Transition is Step One to Creating a School of Endearment

Ed Week Article: Study Links Academic Setbacks to Middle School Transition

Ed Week just presented an interesting article regarding the importance of transition. A major study out of Harvard states that the point of school transition from elementary to middle is the most significant transition point for students to remain successful through high school. You can find the abbreviated article on the November 28 version of ASCD's SmartBrief, or go directly to Ed Week and find the full article, which is worth reading.

Michael Fullan in his 2008 book on Six Secrets of Leadership, discusses how a business, and I converted it to a school can become a Firm of Endearment. Creating Schools of Endearment requires effort and pre-thought about how we bring new students into our culture, and guarantee that the culture that exists is a healthy, caring, and trusting culture.

Since my time as a middle school principal, I have believed that the elementary to middle school transition was very much overlooked for its importance to educators. As a director supervising middle schools in the early 2000s, I presented data to show the dip that occurs to middle students in both math and ELA at the point of transition. The middle school principals I shared this with seemed to take the information seriously based on the table conversations that followed, however, it did not seem to change the direction of the school district. Focus was then, and continues to be on the elementary and high schools. I understand that all levels are important, but as a society we put a lot of emphasis on the data coming out of our high schools. This puts the high school educators in a difficult situation, and it ignores the importance of middle school in preparing our kids to succeed in high school.

Three years after retiring, I still sit with an approved middle school plan in my computer, that no one has asked for in order to begin implementing. It was approved in the middle of my last year in my district, 2008, and nothing has altered the focus since. I continue to question why only data is the concern and not the preparation of the kids in many areas, including those that are academic.

As a director, I reflected on my efforts to build a real transition program from elementary to middle school, and wrote a paper sharing what seemed to work successfully for our students. You can read my paper on transition from elementary to middle school by clicking here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NW1aDKkKCYJpEQpH07g0kMJOeOZXpGez10ye8pphCcU/edit?hl=en_US

Please let me know if you have difficulty getting to this document through Google.docs. I would also be interested in your comments about the article. Transition has to be more than a couple of brief encounters of the minimal kind. It is at the time of articulation opportunities where a school can change in the minds of parents and students from an institution to what Michael Fullar refers to as a "School of Endearment".