Education Commons^™

What Drives Your Spirit And Commitment To Middle Level Education? Exploring A Middle School Mindset, Nancy B. Ruppert

Current Issues in Middle Level Education

Over the past two years, middle school advocates have been sharing their thoughts on the following prompt: “What drives your spirit and commitment to middle level education?” The purpose has been to capture ‘the spirit’ of middle school* educators?’ From these stories five characteristics emerged that can help us consider how to promote the next generation of middle school leaders. Perhaps using the findings from this exercise can help us advocate for the next generation of middle school leaders. * For the purpose of this study, middle school refers to those who work with 10-15 year olds and includes intermediate …

Curriculum Integration: Walking The Walk, Taylor A. Norman, Amanda Wall

Current Issues in Middle Level Education

Curriculum integration is a hallmark of middle level education. This approach to education involves blending topics across content areas as a way of studying topics and problems of interest to young adolescents. Approaches to curriculum integration and interdisciplinary curriculum overlap with concepts like democratic education, place-based learning, student agency, and student-designed curriculum. Here, two teacher educators report on a recent initiative in which we co-designed integrated curriculum along with middle level teacher candidates. We drew on place-based instruction and models of collaboration to develop this project. Candidates then developed integrated units appropriate for middle school classrooms.

Collaborating With The European League For Middle Level Education, Nancy B. Ruppert, Deborah Mcmurtrie, Bridget K. Coleman, Gary J. Senn, Sarah Ellyson

Current Issues in Middle Level Education

Collaborations between the National Association for Middle Level Education (NAPOMLE) and the European League for Middle Level Education (ELMLE) can be mutually beneficial. This article reflects on NAPOMLE’s past experiences with our global affiliate ELMLE and promotes future partnerships expanding our commitment to supporting the development of middle schools and middle level leaders. We advocate a global approach to preparing and empowering the next generation of middle school leaders.

Introduction To The Issue: Preparing The Next Generation Of Middle School Leaders, Amanda Wall, Nancy B. Ruppert, Bridget K. Coleman, Jeanneine Jones

Current Issues in Middle Level Education

The articles in this issue of Current Issues in Middle Level Education are based on a Symposium that did not take place as planned. In May 2020, middle level educators and researchers from across the Southeast and beyond would have gathered in Asheville, NC, for a Symposium sponsored by the Southeast Professors of Middle Level Education (SEPOMLE). Due to COVID-19, however, the in-person Symposium was canceled, and accepted authors were invited to submit manuscripts based on their work for this issue.

These articles represent ideas on the Symposium theme of “Preparing the Next Generation of Middle School Leaders.” Across the …

Leveraging Communities Of Practice To Build Integrated Professional Learning Communities For Stem Education, Amanda L. Glaze

Department of Middle Grades and Secondary Education Faculty Publications

In the modern educational era, there is an increasing focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) education. Innovation and workforce preparation play a large role in the push to increase scientific literacy, thinking skills and high-skilled personnel. However, there are ongoing issues with reforming education to meet these goals as well as the recruitment and retention of students in these fields. STEM and the various other iterations in which it is found, represents a challenge in education, as there are often many intersecting cultures, epistemologies, practices and expectations that are unique to each of the represented fields. As a …

The Effects Of Schema-Based Instruction On Solving Mathematics Word Problems, Scarlet Hughes, Joshua Cuevas Dr.

Georgia Educational Researcher

The purpose of this study was to investigate the frequency with which students use math word problem strategies during and after schema-based instruction. It examines the extent to which students increase their ability to correctly solve word problems. It compares students’ attitudes toward mathematics problem solving before and after schema-based instruction. The study was conducted in a resource class with seven second-grade students on individualized education programs (IEPs). A single-subject research design was used. The schema-based instruction was implemented by the special education teacher in a small group setting. Students showed an increase in attempted and correct strategy use during …

Story Squad: Connecting Books, Standards, And Literature Circles, Leslie Cowell

National Youth Advocacy and Resilience Conference

Story Squad was developed after experiencing the use of Literature Circles in a fourth grade classroom. Students enjoyed the idea, but the jobs themselves and process were not engaging. Story Squad presents roles for connecting to literature after giving students “a mission” to solve. Roles expand past the traditional Literature Circle roles and directly connect to state standards. Can be used and adapted for 3-8^th grade.

Behavioral, Cognitive, And Health Benefits Of Walking While Listening To Educational Podcasts, Debra D. Ives

National Youth Advocacy and Resilience Conference

This session will highlight the behavioral, health and cognitive benefits of walking while listening to educational podcasts. Improvement is learning, mood and healthy habits result. Attendees will get to experience these benefits first hand when they go for a walk listening to a Walking Classroom podcast. Attendees will Walk. Listen. And Learn.

Parent/Guardian Experience: How Schools Can Improve The Parent Experience And How That Leads To Positive Outcomes., Wesley H. Walters

National Youth Advocacy and Resilience Conference

Parent/Guardian eXperience: How creating an awesome Parent/guardian experience can lead to increased parent participation, and how parent participation leads to success of the student & the overall success of the school. The goal of this presentation is to engage parents in their child’s school experience by building a genuine connection with the school and a positive parent experience.

The 4 Things That Really Matter And How They Tie Into Life Development, Derrick Hayes

National Youth Advocacy and Resilience Conference

The 4 Things That Really Matter and How They TIE Into Life Development is a program where participants will see how the choices they make on a daily basis can determine the habits that they have for the rest of their life. They will begin to network with each other to see how to build positive relationships that will empower others and put them in a position to overcome obstacles. Staff or participants will leave the presentation with tools and strategies that can help their students before, during and after High School.

Read, Write, Rhyme: Increasing Reading Performance With Hip-Hop Texts, Crystal Monique Lavoulle

National Youth Advocacy and Resilience Conference

This presentation describes the Harlem Renaissance to Hip Hop Movement, a literacy program that uses best practices in literacy instruction to improve reading comprehension, critical thinking, and writing. Moving beyond educational hip-hop songs and videos, this presentation offers insight into effective ways to increase Georgia Milestone Assessment scores in both English language arts and social studies using a variety of hip-hop texts.

Integrating Social, Emotional, And Academic Learning (S.E.A.L.) Into School Culture: It Starts With All Of The Adults, Joelle Hood

National Youth Advocacy and Resilience Conference

In this engaging session, Dr. Joelle Hood will demonstrate how SEL needs to be modeled from all adults and integrated into all areas of the school site and district. She will share how she has brought this deep dive learning into Executive Cabinets and District Management Retreats, into multi-day sessions with teachers and counselors, and into an innovative and interactive online course to empower educators with the opportunity to strengthen their own social-emotional intelligence, well-being and resilience, and deepen their understanding of WHY these skills are so important to students and staff. Participants will engage in discussions and activities that …

Rising Up: Kids Who Own Their Learning And Behaviors, And The Supports Which Made It Happen, Brian Keefer

National Youth Advocacy and Resilience Conference

A success story connecting Head and Home will be explored focusing on Hampton Elementary School’s strategic integration of STEAM Focused Project Based Learning, Authentic Learning, Student Goal Setting and Reflection, Social and Emotional Learning, and Increased Parental Engagement. Participants will leave with applicable ideas and strategies to grow student and parental engagement promoting increased academic outcomes in their own setting.

Rockets: Reaching Our Community Through Kindness, Education, Togetherness And Stem – A Sustainable Communities Project In Sumter County, Georgia, Crystal Perry

National Youth Advocacy and Resilience Conference

This poster session highlights the ROCKETS program implemented in Sumter County Schools through UGA Extension. Through the ROCKETS Project in-school sessions, youth with disabilities are provided additional opportunities to belong to a larger group of youth through the Georgia 4-H Program. The ROCKETS Project focuses on Agricultural literacy and STEM education as content areas to cultivate, recruit and graduate the next generation of a highly-skilled diverse workforce.

Differentiated Instruction That Works For “At Risk” Students: Reaching And Meeting The Need, Henry Tellis

National Youth Advocacy and Resilience Conference

Are you looking for differentiated instructional strategies that reach every student? Come hear how I have learned to meet the learning styles of students in my classroom. This session will provide research-based strategies on how to effectively implement center-based instruction and practical strategies to use in a risk school classroom. Learn how to reach and meet the needs of learners.

The Domino Effect: Lessons From The Prison Walls, Trent Grundmeyer, Jamie Ross

National Youth Advocacy and Resilience Conference

This presentation is designed to provide insight to those who serve at-risk populations. Participants will explore the risk factors and statistics around at-risk youth. Furthermore, participants will have the opportunity to hear first-hand from an incarcerated women who can testify to successful and unsuccessful interventions adults attempted to help her with. She is both a victim and success story that is the face of how education can indeed make a difference for kids.

After successful completion of this course students will be able to:

1. Build empathy for students who do not have support from parents.
2. Understand why attendance is often …

Effective Instructional Practices For Students With Mild Disabilities: Cognitive And Meta-Cognitive Strategies, Crystal Roberts, Andrea Scandrett, Jessika Washington

National Youth Advocacy and Resilience Conference

General Education Teachers, Special Education Teachers, and School Administrators will be able to gain information needed to support students suspected of or identified as experiencing learning disabilities. The presenters will discuss cognitive and meta-cognitive high leverage instructional practices that can be used to improve student engagement and academic achievement by strengthening executive functioning skills to enhance memory, attention and self-regulation.

Practical Strategies For Regulating Students’ Brains, Kathy Van Horn, Joshua Macneill

National Youth Advocacy and Resilience Conference

Knowing your students are impacted by trauma is only step one. It is more important to know what to do. This session will cover interventions such as brain breaks, fidgets, student curriculum and service dogs. We will share how we transformed four schools to meet the needs of struggling students. Whether you are an academic, clinical, or administrative staff, you will leave with tangible interventions you can implement immediately.

Willowcreek Middle School Alternative Program: Successfully Working Through Trauma, Debra B. Ekdahl 6061

National Youth Advocacy and Resilience Conference

Willowcreek Middle School in Portage Indiana is not your typical alternative school. We offer trauma informed practices in place of student expulsions. A safe structured environment, reduced class time, academic strategies, mindfulness, yoga, and community service, all help to provide the educational and social/emotional support necessary to help students at risk reach their potential and eventually transition back to the traditional classroom.

Innovative Education: Information Literacy Planning Reframed As Design Thinking, Kay Coates, Dylitchrous Thompson

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

Innovative education can be conceptualized as the “new” ways and methods of delivering educational content mostly in the realm of civil discourse and academics. Information literacy plays a niche role in content delivery generally, but especially when the discussion centers on tertiary scholarship. Design thinking is one of the many innovative methods of teaching and learning that has taken traction in the field of education. Manifestly, however, librarians have practiced this since the profession became a lettered vocation. It is without adequately acknowledging that by providing information literacy, librarians continue to do their part skillfully and quietly for successful outcomes …

From Information Literacy To A Spirit Of Inquiry: A Tale Of Two Librarians, Maura Mandyck

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

With just two teaching librarians at our small liberal arts college on the Gulf Coast, we needed to create a coherent, reproducible, adaptable, and student-centered information literacy curriculum that would best serve the freshman English courses we work with most closely. Over the course of the last four years, we have blended the long experience and deep institutional knowledge of one of our librarians with the fresh-from-the-trenches (that is, high school librarianship and experience as an adjunct English instructor) perspective of the other to create the program of a Spirit of Inquiry, which we describe this way:

Active curiosity, diligent …

Databases Are Like Box Stores: Teaching Information Literacy With Analogy, Kory A. Paulus

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

Teaching information literacy (IL) often requires instructors to explain and explore abstract concepts. This feat is never easy, as novice students often need a bridge between concrete and abstract thinking. Current research on the topic suggests one effective way to teach new, abstract concepts to students of any age is by using an analogy. However, it’s difficult to come up with effective analogies on the fly. In fact, Rick Wormeli has stated in Metaphors & Analogies: Power Tools for Teaching Any Subject that “what may need to change in many of our classrooms is the purposeful pursuit of metaphors and …

“It [My Research] Would Take Place At 11:50pm”: Constructing A Realistic Simulation To Study Online Information Evaluation For School Projects, Amy G. Buhler, Brittany Brannon

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

When students explore a search results page for a school-related project, what leads them to select a resource? We explore this question in our IMLS-funded research study, Researching Student Information Choices: Identifying and Judging the Credibility of Online Sources. In this session we introduce our novel simulation-based research method. We designed a simulated environment to study students’ online information-seeking behavior and understand their point-of-selection behavior when they determine that a resource potentially meets their research need. Simulated search engine results pages were used to examine students’ information selection decisions for an age-appropriate research prompt. The simulation collected quantitative data …

Beyond The Checklist Approach: Teaching Students To Think About How They Will Use Information, Jenny Mills

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

Students can generally find relevant information for their topic that checks the boxes for “quality,” but then, what do they do with that information? Relying on a checklist approach to source analysis leads to a surface examination of sources, which can then lead to patch-writing and simplistic, bland papers. Instead of focusing just on those outside markers of quality, library instructors at Belmont University also focus on how the source will be used, and for what specific purpose. This holistic approach to evaluating information encourages students to dig deeper into texts while simultaneously teaching that research is about inquiry.

Library …

Refresh Student-Library Relationships With Innovative Applications Of Goosechase, Natalie Edwards Bishop, Jessica Xiong

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

Effective library orientations place significant strain on library staff. Development, execution, and assessment of learning outcomes require a significant time investment, especially if working within a low-no cost framework. Learn how we leveraged an FTE-based GooseChase scavenger hunt subscription to create an innovative, community-building orientation that successfully met our information literacy outcomes. Compared to previous, home-grown orientations, GooseChase afforded our library with a platform to easily assess student learning and provide students with self-directed way to learn about library collections, services, and spaces. GooseChase allows for flexible, real-time feedback and assessment such as adding bonus points. Students were self-motivated to …

How To Make Services Sustainable Without Losing Friends Or Making Enemies, Jennifer Stout

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

The Teaching Librarians at Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries have traditionally offered in-person library instruction to all sections of UNIV 112 and UNIV 200, two writing and research intensive courses all students are required to take which are taught out of the Department of Focused Inquiry (FI). In Spring 2018, we realized that our teaching load had become unsustainable and, with the blessing of FI leadership, made the difficult decision to end in-person instruction for UNIV 112.

In this presentation, I will cover how we handled this transformation of services without jeopardizing the immensely positive relationship we have with FI. Over …

Information Literacy As Structured Authoring, Robert Terry

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

By drawing on the early findings of an IRB-approved study, this presentation will discuss some challenges involved in teaching structured authoring, defined here as topic based authoring combined with an XML or XML-like structure. Since the late 1980s, Robert E. Horn and others referred to structured authoring/writing as a new paradigm that transforms the ways writers think about information usage, presentation, and structuring. Charlotte Robidoux (2007) and Sally Henschel (2010, 2014), among others, have explored how curriculums that taught structured authoring might help students begin to understand how the approach changes writing. However, as Joy Robinson et al (2019) demonstrated, …

Seeking Symbiosis: Designing Libguides That Bring User-Centered Design And Learner-Centered Practice Into Harmony, Vanessa Garofalo, Adrienne Button, Anne Le-Huu Pineault, S. Paige Crowl

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

Libraries around the world use LibGuides to create research guides for students. But is the user-centered approach often employed by libraries when creating these guides enough to meet the needs of today’s learners? A small task force of librarians at Oxford College of Emory University set out to answer this question. After studying the literature, it was found that very few studies focus on instructional design principles in the creation of LibGuides. Furthermore, an examination of their own library’s LibGuides revealed that while the guides addressed many issues of usability, learner-centered design was often absent.

(25 minutes) The first portion …

Using Best Practices Of Teaching And Learning To Make Your Meetings More Inclusive And Productive, Jessica Kohout-Tailor

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

As instructors of information literacy, our goal is to equip learners with the skills needed to critically evaluate, use, and create information effectively and ethically. Listening and speaking skills are vital, as the information proficient learner listens to information, asks questions, and synthesizes the information with which they interact.

As instructors, we model these skills and behaviors within and outside of classrooms and libraries. We teach learners how to read information, model metacognitive skills, and support learners with how to effectively articulate their findings and new knowledge. We recognize that our pedagogy extends beyond the traditional classroom, which can include …

Libguides 2.0 Continued: Implementing Best Practices In Design And Accessibility After Migration, Holly Mabry, Jessica Xiong

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

Since migrating LibGuides from version 1.0 to 2.0 in 2015, librarians at Gardner-Webb University have adopted a continuous evaluation approach that addresses best practices in LibGuides design, accessibility, and instruction techniques. This presentation will provide an overview of Gardner-Webb Library’s experiences with the migration and evaluation process.

The librarians formed a professional learning community (PLC) to choose colors, fonts, and layout templates to use after the migration that would fit in with the university’s branding. In 2018, one of the librarians provided best practices and training in accessibility for people with disabilities. In the summer of 2019, two of the …