Collaborative Efforts to Improve Teaching in California's Middle Grade Schools

£ ecently a great deal of attention has been directed at setting, raising, and evaluating the standards by which new teachers are trained and experienced teachers retine their skills. Criteria currently being identified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (1989) may even make it possible for an experienced teacher to earn a national certification in the near future. Yet, despite this extraordinary amount of attention to standards for teachers, the subject is not a new one to middle school educators. For almost as long as the movement has existed to reorganize and improve middle level schools, experts have argued that the knowledge and skills teachers must possess to work successfully with young adolescents are uniquely different from those needed by elementary or secondary teachers. The lack of teachers trained for the middle grades has long been viewed as a stumbling block to the growth of developmentally responsive schools (Alexander & McEwin, 1988; Lounsbury, 1990).