April 2011
| Volume 68 | Number 7
The Transition Years
Marge Scherer
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Elizabeth Graue
This article traces the evolution of kindergarten from its focus on children, to its focus on outcomes, to its current focus on literacy and math. The early childhood parts of kindergarten are losing ground to growing allocation of kindergarten time to academic content. A more ecological approach to kindergarten involves reincorporating play into the curriculum and taking time to build relationships with students. The kindergarten experience should be broad based, contextual, and inclusive of all dimensions of development.
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Denise H. Daniels
Child development research shows that during the 5 to 7 shift, children make a major transition from early childhood to middle childhood ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. At the same time, their entry into formal schooling thrusts them into new roles and responsibilities, often in unfamiliar settings with unfamiliar people. These challenges exist not only in kindergarten but also throughout the primary grades. To foster smooth transitions, schools should provide a web of support that meets young children's key developmental needs, including feeling safe and secure, learning to regulate their own behavior, and building relationships with others.
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Amanda Fenlon
The transition into kindergarten is a challenge for any student, but it can be especially difficult for students with disabilities and their families. In this article, Amanda Fenlon suggests that by planning ahead families and schools can smooth that transition and put students on the right road. She encourages families to work with their child's preschool and kindergarten to develop a vision for the child's future and determine what supports will help the child get there. Ongoing communication before and during the child's kindergarten year are key to this process.
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Kelsey Augst Felton and Patrick Akos
The transition from 2nd to 3rd grade has received little notice in education research—yet the authors' experience in elementary school counseling convinced them that most students undergo a seismic shift during this period. Third grade is not only the first year students will encounter standardized end-of-grade tests, but also a year in which students are expected to have mastered basic reading skills and to be able to "read to learn." Developmentally, students' confidence and sense of competence are just emerging. The authors describe practices at one elementary school, where staff members support students through this transition by collaborating, reaching out to targeted students, promoting student strengths, and evaluating school practices.
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Mike Anderson
Fourth grade is a pivotal year, in which students commonly face increased academic demands. According to Anderson, teachers can help students make a smooth transition to 4th grade by introducing these new challenges in ways that are in line with 4th graders' common developmental characteristics: incredible energy and emotion, industriousness and curiosity, increased awareness of the world around them, and heightened anxiety and sensitivity. Anderson describes a variety of specific strategies that teachers can use to establish the safe, supportive classroom environment that enables 4th grade students to perform at their best.
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Christine S. Beck
High-achieving kids from low-income families too often fall into the achievement trap; as they progress up the grades, their academic performance falls, and they are far less likely to remain star students than are middle-class or wealthy high-achievers. So says the first U.S.-wide analysis of high-achieving students from poor families (published by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation). The Gesu School, a private K-8 Catholic school in Philadelphia, tackled this problem by developing an enrichment program for their low-income 3rd through 5th grade students identified as top achievers. In a 5-week summer session, these "Youngest Scholars" are challenged to research in-depth content related to stimulating learning topics (like ancient Egypt and ocean life), prepare creative presentations of that research, and plunge into public speaking and challenging writing assignments. During the school year, they participate in weekly after-school and pull-out enrichment sessions, read and discuss—in seminar format—novels above their grade level, and enjoy mentoring and occasional field trips.
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Laurence Steinberg
Understanding the nature of brain development in adolescence helps explain why adolescents can vacillate so often between mature and immature behavior. Early and middle adolescence, in particular, are times of heightened vulnerability to risky and reckless behavior because the brain's reward center is easily aroused, but the systems that control impulsive behavior are still relatively immature. Assignments that require teenagers to think ahead, make a plan, and carry it out may stimulate the maturation of brain systems that enable more mature self-regulation.
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Rick Wormeli
The middle years are crucial to high school success, when students develop skills for navigating the larger world, and discover the direction they want their lives to take. So why, asks noted middle school educator Rick Wormeli, would anyone leave the transition into this phase to chance? Five mind-sets can help educators guide their students on the path from elementary to middle school: understanding students' concern about belonging, empathizing with students, understanding the characteristics of the age group, focusing on the positive, and building hope. The article offers a wealth of practical strategies for making great transitions.
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Robert Balfanz
The Talent Development program at Johns Hopkins, City Year, and Communities in Schools have created a new middle school and high school model that reduces dropout risk. Diplomas Now integrates strategies that are designed to raise student achievement, promotion, and graduation rates in the nation's most challenged high-poverty secondary schools. A teacher-friendly early warning system alerts teachers as soon as students begin to demonstrate off-track behaviors. The program incorporates teams of young adults up to 24 years old to serve as coaches for students with off-track indicators; case-managed, community-based supports for the highest-needs students; and extensive teacher team-based work.
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Cheryl Holcomb-McCoy
For all students, the transition to high school may lead to lower academic achievement and adjustment problems. Black students are at greater risk for academic and social decline during this transition. Holcomb-McCoy identifies four obstacles that make black students more vulnerable as they navigate the transition into high school: stereotyping in school settings; lack of positive role models; a disconnect between the school and home cultures, which can lead to mistrust; and the process of ethnic identity exploration. The author describes and gives examples of five ways high school educators can ease this transition for black youth: by promoting communication and transition planning between educators at high schools and their feeder middle schools; enlisting black mentors; targeting counseling to black students' needs; shaping a more culturally sensitive school; and creating parent partnerships.
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Nathan Frank
As instructional coach at Spring Grove Area High School in Pennsylvania, the author realized that too many of the school's freshmen were becoming what one might call lost in transition; they never made it to their sophomore year. He joined with concerned teachers and counselors from the school and its feeder middle schools to create a freshman advocacy group and eventually a successful peer mentoring program. The program trains upperclassmen to serve as one-on-one mentors to freshmen identified as at risk for academic failure. Mentors also raise money to buy school supplies for all their at-risk peers, and mentors and mentees have come together to raise money for groups like Habitat for Humanity. After several false starts, the program is helping a majority of students it serves succeed in classes and transition successfully to their sophomore year
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Heather Hamed, Jazmin Reyes, Dominic C. Moceri, Laura Morana and Maurice J. Elias
The authors describe a program implemented in Red Bank Middle School in New Jersey to help at-risk, minority middle school girls realize their leadership potential. The GLO (Girls Leading Outward) program was developed by the Developing Safe and Civil Schools Project at Rutgers University and is facilitated by university students. Selected middle school girls who have academic, social, or emotional challenges attend after-school sessions in which they learn problem-solving, emotional recognition and regulation, communication and assertiveness, and teamwork. At the end of the sessions, they design and implement a service project. Stories of some of the participants illustrate how the program has improved their self-image and helped prepare them for a more successful transition to high school.
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Judith Rance-Roney
For many English language learners, the endgame isn't passing state exams—it's attending and graduating from college. Yet schools often focus on a lower target: proficiency. To support the transition of English language learners to postsecondary success, schools should create formal transition plans, provide differentiated guidance, focus on grammar and academic English, provide extended time to learn, and partner with postsecondary institutions.
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Donna Rodrigues and Cecilia Le
University Campus School in Worchester, Massachusetts, was extremely successful in helping its graduates get into college, but the faculty realized that many students were not staying on track to graduate. To increase students' chances of finishing college, the faculty decided to revamp its senior year, giving students something similar to the college experience and teaching them to become more independent learners. Student schedules and coursework were designed to mimic college-level classes, and students were expected to ask for help and extended deadlines as needed, instead of relying on teachers to put these supports in place. Each year, faculty at the grade 7–12 school prepared students for their final year by gradually withdrawing supports. The new senior year also included a college-success course in which small groups of students helped one another set goals and manage their own learning. Alumni have reported that this revamped program helped them have a better idea of what they would experience in college.
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Michael Thompson
Michael Thompson, a psychologist who consults in K-12 schools, describes the high levels of anxiety he sees among high school juniors and seniors as they go through the college application process. Thompson believes the admissions process is a poor rite of passage to young adulthood because it focuses on the wrong questions. Parents and families obsess over whether a child will get into a particular elite college instead of the more important question: "Will this teenager grow up to be an independent, productive, loving adult?" Teachers can play an important role in bringing perspective to the college application process, helping kids sort out college options and supporting young people through this rocky transition.
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Bryan Goodwin
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Robert J. Marzano
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William M. Ferriter
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Joanne Rooney
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Cossondra George
George, a special education teacher at a rural middle school, describes six classroom-based strategies that she's found help teachers help make students' middle school years a safe passage between childhood and the responsibilities of young adulthood: (1) setting up classrooms with predictable structure; (2) making learning activities active; (3) accepting and expecting mistakes; (4) establishing a clean slate policy; (5) encouraging socializing; and (6) making humor part of the class routine. Each is accompanied by examples from George's classroom practice.
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Donna M. San Antonio, Elizabeth Marcell, Mara Tieken and Karen Wiener
The authors interviewed eight students about their hopes, fears, and experiences as they prepared to enter middle school and then experienced their first year. Student responses suggested that they looked forward to more freedom and welcomed the idea of harder academic challenges; at the same time, they wondered whether they would be up to the task. Their primary concern centered on social relationships with both teachers and other students—a concern magnified in their specific middle school, which draws students from six economically and socially diverse towns. The authors provide recommendations for strategies that schools can use to help students thrive in the broader, more diverse environment of the middle school.
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Natalee Popadiuk and Rick Oliver
Research shows that the transition from one level of schooling to another is a long process that unfolds over time. Popadiuk and Oliver write that, in their experience, educators often underestimate the intensity and duration of the middle school-high school transition. In interviews with 31 first-year and second-year high school students, the authors found that relationships with caring adults, especially teachers, were the one factor most helpful to students in making a successful transition. They advocate the middle school and high school staffs work together to create comprehensive transition programs that provide support from the last year of middle school through the end of the first year of high school.
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Naomi Thiers
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El Group
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