PBIS. The other co-director is Rob Horner of the University of Oregon. Sugai also is a professor of special education and director of the Center for Behavioral Education & Research at the University of Connecticut's Neag School of Education. The Universities of Oregon and Connecticut are the lead institutions for the PBIS center, which is a collaborative of six universities and three agencies.

One of the keys to a school-wide behavior management plan is for everyone to agree to a common approach, Sugai told Education World. Educators need to emphasize prevention and positive modeling. The next highest priority is behavior management. "To improve classroom climate, you have to have good classroom management," he said. "Students need to know the consequences for rule violations and teachers have to know what's going on."

Good instruction is one of the best behavior management tools, added Sugai. "When kids are engaged more often with academic engagement that works, they are less likely to misbehave." And when teachers spend less time on classroom management, they can spend more time on instruction.
The center now has data from about 7,000 schools with which its staff members have worked. Members of the center provide schools with resources, consultants, and on-site assistance.
LEAVE NO LOOPHOLES

PBIS focuses on creating and sustaining primary (school-wide), secondary (classroom), and tertiary (individual) systems of support for positive behavior.

Schools start implementing PBIS by developing expectations and rules for the whole school.

At Dewey Elementary and many other PBIS schools, the framework for the rules and expectations are similar to these:

Be respectful

Be safe

Be caring

Be here

Be ready

At Dewey, these are called the Dewey Dos. Besides the Dewey Dos, PBIS at Dewey includes a matrix of behavioral expectations; ?Cool Tools, which are lesson plans used to teach students the behavioral expectations; Tiger Tickets, the acknowledgment/reinforcement (reward) system; and ?office discipline referral forms (ODRs).
Different matrices were created to show what adhering to the Dewey Dos looks like school-wide, as well as in classrooms and all other areas, including the hallways, bathrooms, cafeteria, and playground. Teachers take the list of school-wide Dewey Dos and then fill in the blanks to see how they apply in their classroom, said Krugly.
Little is left to interpretation.

Parents are asked to review the school's code of conduct and behavior matrices with their children and sign a form acknowledging they have read them and return the form to school.

PBIS plays out in a similar way at North Elementary School in Des Plaines, Illinois. "We start with three or four Golden Rules," said Carol Gibbs, principal of the 526-student K-5 school. Gibbs said she inherited PBIS from the prior administration. "I'm sure it was in response to discipline issues which at the time were pretty hefty." And now, "we're in year five [of PBIS]; we're in a good place, but we have a lot to do still," she told Education World.

The first few weeks of the school year at North are devoted to introducing and re-enforcing the rules. "For the first week of school, we focus on what the Golden Rules mean in classrooms," Gibbs explained. "We have training modules for how they work in bathrooms, hallways, classroom, and buses. The second week we do hallways, the third week bathrooms, and the lunchroom we do by grade. For the buses, we walk students through the procedures and then have students sign a contract."

"We took a tip from Ruby Payne," she added. "We tell kids school is like church -- not like home. So they need to be respectful."

DON'T SKIMP ON REWARDS

Once the rules are in place and reviewed, the other vital component of PBIS is rewards for adhering to the rules. At Dewey, Krugly requires teachers to give out at least ten Tiger Tickets a day. "Adults have to be more positive, rather than being reactive to behavior," he said. Students can redeem the tickets for extra recess time, items at the school store, privileges, activities such as drawing with chalk on the sidewalk, or to participate in special celebrations. Whole classes also can earn Tremendous Tiger Tickets for rewards. One year ten tickets earned a student the chance to try to drop Krugly into a dunk tank. This past school year, the big prize was allowing students to tie-dye shirts if they earned 15 tickets.

Students cannot lose tickets once they have earned them. But for students who commit infractions, there is a graduated system of discipline. (See sidebar, Graduated Discipline)

Krugly also has seen how PBIS helps teachers. In one case, a teacher started the year with a very chatty group of first graders. After two weeks, she was frazzled from constantly trying to quiet them down, he said.

Krugly told the teacher to stop her lessons every three-to-five minutes and write out three Tiger Tickets. She didn't have to pass them out immediately; she could do that during a break. The teacher said that would mean a lot of pausing -- but Krugly pointed out that she already was interrupting her lessons every few minutes to shush the students anyway.

After two days of writing out massive numbers of tickets, the teacher told Krugly that the students' behavior had not yet improved drastically, but she was feeling better because now she was stopping instruction to do something positive -- reward kids who were not chatting.

At the end of three weeks, Krugly said, the teacher didn't have to issue as many tickets because the chatting had decreased. "And she was a happier teacher," he said.

The school-wide system for catching students being good at North school is called Eagle Eyes, Gibbs said. Each classroom has its own reward system.

Luis Tousent, the eighth grade administrative dean at Conway Middle School in Orlando, Florida, said the PBIS reward system has been very effective in his school. "It helped reduce negative behaviors considerably," Tousent told Education World. School administrators began to see a change a year after adopting a school-wide PBIS system. "The whole school has bought into it -- as far as our school goes, it is working well."

In 2002-2003, the first year using PBIS, Conway had 1,621 office referrals for discipline problems, Tousent said. The next year, referrals were down to 1,012, and by 2004-2005, office referrals had dropped to 819. Conway has been considered a top school for the past seven years.
"If they are not getting into trouble, they are taking care of business, which is what we want," Tousent told Education World.
Conway's PBIS program revolves around the motto PRIDE (Preparedness, Respect, Integrity, Dignity, Excellence) and has a reward system for every grade level. Sixth graders receive paper High 5's and seventh graders earn Falcon Dollars for conducting themselves according to PRIDE. Eighth graders accumulate points for academics, conduct, attendance, lack of discipline referrals, and participation in extracurricular activities. Rewards can include being able to leave school earlier some days or being allowed to wear a hat. Administrators are constantly changing the reward system to keep students interested in the program.

"It's so woven into the fabric of the school that it is difficult to think about the school without it," Tousent added

BUT ARE KIDS BEING PAID TO BE GOOD?
With all the emphasis on rewards, though, one could wonder if students are falling in line just to earn treats and privileges, and whether the positive behaviors get cast aside when no rewards are on the horizon.
But several administrators said they do not consider PBIS "paying" or "bribing" kids to be respectful and responsible.

"We did have to ask ourselves, 'Do we want to pay kids to behave?'" Krugly said. "But you have to decide what you want more. Do you want kids to perform better? Do you want more instructional time? And people have been rewarding kids for behaving before this. Now teachers have more time to teach and have more time to work with teachers and staff. Over the past five years, test scores have risen significantly and referrals decreased significantly."

Educators also have noted that students continue to follow positive behaviors when they go on to middle school, Krugly told Education World.

And some students are not interested in the rewards themselves, but in amassing Tiger Tickets. "Some kids collect them just to set a goal to see how many they can collect," he said. "About 20 percent don't spend any tickets at all."

Schools need ways to override the negative messages children see in society and rewards do the job, pointed out Tousent. "Here's the situation -- we have powerful forces working against us," he told Education World. "Being smart is not cool, being educated is not cool. We're trying to do anything we can to instill positive behavior. We're trying to motivate kids. At the same time, we don't reward average behavior. You don't get a reward for breathing. We reward outstanding behavior."

For example, if a student who never turns in homework finally completes an assignment, he or she could earn a reward. But if the student turned in homework the next day, there would be no reward, because now he or she is meeting expectations, said Tousent.

Students are extremely motivated by the reward system, he added. The school no longer is allowed to offer food from outside vendors as an incentive, which is unfortunate in a way because it was effective. "Nothing motivates like stuff and food," Tousent noted.

The system works for about 94 percent of students in North school, added Gibbs. "Some kids may need more intensive intervention, like a chart on their desk, and have to check in with the teacher dailybut if you do it [PBIS] correctly, it improves relationshipswith kids, teachers, and parents. It's a framework for improving relationships and increasing the amount of academic time on task."

Article by Ellen R. Delisio
Education World®
Copyright © 2008 Education World

08/27/2008

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PBIS Boosts School-Wide Behavior and Academics | Education World

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By relying on concise rules and frequent rewards, principals say the PBIS approach to school-wide behavior management drastically reduces discipline problems and improves academic performance among all students. Included: Examples of successful PBIS programs. Over a four-year period, principal Andrew Krugly saw office referrals and suspensions at Dewey Elementary School decrease, test scores climb, and the achievement gap in math shrink to almost nothing.