Middle School Centers

In school, children participate in two worlds: the official school world and the unofficial social world. The official school world consists of school work that is evaluated by authoritative figures and scrutinized by administrators of standardized tests. The unofficial social world is created by peers. Caroline Maurer describes the advantage of merging these two worlds together: "When children are put together in an official school world, they use peer talk to share ideas, exert power and gain control over an unofficial world... an unofficial world that exists under the radar of adult influences" (Meeting Academic Standards through Peer Dialogue at Literacy Centers).  Although Maurer's article focuses on centers in an elementary classroom, I believe that there is great insight to be gained and tailored for middle school students. At an age where peer approval is prioritized and active engagement is desired, I find the use of centers to be developmentally appropriate in a middle school Language Arts classroom. Centers provide physical movement in the classroom and intellectual stimulation as the students work on things that are important to them, and develop social skills while allowing time to building relationships with peers. In addition, centers encourage the students to take on responsibility for their own learning and help to develop a level of accountability.

It is more than likely that a teacher will run into management problems with the use of centers. What if the students get off task? What if they need extra help? How can you, as the teacher, be facilitating every group at once? It is important to plan to avoid these problems all together. The teacher should have explicit instructions at each center instructing the students on what to do. Each student should be assigned a particular role to rule out the chance that one or two students will emerge to carry the rest of the group. For struggling readers, it might even be necessary to have the instructions and activity recorded in order to guide them through the process. The teacher should rotate through the groups to answer any additional questions or help where difficulties arise, or work with a specific group individually. A question I would like to pose, however, is how the groups should be determined. Should students always work with the same groups to build a level of camaraderie with group members or should the groups be scrambled every so often? Should the groups be assigned according to ability or should each group have a mix of strong and struggling students? And how much time should be alloted to each center?

I think this approach would be extremely effective in a reading and writing workshop, with each center focusing on a specific skill. In a reading workshop I might assign students to the center that they are struggling the most with, encouraging them to develop in one area and move onto another. In a writing workshop I might allow a little bit more freedom, letting the students choose a particular station. Each workshop would benefit from the use of centers, because both reading and writing are skills that can continually be developed at the pace of the individual. There are so many aspects to reading and writing, it would be helpful to break it up and allow room for discussion with peers.

The National Middle School Association Conference in 2007 published a helpful guideline for establishing centers in a middle school classroom. Launching Learning Centers in the Middle Grades is great place to begin brainstorming ideas for centers in your own middle school classroom.