• The middle school curriculum is critical for empowering early adolescents.
• The curriculum should respect adolescents' abilities and potentials.
• The curriculum should allow students more control over their learning.
• The curriculum should help students discover who they are and make sense of their world.
• The curriculum should encourage students to contribute to the well-being of others.
• The curriculum should help students understand and react to those social forces that would seek to exploit them.

IMPLICATIONS FOR LEARNING:

• Students should have some say in what and how they learn.
• Students must take charge of their learning experiences.
• Outside classroom experiences with the adult world are vital in the learning process.
• Meaningful relationships with adults will help students gain focus.

IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING:

• Engage students in "active" endeavors and hands-on learning.
• Give students considerable control over their learning.
• Engage them in meaningful tasks and encourage them to contribute.
• Students should have meaningful interaction with adults through their learning experiences.

Garabino takes an ecological perspective on adolescence. He feels that interactions between adolescents and development components of their environments (peers, home, school, community) have a great deal to do with how they develop. The number and quality of interactions among the four components of an early adolescent's environment suggests the strength of support they receive.

IMPLICATIONS FOR LEARNING:

School is one of the several microsystems (immediate setting in which an adolescent develops) that impacts the adolescent. A microsystem enriches an individual when there is a good balance of power and reciprocity. Adolescents are also affected by many other social, cultural and economic conditions, all of which influence and are influenced by the school.

IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING:

Teachers need to be aware of how outside expectations, pressures, demands and experiences affect their students. These outsinde influences come from home, family, friends, neighbors, peer groups, and communities. School best benefits the adolescent when it works in harmony with these other parts of students' environments.

James Garbarino's web page

An "Education World" article 4/17/2000

Information on Lost Boys

There are seven discrete "intelligences" or cognitive disciplines: body/kinesthetic, logical/mathematical, musical/rhythmic, verbal/linguistic, visual/spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal.

IMPLICATIONS FOR LEARNING:

Different people have different latural affinities for a style or approach. The more aspects of the various intelligences are incorporated in presentation of material, the more that can be learned and remembered.

IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING:

Teachers need to be aware of how different learning styles can be used as a way to measure the "whole person" rather than the small part of intelligence represented by IQ tests. Teachers need to address as many of the intelligences as possible through differentiated teaching.

• Cognitive development and language are shaped by a person's interaction with others.
• Children's knowledge, values, and attitudes develop through interaction with others.
• Social interactions that assist in learning increase a child's level of thinking.

IMPLICATIONS FOR LEARNING:

• Students will learn best through activity.
• Students should be encouraged to communicate frequently with self and with teacher.
• Using a higher level of language will help students to increase their language levels.
• Assisted problem solving creates learning.

IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING:

• Teachers should use interactive methods of teaching such as hands on activities and group work.
• Teachers should present students with challenges to increase problem solving abilities.
• Teachers should frequently use a high level of language.
• Teachers should use scaffolding to increase students' cognitive abilities.

A page about Vygotsky, with links

An article about Vygotsky

• Educative process must be viewed as a whole.
• The process begins with the child-what does he or she know through experience?
• A connection must be established between the student's knowledge and the material to be learned
• This learning must become part of the student's experience

IMPLICATIONS FOR LEARNING:

• A child's developmental progress depends on the stimuli which surrounds him or her-it must be that which helps them gain new experience.
• The stimuli must be connected to a student's previous knowledge and experience.
• The quest for learning must be instrinsically motivated out of a sense of need.

IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING:

• Teachers must learn to interpret students' strengths and weaknesses-all in the light of their growth process.
• Must determine a student's connection in experience to the new material to be learned-and use these connections in teaching.
• Must make sure that this knowledge is "experienced" by students instead of merely "learned."