Great Meadows Middle School Principal’s Message Tim Nicinski

Great Meadows Middle School is a school that strives for excellence. The school is fueled with a sense of purpose and that is supported by educators that challenge students to achieve at the highest levels both in academics and character. Joan Lipsitz, the cofounder of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, identified the priorities of academic excellence, developmental responsiveness, and social equity as those most important to a school of excellence. The goal of excellence provides a framework in the operation of the school.

Great Meadows Middle School continuously develops diverse educational practices to support our goal of excellence. The focus is based on the 13 Principles developed Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde in their 1993 book Best Practices: New Standards for Teaching and Learning in America’s Schools.

1. Child Centered: The best starting point for schooling is kids’ real interests; all across the curriculum by respecting and investigating students’ own questions.

2. Experimental: Active, hands-on, concrete experience is the most powerful and natural forms of learning.

3. Reflective: Balancing the immersion in direct experience must be opportunities for learners to look back, to reflect, to abstract from their experiences that they felt and thought, and learned.

4. Authentic: Real, rich, complex ideas and materials are at the heart of the curriculum.

5. Holistic: Children learn best when they encounter whole, real ideas, events, and materials in purposeful contexts, and not by studying sub-parts isolated from actual use.

6. Social: Learning is socially constructed and interactional; teachers create classroom interaction which “scaffolds” learning.

7. Collaborative: Cooperative learning activities tap the social power of learning.

8. Democratic: The classroom is a model of community.

9. Cognitive: The most powerful learning for children comes from developing true understanding of concepts and higher order thinking associated with various fields of inquiry and self-monitoring of their thinking.

10. Developmental: Children grow through a series of definable but not rigid stages, and schooling should fit its activities to the developmental level of students.

11. Constructivist: Children do not just receive content; in a very real sense, they recreate and re-invent every cognitive system they encounter, including language, literacy, and mathematics.

12. Psycholinguistic: The process of children’s natural oral language acquisition provides our best model of complex human learning and once learned, language itself becomes the primary tool for more learning, whatever the subject matter.

13. Challenging: Students learn best when faced with genuine challenges, choices, and responsibilities in their own learning.

(Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde. New Standards for Teaching and Learning in America’s Schools. 1993. Nienemann)

A school is a part of the community. In being a part of the Great Meadows community, the middle school recognizes two valid points that represents foci on the same ellipse. The first is that the school is not independent of the family and community in educating our children. The students of our school always benefit when parents and educators coordinate in the best interest of kids. The second point is that schools are not static. Change is the constant. We will always continue to develop, improve, and learn from experience so that adults and children remain life long learners.

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