Welcome to our Course

Welcome to Classroom #310

When you open this door, you enter Classroom #310. In it, you'll find lots of students who have similarities to each other --- age, neighborhoods, average height -- -but you'll also find students with differences. Those differences come from many areas, but we're going to zoom in on the developmental stages of these early adolescents as well as the social milieu that frames each adolescent's daily existence.

What does it mean for an early adolescent to go through developmental stages?

Current research shows that young adolescents go through tremendous brain growth and development. According to the National Education Association, Adolescents are moving from concrete to abstract thinking and to the beginnings of metacognition (the active monitoring and regulation of thinking processes). They are developing skills in deductive reasoning, problem solving, and generalizing. This period of brain growth marks the beginning of a person's ability to do problem solving, think critically, plan, and control impulses.

What kinds of early adolescent development should we know?

So, as we enter Classroom #310 and get to know the students who meet in this room, we'll be giving special attention to many of the developmental stages of early adolescents, including their physical, psychological, intellectual, and social needs. And, as we do so, we'll be starting to understand the educational implications of these developmental needs for teaching and learning practices in a middle level school.

And, as our course evolves, we will look to the way that social constructions frame the lives of our young adolescents. That means we'll zoom into the ways that gender, race, expectations around heteronormativity, and other categories of "normal" affect the way young adolescents interact with others and school culture.