Meet Me in the Middle Chapter 2

Chapter 2 lays out multiple ways of motivating and engaging middle school students. There were a few strategies from this chapter that I find are incredibly important when trying to motivate and engage your students. There were also a few instructional strategies that I had never thought of using that I may end up using in my future classroom. I completely agree with the quote on page 463 that “Getting young adolescents to pay attention and learn is 80 percent of our battle in middle schools”. From the little bit of experience that I have with working with middle schoolers, I can say that this has been a battle at times. If you are unable to gain students’ attention your lesson is not going to effective for your students. When it comes to gaining attention I strongly believe in two strategies that were mentioned in this chapter. The first is having an interest in getting to know your students. If students feel like their teacher is interested in them they will value the time they spend in that teacher’s classroom. The second strategy is creating a good learning environment. If students feel safe and supported in the classroom they will be more engaged and more likely to participate. Lastly, a few instructional strategies that I had never thought of, but will most likely end up using are PQRST and exclusion brainstorming. I really like the idea of making readings a bit more structured, because as the author mentioned students often find reading from a textbook to be boring. Giving the reading a purpose will engage students with the material more. I also liked the exclusion brainstorming strategy. Trying to get students interested in a subject is half the battle when it comes to motivating students to participate in the classroom.