This course focus on the American middle school and emerging adolescents’ development. About the American middle school, we understand the history of education trend changes, also know about the middle school Big Four which are teaming, block scheduling, advisor / advisee and exploratory. We also learnt plenty of educational theorists, such as Dewey, Erikson, Beane and their theories. Those theories are effective on adolescents’ development.
Middle School Big Four
There are four aspects could build middle schools of excellence, and they are partnership teaming, block scheduling, advisor/ advisee and exploratory. Those four elements could help administers or curriculum instructor to build an excellence school, also could help teachers to create valued assignments for middle school students, especially teaming and block scheduling. Teaming, which means to build teacher’ team. In the US middle school, teachers’ team normally consists of two-teacher team or four-teacher team, which could build closer student-teacher relationship and teachers' relationship. (1) Within the team, teachers could easily communicate with each other, if one teacher give too much homework to students, so that other teacher could give less or none homework for students. (2) In teacher’s team, it is more flexible to set interdisciplinary assignments; like using second language to learn math problems, or write an essay according to the math formula. Teachers create one assignment through cooperation for different purposes, which not only could reduce the homework time, but also could help students to connect what they have learn. Block scheduling is an idea that using long period but less classes replaces the traditional schedule, for example to extend 50 minutes math sessions to 90 minutes. In this way students can do more activities, and teachers are easily control the class. Students have a concentrated time to study on one subject or topic. Since the session time is 90 minutes, so that teachers could create in-class-assignments for student, and they could work together, in-class-assignments is more efficient and decrease students' homework time
Erick Erikson proposed a psychoanalytic theory of psycho-social development comprising eight stages from infancy to adulthood, which every individual will encounter in a lifetimes. Erick’s theory has great impact both in psycho-social and education field, in middle schools, students in the stage 5 “ Identity vs Role confusion”, which means in this stage, students developing a strong sense of identity of ego. So teachers can have a great influence on the development of students at this stage. Teacher could use this impact to help students develop their potential selves.
Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)
Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is a concept that what students can or can't be done without help, which introduced by psychologist Lev Vygotsky. In 1950s Jerome Bruner developed the scaffolding theory, which means students develop them to a level above their current level through effectively guide and encourage. Homework as an operative tool to help student to review what they already know and understand. Also, teacher could assign homework for one goal, for example, teachers set up homework patterns one for review and another for preview, so students could choose different homework pattern for different purposes. This pattern may help students to dig themselves and to finger out what are they need, then work for it.