Hello and welcome to our final newsletter for 2017!

Thank you for all your support - we have been thrilled to see so many of you at events throughout the year.  

You will notice that your membership invoice for the 2018 calendar year will come out towards the end of this week and will cover your membership from Jan-Dec 2018.  It's through your support of the association that we can continue to provide the professional development and publications that reinforce our position as the only professional association dedicated exclusively to young adolescents.

We have some exciting events taking place next year and hope you can join us for some of them:

Ongoing: throughout the year we are running for the first time, specific middle years certification workshops where you can achieve certification as an exemplary practitioner in the middle years.  These workshops will run in each major city from term 2- term 4.  Dates and venues will be sent out soon.

October 2018: 10 day educational tour of Finland 

October 2018: Singapore action research conference

Other projects we are working on:

* updating our Position Paper as an infographic - for you to share with staff and parents in your community

* supporting research in the middle years by having links on our website to current research for practitioners to refer to

* creating a directory of 'schools to visit'

* creating a directory of 'recommended programs and experts'

* increasing use of our members forum for sharing ideas and support

Your feedback and suggestions are always welcome and we encourage you to get in touch by email if there is anything we can assist you with or if you'd just like to chat about middle years issues.  

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a safe and relaxing holiday break.

Angela White

Executive Officer

Independent Schools Queensland, proudly supported by Adolescent Success, is offering a project on the Middle Years. In the 2018 Middle Years Project, individual school teams will determine what they will investigate in their school-based research. The 2018 Project will encourage schools to focus on topics such as:

• Effective curriculum offerings (eg. STEM, STEAM)
• Pedagogical approaches
• Student wellbeing
• Flexible learning spaces
• Management and organisational structure

Interested QLD Independent schools are encouraged to access the project guidelines by visiting the ISQ website - applications for funding. 

Back by popular demand, the World of 7 Billion student video contest helps you bring technology and creativity into your middle and high school classes. The contest challenges your students to create a short video connecting world population growth and one of three global challenges: Advancing Women and Girls, Feeding 10 Billion, or Preventing Pollution. Students can win up to $1,000 and participating teachers will receive free curriculum resources. The contest deadline is February 22, 2018 – use this lesson plan to get started now! Full contest guidelines, resources for research, past winners, and more can be found at https://www.worldof7billion.org/student-video-contest/.

This article was taken from Edutopia. You can use these strategies to help middle and high school students to identify relevance, accuracy, bias and reliability in the content they read.

An essential part of online research is the ability to critically evaluate information. This includes the ability to assess its level of accuracy, reliability, and bias. In 2012, my colleagues and I assessed 770 seventh graders in two states to study these areas, and the results definitely got our attention. Unfortunately, over 70 percent of the students’ responses suggested that:

• Middle school students are more concerned with content relevance than with credibility
• They rarely attend to source features such as author, venue, or publication type to evaluate reliability and author perspective
• When they do refer to source features in their explanations, their judgments are often vague, superficial, and lacking in reasoned justification

So what can you do to more explicitly teach adolescents how to evaluate the quality of online information?

Read more

Effective teacher-student relationships are intrinsic to student well-being including their social and academic development. Yet these relationships are also important for maintaining teacher wellbeing with research suggesting that poor student relationships are a determining factor in the loss of self-efficacy and wellbeing.

Read more

An exciting Study Tour opportunity awaits for our Adolescent Success members. Visit the Adolescent Success website for further details and proposed itinerary.

Some of the standards for middle schoolers are great, like finding textual evidence to support an analysis. Others, like knowing the difference between reflexive and intensive pronouns, not so much. Some of my most important goals for my students lie completely outside the standards, but I think they’re essential to my kid’s success. These six social and study skills for middle school students will stay with them long after they leave the classroom.

Read more

We would love to showcase your school/students in the November publication of the Australian Journal of Middle Schooling.

If you have any photos of your school, students or events which you'd like to submit please click here for the copyright release form.

This is a great way to showcase your school and students.

Many thanks for your support; it's shaping up to be a great publication!

Please email either our journal editor Anne Coffey at anne.coffey@nd.edu.auor executive officer Angela White at angela@adolescentsuccess.org.au.

Have you bought your copy yet? This 3rd edition text is a ‘must have’ for every Middle Years’ teacher. You can purchase yours here.

Are you on Twitter yet? If you are not, you should be! @adolesuccess hosts an Australian Middle Years Education chat every Thursday fortnight from 8pm AEST. We talk about all things ‘Middle Years’ and share practical ideas and strategies with fellow middle years’ educators. Join the next conversation on November 23.