Becoming Educative: Reforming Curriculum and Teaching in the Middle Grades

Contemporary middle grades reform presses schools to develop heterogeneous communities of learners wherein traditional disciplinary boundaries are blurred and students' messy engagement with academic work takes precedence over order and routine. Using data from a longitudinal study of 16 schools participating in MGSSPI (Carnegie sponsored Middle Grades Schools State Policy Initiative), this paper examines middle schools' efforts to shift from the traditional junior high emphasis on order and preparation for the compartmentalized, impersonal, content-driven routines of high school, to pay attention to educative opportunities uniquely suited to young adolescents. Here, we present examples of considerable new thinking and substantive changes in curriculum and teaching. We also examine normative and political tensions that work to keep traditional, teacher-directed instruction still firmly in place in the vast majority of middle grades classes.