Educational Article: Four Fundamentals of Middle Grades Teaching Part 1

Rick Wormeli is a National Board Certified Teacher, the author of six respected books in the teaching field, and an internationally known speaker on middle-level education, classroom assessment, innovation, and teacher professionalism. He recently posted for the great site MiddleWeb


In his post the "Four Fundamentals of Middle Grades Teaching," Rick highlighted "(1) the need to shape our lessons and our teaching strategies around what we know about the adolescent learner, and (2) the importance of “recursive” teaching, the practice of looping back to earlier content and integrating it into our students’ on-going learning experience. We make it stick by asking them to process the content in new ways." Check out the full post here.


I especially enjoyed reading "Fundamental #2: To become proficient, we have to fail a lot...Gaining proficiency requires us to spend a fair amount of time failing." I agree with this statement and believe that as teachers we cannot fear failure. We must continually push ourselves to improve our classrooms, our lessons, and ourselves as teachers. And with this consistent desire to get better we may and will fail at some points. We will have lessons that do not quite work - but fearing failure ensures stagnant static lessons that will end worse. I recommend checking out Wormeli's post here to read his explanation and ideas further.