The Physical, Cognitive and Neural Transitions of Middle Level Students The average middle school student experiences a plethora of changes in the three short years they are in our presence. These changes affect their performance in our classrooms. As educators it is our duty to best support our students with our knowledge of their ever changing selves. Generally speaking, included in these changes are their cognitive, neural and physical attributes. One way in which the middle level students are changing is cognitively. By middle school, the students are transitioning from Piaget’s concrete stage to the formal operational stage(Brown & Knowles 30). In this stage students are developing a sense of metacognition. This affects our roles as teachers because our students are beginning to understand how their own thinking works. We can take advantage of this fact by having peers evaluate their peers work. Instead of simply grading students as …show more content…
Our students have their myelin, which is the fatty white substance that surrounds the brain, increase by 100% by the end of adolescence(26). This leads to a better short term memory, which leads to better problem solving, and more active learning skills. To serve this changing factors, as teachers we can teach lessons which require our students to be a more active participant. One example of this is reciprocal teaching. Reciprocal teaching is a teaching strategy that deconstructs the physical act of teaching. Then the students are assigned roles in which they take a part of the teacher’s job, and teach the information to their groups. The roles traditionally are summarizing, question generating, clarifying, and predicting The students are able to handle the adult-like roles they will need to utilize in reciprocal teaching in part thanks to their changing brains. Moreso, reciprocal teaching requires the students to be an active conductor in their own