What it Really Takes to Be a Successful Middle School (3 min)

Support, connect, balance. When the ELMLE team selected these words as the theme of the 2023 conference, they certainly had no idea they would also so accurately summarize what we’ve learned from AMLE’s Successful Middle School programming during the 2021-2022 school year.

We’ve facilitated studies of The Successful Middle School: This We Believe to help schools understand middle grade best practices, conducted the Successful Middle School Assessment to help schools gauge their implementation of those practices, supported schools and districts through ongoing coaching and professional development, and recognized twelve schools as our inaugural Schools of Distinction for their robust implementation of those very practices. Although we already knew what makes a middle school “good,” we’ve learned a lot about what it actually takes to get there.

We’ve learned that successful middle schools foster a symbiotic relationship of support, empowerment, and collaboration among staff, students, and the community. When the upper administration trusts a school leader to do their job well, the school leader feels supported and empowered. If that school leader feels supported and empowered, they can trust their staff to do their jobs well, and the staff feel supported and empowered. If school staff feel supported and empowered, they can trust their students to do their job well, and students feel supported and empowered. If students feel supported and empowered, they take the success of a school far beyond the school’s walls, fostering trust and positive relationships between the school and their families and community. When families and the community feel connected to the school, they trust upper administration to do their job well. Support, connection, balance.

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We’ve learned that successful middle schools develop these relationships intentionally and meticulously. Although the following list is by no means exhaustive, it provides a few tangible practices and mindsets that we’ve seen them utilize to create favorable conditions for these relationships to grow.

  • Staff understand and appreciate their students, including a strong foundation of young adolescent development.
  • A clear vision unifies staff and guides every decision.
  • Policies and practices are developed collaboratively and are evaluated transparently to ensure they are unbiased, student-centered, and fairly implemented. Staff and students know they have a voice in the decisions that are made for their school and believe they are listened to.
  • Structures foster meaningful relationships for students and staff, such as small learning communities through interdisciplinary teaming and advocacy for each student through advisory.
  • The empowerment of staff extends beyond administrative and teaching staff to include support staff and those in other roles.
  • Professional development honors the existing expertise of each staff member while working toward goals in line with the school’s vision.
  • Students believe they have a voice–in their academic experiences, in how their school operates, and in their larger community–and they know adults will listen.
  • The school engages with the community so that students’ learning experiences have both real-world relevance and impact.
  • The school views families as equal partners with the school in the best interest of the students and ensures families have authentic opportunities to not just spectate but actually influence the life and work of the school.

We’ve learned that when staff, students, and families feel trusted and empowered as part of a collaborative school community, the vision and mission of The Successful Middle School truly comes to life. We look forward to sharing more of what we’ve learned with you at ELMLE in January! 

Snowploughs, Snow boots, and Supervised Struggle

Martin Griffin

Recently I was reading an interview with a famous UK TV presenter in which she told a story about raising her son. In it she revealed something of her parenting style; something I found quite alarming at the time. If it rained in the afternoon as her boy was due to get out of school, she said, she’d send money to his bank account and text him to get a taxi home so he didn’t get wet.

This was my first encounter with what is now commonly referred to as snowplough parenting. Snowploughing replaces helicoptering – hovering around toddlers in playgrounds – when children reach middle level education. The snowplough parent aims to solve every conceivable problem their child might have ahead of time, ensuring a blissfully effortless existence.

The problem this creates for teachers compounds year-on-year. Why? Well, firstly snowploughing suffocates the development of the characteristics necessary for academic success, and crucially, creates a cultural expectation that is the school’s job to snowplough as well. The parent arranges life in the domestic context – removing issues around money-management, tech and connectivity, even walking through the rain – but it’s expected the school does the same in the educational context; tests shouldn’t be too hard, one-on-one sessions should deal with specific difficulties, lessons should be universally entertaining but also bespoke to each child, an issue was vividly illustrated by a recent GCSE student of mine. Approaching me at the end of a lesson he said, “Sir, I’d like to start revising
soon. So when are you going to put the extra lessons on?”

And we’re also dealing with a second challenge; the seemingly-daily expansion of what parents define as a problem. Helping your child to get started on their homework gradually becomes doing the homework for them, which morphs into complaining to the school that the thought of homework makes your child unhappy.

Which brings us to the question – what can we do? Having been a middle and high school teacher, at Key Stage 3, 4 and 5, for over twenty years, I’d like to make a case for replacing snowploughs with snowboots. Where one sweeps aside potential problems before they emerge, the other helps pupils suit-up and tackle them. I’m not advocating a let-‘em-get-on-with-it-and-turn-a-blind-eye approach; what I’m suggesting is that we create supervised struggle. We can do this as classroom teachers, designing a task that occurs in the middle of a lesson – a task we build-up to and carefully framework, but one that pushes students to operate at the very edge of their ability – or we can take a more holistic approach, leading struggle across a longer period of time and multiple subjects; modelling project-management tools and guiding their use over a fortnight for example.

Whichever approach we choose, we should be explicitly sharing the strategies pupils need for study at and beyond our level, rather than micromanaging every minute of their school experience. We hope to be sharing some of these tools and approaches at ELMLE’s January conference.

Martin Griffin and Steve Oakes

Martin Griffin and Steve Oakes have a combined 40 years’ experience teaching post-16 students as classroom teachers, heads of faculty and senior leaders. They are the authors of The A Level Mindset (Crown House, 2016), The GCSE Mindset (Crown House, 2017) and The Student Mindset (Crown House, 2019). You can learn more about their work with the VESPA model online and on Twitter @VESPAmindset. 

You can join Martin and Steve in three sessions during our main conference. These sessions include: 

  1. Divers and Thrivers: introducing non-cognitive skills in middle level education
  1. ‘Clear is Kind’: coaching students in positive study behaviours 
  1. Teaching middle school students how to revise