Abstract:

The Association for Middle Level Education (AMLE) position statement, The Successful Middle School: This We Believe, calls for curriculum that “is challenging, exploratory, integrative, and diverse.” Such a curriculum emphasizes academic content mastery while cultivating a sense of belonging and fostering whole-child development. Curriculum researchers have argued that understanding curriculum design requires attention to both curricular processes and products, which are inextricably linked to one another. Moreover, middle school teachers often face obstacles and pitfalls that can derail curriculum improvement efforts, including material, organizational, relational, cultural factors. Four middle grades teachers who are familiar with AMLE’s vision for curriculum were interviewed in order to gain an understanding of their curriculum design process and the products they create.

The study identifies and describes:
(a) the challenges and obstacles middle school teachers encounter as they design curricula;
(b) the ways teachers employ design thinking as they overcome the obstacles and challenges they encounter; and
(c) exemplars of curricula designed to overcome obstacles and challenges.

In successful middle schools, curriculum planning is an interactive process marked by transparency, deliberation, and collaboration. Creating curriculum can be conceptualized as a set of design principles and design criteria applied to solve the problem of determining the best route and vehicle to get diverse students to their learning destination. As such, design-based research can provide a helpful approach for teachers to work together in creating a successful middle school curriculum.

The study highlights the value of a design-based approach to curriculum planning using AMLE’s vision as a source of design principles, and it illustrates how an iterative, backward design process can lead to curriculum that is challenging, exploratory, integrative, and diverse. Moreover, obstacles and pitfalls to successful middle school curriculum can be addressed head-on through the “LESS” framework: local, emergent, simple, and small. This framework offers teachers and school leaders a way to ensure that deep, meaningful connections are at the heart of the curriculum which is implemented through a flexible curriculum design process. Vivid descriptions of classroom practice demonstrate how teachers working from a successful middle school curricular stance (i.e., beliefs system) leverage local resources (L), embrace emergent design (E), use simple integrative design structures (S), and start with small-scale curriculum development (S).

Keywords:

Curriculum, design thinking, middle school, teacher beliefs.