Meet Me in the Middle: Chapter 6

Chapter 6:

This chapter discussed the concept of holding students and teachers accountable for high standards. Wormeli encourages teachers to hold their students accountable for their grades. In this chapter Wormeli recognizes that holding a student accountable can involve risk tasking. He illustrates this with a story about a boy with Tourette’s syndrome and how he had the boy play the lead role in a play. Wormeli felt that doing this encouraged the student to reach for a higher goal and that he made the student accountable for this performance. To hold students accountable for meeting high standards Wormeli suggests: providing models of success, display assignments publicly, reducing or eliminating extra credit projects, allowing students to struggle and having a telephone in your classroom. Other suggestions Wormeli made on how to meet state standards were: putting the student first and not just teaching to the test, keeping yourself aware of new relevant research, make sure school is about learning and not maintaining control of students, make sure students understand and be prepared to re-teach content in new ways, collaborate with colleagues, seek and use available resources, and give students time to learn the format of state exams. Doing these suggestions will according to Wormeli create students that are successful and able to analyze information.

I found this chapter to be interesting because it encouraged teachers to hold not only themselves, but their students to high standards. I found this to be interesting because I feel like a recent trend in education is to not hold students accountable. For example, the school in Rhode Island fired all its teachers because of the grades; the problem may have been the instruction style, but it also could have been students weren’t as one parent suggested willing to put in the work. I liked how this chapter connected well into the Turning Points 2000 points. I feel like the suggestions in this book would create a great environment in which students are accountable for themselves and determine their success. I think that it is important for teachers to also be held accountable and like how Wormeli has his students grade him. I would like to use this in my classroom.