Thomas Owen Erb

Introduction: The Middle School: Mimicking the Success Routes of the Information Age

Tom Erb is one of the key figures in the Middle Schools movement which has been a rapidly increasing presence in the education of the preteen and early teenage student in the United States, slowly but surely replacing the Junior High School. Erb, like many of the other contributors to this special issue, points to the changing times and new needs of the society to justify major changes in the educational system. He refers to the postindustrial age, where more of an intellectual and achievement level will be required of the students than was needed in the industrial age, where hard workers who could plug away at repetitive tasks without engaging in too much interfering thought were what was needed in large numbers. But Erb claims that more than increased intellectual complexity is called for. We need to stress interdisciplinary curriculum and to understand that cooperation and collaboration will be required in the society of the near future, and that has implications for teaching staff as well as students. That means teaching teams and cooperative learning and self-awareness and concern for others as parts of the curriculum and program. As Erb points out, the field of gifted education is, or should be, more ready to accept many of these changes than others. It seems critically important that we do not become so negative to such momentary middle school themes such as heterogeneous grouping that we fail to accept and work with a movement that has so much in common with our own goals and our own practices.

Eighth Grade Classrooms in Theory and Practice: The Gap Persists

Recent research has demonstrated that a gap exists between the advocacy of educational innovations in the literature and the actual practice of these innovations in classrooms. The middle school movement has raised several questions concerning the implementation of recommended procedures in the middle grades. This study went beyond using paper and pencil instruments to gather data on classroom practice. Two lowinference observation instruments were used to compare core classrooms to departmental ones on the dimensions of climate, control, and teacherstudent verbal interaction. Except in the area of climate, where core classrooms showed superiority, more similarities than differences were found. Neither core nor departmentalized classrooms were dominated by the practices recommended in the literature to aid early adolescent growth and development.