A Challenge for Middle Grades Teacher Education Programs to Practice What They Preach: An Australian Experience

Over the past 15 years, Australia has seen the growth of separate middle schools for lower secondary school students and in some cases, upper primary school students. For example, every new government high school built in the state since 1995 has taken the form of a middle school for young adolescents and a separate senior campus for young adults. Middle schooling has become more prominent in Australia. In response to this trend, Edith Cowan University introduced a one-year Graduate Diploma of Education in Middle Schooling in 2002. In this article, the authors discuss how ECU's new middle grades diploma represents the school's effort to promote middle schooling reform in Australia. They describe the intended outcomes for this particular diploma into three broad categories: (1) relationships, (2) curriculum, and (3) pedagogy. The authors, who are teacher educators at ECU, describe how they strive to practice what they preach by modeling middle schooling principles and practices in their teaching. They do this by not only "telling" graduates about the principles of best practice associated with middle schooling, but also "showing" them what it looks like in classrooms and learning communities, as a whole. (Contains 1 figure.)