| What's Driving You Crazy? A Question to Drive Collaborative Middle Level School Improvement |
| "What's driving you crazy?" This is not just an invitation for another pointless gripe session. This question can be a powerful catalyst for discovery, learning, and improving middle level schools for students and their educators. Middle level educators in Hawai‘i, the mainland U.S., Canada, New Zealand and Australia are collaborating to improve their schools by making their own professional lives better -- by making things less crazy. This process of enlightened self-interest inevitably leads to lots of laughter while looking deeper into adolescents' nature and needs, working together to make schools more compatible with students, and ultimately, to making everyone's school experience "less crazy" and much more satisfying. What have you got to lose? |
| Maslow Means Middle School! |
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Humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow’s "Hierarchy of Needs" provides an invaluable lens for understanding young adolescents and their schools (and really, any age group’s schooling). Young adolescents’ growth spurts and ravenous appetites, their fears of bullying and their herd instinct, their love for real learning, their crusading for causes, and their occasional brilliance and transcendence, all fit Maslow to the max. Like, it’s totally obvious -- Maslow means middle school! OR: Maslow Means Good Schooling! [same as above, but with more general focus – can be geared to pre-school through adult education] |
| Adolescents in the New Millennium -- Risk and Opportunity |
| The New Millennium is not the same millennium we grew up in. For today's adolescents, the front porch has been replaced by chat rooms, and "Columbine" does not bring to mind an incredibly beautiful flower. Adolescents undergo one of the greatest periods of change in the human life span – physically, socially, emotionally and intellectually. This is a time of incredible opportunity as they change from children into near-adults. It is also a time of risk, as teens face huge challenges and temptations that they are not necessarily ready to undertake. Great schools for adolescents are designed to maximize the opportunities and minimize the risks – they are very personal places where kids are systematically connected with their peers and caring adults in small learning communities, and engaged in active learning. They are places where learning how to deal with being a teen and how to lead a healthy life are seen as the foundation of academic excellence. |
| Adolescents: Fortunately, Unfortunately |
| The children's pattern book, Fortunately, offers a great lens for viewing and laughing about the jokes that nature plays on adolescents and their teachers. "Fortunately adolescents' bodies are growing and maturing. Unfortunately you can smell it happening! Fortunately there's deodorant. Unfortunately they don't know that. Fortunately you're there to teach them about it!" and so on.... |
| Who Cares? Caring Schools |
| Nel Noddings says that Caring should be the focal point of our schools. Caring has many implications. Students may say, "Who cares?" when you want to teach them the fascinating properties of the five paragraph essay. Some youth, particularly adolescents, use violence to scream, "Who cares?" when home and school have let them down. Looking carefully at Caring is a great starting point for better learning, development and schooling for youths – and for their educators and parents. |