One of Mallory Carlisle’s seventh-grade students does not feel comfortable reading out loud in front of the class. But if Carlisle sits next to her, the student will read in whispers to her teacher.
“She and I have built that relationship with one another,” said Carlisle, who has taught history at Armstrong Middle School for 21 years. “I bring up her comments (with the) whole group and she just smiles because she’s like ‘That’s what I thought.’ It all comes down to relationships and the emotional connection.”
Teachers have to be versatile, flexible and able to laugh things off in order to build those relationships with students during the time of transition that is middle school, Carlisle said.
“They’re different. In a good way, but they’re different, and you’ve got to meet them where they are,” she said.
AMS is one of 20 middle schools statewide that will participate in a yearlong pilot program aimed at helping teachers support students’ social, emotional and academic growth, as Carlisle has made two decades’ worth of effort to do in her classroom.
The Mississippi Department of Education announced last week it will conduct assessments and professional development in 20 schools that applied for the Middle School: A LAB for Success pilot program. A task force spent two years developing the program, and MDE hopes to “package and coin” it to implement it in middle schools throughout the state, said Wendy Clemons, MDE executive director for secondary education.
The program aims to foster three things: academic rigor, social emotional learning and mentorship so students can have access to a variety of career pathways, Clemons said.
The foundation of all three is a healthy teacher-student dynamic, grown from individualized attention and the teacher’s willingness to sometimes be the learner, Carlisle added.
“(The student) needs you to be taught,” Carlisle said. “Let him be the teacher, basically, and teach you about his lifestyle and his wants and his needs.”
She tells students about her life as well, and the whole class knows that her son is a farmer and her daughter does karate, she said.
Her knowledge of current celebrities is limited, she said, so sometimes her students teach her about someone famous and she finds a way to relate it to the lesson at hand.
“If you can fix or find ways to connect that generation gap, (both) your new teachers and your old teachers are going to be OK,” Carlisle said.
She also uses sports analogies to teach them about wars, she said.
“We’re entertainers. That’s what middle school teachers are. If you can’t entertain, you need to go home,” Carlisle said. “If you fake that connection or that entertainment, the kids can see through it. Middle school is all honesty, and it’s raw honesty.”
How the pilot program works
MDE only considered schools with C, D or F accountability grades in 2017-18, according to the pilot program application form. AMS had a C that year and dropped to a D in 2018-19.
AMS fits the bill for the program because not only can it give the school more resources to meet children’s needs, but also because it can help retain teachers, Principal Julie Kennedy said. AMS has the highest teacher turnover rate in the Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated School District, with 42 new teachers at the beginning of this school year.
MDE is partnering with several agencies to develop the program and visit each participating school over the next several weeks. They include the Barksdale Reading Institute, Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning, Southern Regional Education Board, Council of Chief State School Officers, the College Board and Mississippi State University’s Research and Curriculum Institute.
MDE and AMS have not set a date for the visit yet, but Clemons said all the visits should be made by early November.
“We’ll be going in and analyzing, looking at the data, talking to students and teachers and leadership, determining what the areas for growth are (in each school), and based on what that looks like, we will then pair them up for some networking opportunities,” Clemons said.
Schools with similar problems will work together to solve them, she said.
One key focus for the program is providing equitable access to math courses for African-American males and special education students. Clemons said those two groups are underrepresented in eighth and ninth grade algebra courses, and giving them more access to those courses will improve their ACT scores and college readiness.
AMS has 153 special education students and 430 African-American male students in a student body of 1,172, SOCSD Public Information Officer Nicole Thomas said.
Funding for the pilot program’s activities will come from the state and the agencies working with MDE. Participation will last for a year but could be extended to three, depending on the success of the implementation, the amount of future funding and the completion of all necessary documents.
SOCSD Superintendent Eddie Peasant, whose previous positions include being principal at Gulfport Central Middle School, was a member of the task force that developed the pilot program. He said the idea came from a need for resources and training specifically aimed at middle schools.
“Most of our educators who graduate from our colleges of education are trained for either elementary or secondary education and there’s not any specific training for middle school,” Peasant said.
Teaching middle school requires a specific passion for the task, Carlisle said.
“If you like middle school, you stay there,” she said. “You don’t tolerate middle school. You love it or you leave. And that’s OK with me (because) I love it.”
The social emotional component
Social emotional learning is a key part of the pilot program because it is a necessary foundation for academic achievement, Clemons said.
“Until you meet the basic needs of an adolescent and make them comfortable in their environment and their skin, it’s very difficult to reach them academically,” she said.
Middle schoolers want to be “liked, heard and seen,” and their teachers “can live off of” social emotional learning, Carlisle said. One way is to reach a place of understanding with a child in trouble, she said.
“Whatever the situation is, get me to understand where you were in this time,” she said. “Why did you take that picture of yourself? Why did you write those mean words down?”
Teachers and counselors at AMS are already being trained to better address students’ social emotional learning needs, and there are smaller learning communities within the school that help with this, Peasant said.
“(They) allow our teachers to know their students and be able to work with a smaller group so they can build better relationships,” he said.
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