Chapter 6: Organizing Relationships for Learning

Chapter 6: Organizing Relationships for Learning
In this chapter, the focus is placed on how to build an effective middle school. The chapter looked at things from a strictly structural view, from a student’s view, and from a teacher’s view. When it comes to the actual physical structure of the school, the chapter suggests small schools that have no more than 600 students should be the norm; those students should be teamed with roughly five teachers so that the overall numbers are about 125 students and five teachers. The chapter does suggest that for larger schools it might be wise to break the school into houses or communities in order to reduce the student-to-teacher ratio for better learning. From a student’s view, the chapter discusses how it is vital for students to be able to develop close, meaningful relationships with their peers and their teachers – according to their findings, it shows that students who have those solid relationships do much better in school. The other suggestion, which deals with the relationships, is to have both the same teachers and students stick together for many years in order to build a good, working relationship. The chapter also had suggestions for teachers. They mentioned the importance of matching teachers based on their learning styles and personalities when forming teaching teams; this is meant to make sure that the team can agree and work together.

After reading this chapter, I had to agree with the suggestions made by the Turning Points group. I totally agree that the schools should be kept small in order to reduce class sizes and help students get the attention that they need. By shrinking class size, teachers will have a better chance of getting to know all of their students and be able to tailor their lessons to suit each student. This method will also help students and teachers have better relationships, which is vital to the success of the whole middle school. From a teaching standpoint, I know that I would much rather be teamed with other teachers who I can get along with and want to collaborate with. If the teachers like each other than I think more work will get done; if more work gets done then there is a much greater likelihood that the students will succeed.