If we truly want to improve attendance by engaging middle school kids, says veteran school leader Jen Schwanke, we need to give them rich elective choices – not just “pick band or choir.”
By Jen Schwanke, Ed.D.
A few weeks ago, I walked into one of our middle school electives – Medical Detectives – and saw a classroom full of eighth graders, all clad in rubber aprons, poking around a sheep’s brain.
I stared – a little aghast, a little nauseous, a lot impressed.
That sheep brain? That’s what this article is about.
I started teaching middle schoolers in 1998. That year, I was part of a team of teachers that visited the elementary school to talk to fifth graders about their transition to middle school – telling them how much fun it would be. Changing classes! A longer lunch period! Having electives! After our pep talk, we would pass out class selection forms for them to fill out. They were so excited – electives! The choice! The sheets promised a whole new future.
But then their faces would twist in confusion. “But we can only choose between… band or choir?” they would ask. “Everything else is chosen for us?”
Yes, I would be forced to say, feigning enthusiasm. Yes. But isn’t it exciting? Choice! Music! Band or choir! Either one! And the next year, I told them, they had even more choice! Health class was a requirement, but they could add a study hall if they wanted! Or take an extra art or physical education class!
Times have changed but choices not so much
More than 25 years have passed since then, and I now work in a different district. Times are different. Students are different. The thing that is consistent, though, not only for me but for middle schools across the globe, is that choice for middle schoolers remains quite limited.
Many teachers and administrators want to increase choice for their middle schoolers. They know adolescent learners are prone to losing interest, that they complain that school is a waste of time, and that they feel like school is something to endure. I have a superintendent colleague on the west coast who told me a surprising trend has emerged in his district – truancy in his middle school is at a higher rate than truancy at his high school. “They don’t seem to want to come,” he says.
I’m here to offer a glimpse at how my district mustered the courage and creativity to change middle school offerings. Thanks to courageous leaders and strong collaboration between our central office and our school principals, I have been thrilled to watch our five middle schools dramatically increase the choices our middle schoolers have when scheduling classes.
Let me explain how we got it done.
It began with mindset shifts
It’s difficult to change long-standing schedules. It’s difficult to make adjustments to staffing allocations. But it’s almost impossible to create a new mindset, to collectively commit to doing the hard work to make change. Here are the specific ways we started thinking differently.
Shift #1: Broadening our perspective
Historically, most educators think choice can only live in related arts – the trifecta of art, music, and physical education. To change that mindset, we got experimental with choice within these related arts – instead of art 6, art 7, and art 8, we started thinking about other art-adjacent opportunities.
We also looked at content areas. Instead of simply offering English 6, 7, and 8, we thought about how we could supplement a standard English class with choice-based options to meet state standards in other ways – journalism, reading seminars, and technical writing. Science classes could do some experimental learning as medical detectives. Literacy could be expanded to include digital literacy and media literacy. We knew students can never have too much reading and writing.
Shift #2: Rethinking staffing and scheduling
We’d always thought of a schedule as needing to have uniformity throughout the day and year. To change that belief, we started dreaming of ways to increase choice and exposure. To do that, we used a trimester grading cycle rather than a semester grading schedule for electives.
The most difficult part has proven to be reconciling changes with existing learning management and student information systems, but creative thinking and unique coding upended the requirement that we follow traditional time structures (i.e. all students having core classes at the same time). In other words, our challenge was rethinking staffing and scheduling more with a strategic mindset.
Shift #3: Becoming risk-takers
If your philosophical reasons for making change are strong, you can overcome the challenges to make it work. Admittedly, the challenges are big. Teacher licensure. Scheduling problems. Communication. Grading practices. Cost. Resources. Developing curriculum. Training teachers.
But if you really want it to happen, you can make it happen. Will it be worth all the work? The honest answer is that you can’t know until you try. But we decided the risk of inaction was greater than the challenge of action.
With our minds right, we got to work.
➡️ LEARN MORE: If you’d like to read a detailed description of the steps we took, which explains our rationale; outlines our year of planning, communicating and teacher training; and describes the electives we ultimately decided to offer, Download this PDF.
Some lessons we’ve learned
We are in our second year of implementation, and we are currently reviewing the success of the program and how we can make it better. As I write this, I’m reflecting on a meeting I had just yesterday with the leaders who are making adjustments for next year. Here are a few things we would caution for anyone leading this process:
► Don’t get too big. As we got started a few years ago, we consulted with a district that had done something similar, but they had made a big misstep: In an effort to get teachers on board, they asked that every teacher propose an elective. As a result, there were thirty different options. What happened? With so many choices, students were overwhelmed. They just signed up for teachers they liked, so some classes had no enrollees while some had fifty.
Classes were cancelled. The ones that did remain often turned into massive study centers. Worse, they were sometimes taught by teachers who’d been assigned to manage the overflow, not the ones who proposed the class – a certain way to make teachers resentful and uninterested. From this district, we learned to stay relatively small – giving students choice didn’t mean we had to give them too much.
► Do an ongoing audit. We knew there would be bumps in the road, and there certainly were. We took note of all the problems and tried to make adjustments – more training, different resources, increased communication, and so on. We plan to continue to audit the offerings annually and make changes on an ongoing basis..
► Be open to mistakes, change, and mea culpa moments. Humility is your best friend. Avoid getting upset at missteps; learn from errors. Just keep coming to the table with ideas and a commitment to problem solving. And don’t forget to laugh.
► Celebrate. There will be enough problems to keep you up at night. Make sure you give yourself a few pats on the back when you get the small wins. You deserve it.
And what about that sheep’s brain?
The teacher of that elective, an outstanding and energetic veteran named Ryan Sebastian, is the perfect person to teach “medical detectives.” When I walked in that day, I was right with the students – in awe at the sheep’s brains, listening to Ryan guide them through the analysis, all of us a little sick from the formaldehyde.
Watching it all, I could have whooped with joy. Some of those students may be physicians someday, operating on a human brain, saving a life. I imagined them going to the hospital lounge and saying to their colleagues, “I remember when I was in middle school. I had this amazing teacher, and an incredible class. It was called…”
A final note: As we wrap up, I want to be clear that it wasn’t me that did the heavy lifting with this initiative. In fact, I was a little dubious that it could be done. But I trusted the vision and leadership of our team, and I am so glad I did. Their implementation changed my mind.
The new approach came to life because of the vision of Lori Marple, our outstanding forward-thinking Executive Director of Teaching and Learning. She empowered her team – Christina Hutchinson, Gina Seemann, Lauren Divine, Natalie Henderson, and Kathy Parker-Jones. The successful implementation credit goes to our amazing middle school principals – Dr. Jaime Stewart, Brooke Menduni, Andy Wilkinson, Katy O’Neal, and Rita Shaffer. These people are amazing. I was just the one watching it happen and cheering them on.
Jen Schwanke, Ed.D. brings nearly three decades of experience to the field of education, having served as both a teacher and leader across all levels. She is currently an instructor in educational administration at The Ohio State University and a Deputy Superintendent in Dublin, Ohio.
Jen has published five books with ASCD, including the most recent, Trusted: Trust Pillars, Trust Killers, and the Secret to Successful Schools. She’s a frequent presenter at major educational conferences, including those hosted by ASCD, NAESP, NASSP, AASA, and various state and national organizations. She’s also the author of the popular newsletter, Principal Problems with Dr. Jen, and shares her insights as co-host of the Principal Matters podcast.
