In this episode, we have Andrea here from History Gal to talk about the transition to high school. 

Andrea had the opportunity to work in a freshman academy which gave students a year to prepare for transitioning to high school. Today she'll share some tips on how we can support middle school students during their transition to high school.

Connect with today's guest:

• Andrea's blog: https://www.musingsofahistorygal.com/
• Andrea's TPT shop: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/store/history-gal

Please subscribe on your favorite platform so you don’t miss an episode. Whether it’s Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or some other listening app, we encourage you to take a moment to subscribe to The Teaching Toolbox. And if you feel so inclined, we would love a review at Apple or Spotify to help other listeners find us just like you did.

This episode may contain affiliate links.

Amazon links are affiliate links from Brittany Naujok and The Colorado Classroom, LLC®. I earn a small amount from your clicks on these links.

Let’s Connect

To stay up to date with episodes, check out our Facebook page or follow us on Instagram.

Join Brittany’s 6th Grade Teacher Success group on Facebook.

Join Ellie’s Middle School Math Chats group on Facebook.

Brittany’s resources can be found on her website or on TPT.

Ellie’s resources can be found on her website or on TPT.

Reach out to share your ideas for future episodes on our podcast website.

https://teachingtoolboxpodcast.com/contact/

[00:00:28] Brittany: Hello.

[00:00:35] Andrea: Hello.

[00:00:54] Andrea: Sure. I'm so happy to be here. My name is Andrea. You may know me as History Gal. All of my teaching experience is in high school. I taught ninth, 10th and 11th graders, mostly US history, world history, and then I had this one amazing year as part of the freshman academy where I taught world history.

[00:01:34] Ellie: Ooh, love that.

[00:01:46] Andrea: Sure.

[00:02:12] And so ended up incorporating kind of the team approach that you guys use in middle school all the

[00:02:19] So we had teams, and our teams consisted of a history teacher, an English teacher, a health or PE teacher, and a science teacher. We did not have a math teacher in our team just because the high school level, there's so many different math classes.

[00:02:42] to make because it ends up being this huge puzzle with trying to get classes fitting and everything all together. And so we had, our team of four, we had a dedicated counselor, and then there was an assistant principal that was dedicated over, we had two sections of the freshman academy.

[00:03:14] Ellie: Okay.

[00:03:26] you have four classes, B Day you have four classes. They're different and they rotate.

[00:03:35] Ellie: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:46] Just a lot of brainstorming and trying to figure out what we all felt freshmen needed more support with. And so there was this entire class that was dedicated to how do you study, time management.

[00:04:03] Andrea: And then something that kids are usually used to in middle school is teachers have kind of the same, oh, now I'm blanking on what the words are, but same procedures

[00:04:16] but then in high school it's like everybody's different.

[00:04:32] So students kinda knew what those expectations were and sometimes those are done at the school level too.

[00:04:41] Andrea: I know there's a movement, where there's a specific late work policy or there's a specific, if you are acting out in your class, this is what you know the procedure is for

[00:05:01] do things their own way. And so in the Academy year four core teachers had the same policy. And we actually had like a homework box and

[00:05:18] Ellie: Okay.

[00:05:24] didn't. Trying to really work on getting the homework in. And of course now everything is, I'm kind of dating myself a bit, everything now can be submitted electronically.

[00:05:36] Brittany: Yeah.

[00:05:50] Help kids because we want kids to be successful as their freshman year, so then they can continue on. If you end up failing your freshman year, it's really hard to dig out of that, and then you end up seeing those kids just you know, dropping out or just being a fifth year freshman and you're just, you're not really helping.

[00:06:20] Ellie: sounds like a fantastic support for those students.

[00:06:26] Andrea: Yeah, so I reached out to the, um, counselor who was over my team, and I said, Hey, do you have any of the stats? And he was like, I know it was successful, but I don't have any of the hard stats anymore. Uh, it was just kind of a bummer, but it was a lot of work for scheduling.

[00:06:50] Ellie: okay.

[00:07:24] So you start seeing some of that tension. And the freshman focus class is something that's required, kind of school specific, it's not a state requirement, so you have students that would rather be taking another class that's gonna get them to where they wanna graduate

[00:07:49] so there ends up being a lot of tension of.

[00:07:57] Andrea: It ended up being, you know, kind of shorter lived . It's not in existence anymore.

[00:08:13] Andrea: No, so you have basically the block schedule. You have eight slots

[00:08:31] Ellie: And then you had the study skills ,

[00:08:36] elective. which again, if you have sometimes, because the ab schedule makes things harder. And so if you have a band class that's trained to meet on both AB days and that takes two slot,

[00:08:54] Andrea: it gets really complicated.

[00:08:59] Andrea: Yeah. I think unfortunately without a freshman Academy, it's up to the individual teacher to try to incorporate study skills or, um, if you need to work on your students on how they're writing, you are doing that yourself. Like as a history teacher, it'd be nice to be able to coordinate, with the English teacher,

[00:09:36] And without that team connection, it's really hard to do because your students don't have the same English teacher.

[00:09:54] Andrea: yeah, so it ends up being difficult 'cause there's usually several English teachers that are teaching, you know, ninth grade English.

[00:10:10] Andrea: curriculum.

[00:10:22] Ellie: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:25] Ellie: Do you recall like what specific types of study skills were worked on? Like test taking strategies or research, like what types of, you know, how to study type stuff?

[00:10:43] take this information that your teacher is giving you and what are different strategies? You know, some people are oral, some people, it helps when they're moving and learning and others it help, you know, if you're teaching somebody else.

[00:11:02] where you're

[00:11:12] And not everything can work the same for everybody.

[00:11:37] Ellie: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:41] Brittany: Like how do you read a question and decipher what they're asking that kind of thing?

[00:12:04] you know, they're writing things down so trying to give them the skills to know , how are you gonna know what's due? it's a little easier now where they can look on canvas or they can look in Google classroom and see due dates and

[00:12:21] Ellie: But they still have to work it into their life and how they're gonna get everything

[00:12:25] Yeah The prioritization of what's more important right now.

[00:12:40] Ellie: Yeah. I think that's really critical. Sometimes, I feel like we assume by the time they reach us or the time they reach middle school or high school, they've been doing homework for years. They've been doing projects for years by now they probably have a good handle on it, but a lot of them just don't, and maybe nobody else really taught them how to manage their time like that, so that's really important.

[00:13:02] Ellie: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:13:27] So go to

[00:13:30] Ellie: Well, they say like, studies I've heard say that if you sleep after you study, you retain it much better because your brain is working on it while you're sleeping.

[00:13:43] Ellie: Did you ever get to like, talk to the middle school teachers before you know that of the students who were coming to you to ever, I don't know, work together on transitions or was that No Communication?

[00:14:17] Andrea: I would be really nice, I think to have eighth grade teachers and ninth grade teachers get together and be like, what do you wish we knew? Or What do you wish the kids are coming with?

[00:14:38] Andrea: time management?

[00:14:50] and then high school classes tend to, especially if you're doing a block schedule a class that's meeting for 90 minutes. It's either meeting for 90 minutes for just a semester or you're getting that 90 minutes every other day you're getting a whole lot more material and like one sitting.

[00:15:34] Ellie: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:41] Ellie: Uh,

[00:15:49] Ellie: Hmm.

[00:15:55] Ellie: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:02] Ellie: Yeah. Yeah. They don't understand the consequence of that.

[00:16:17] pull that up.

[00:16:20] Andrea: and you asked for a third one.

[00:16:32] Andrea: So plagiarism is.

[00:16:35] Andrea: A major, and even now with ai, it ends up being a whole nother

[00:16:41] Andrea: ball game. But just understanding the concept of plagiarism, just because you copied something and pasted it into something new, it doesn't make it yours.

[00:16:57] Andrea: It's just not so much malice involved, just kind of

[00:17:04] Andrea: ignorance and not really thinking about it

[00:17:14] Brittany: or, my brother used this years ago. It's okay now.

[00:17:24] as opposed to turning it in.

[00:17:42] I dunno about elementary school now, but definitely

[00:17:46] Ellie: But as they start like doing research papers and research reports and then having to take you know, information from different sources that just increases as they progress.

[00:18:14] And so the first day of school, they're just like getting up and walking out of the room.

[00:18:21] Brittany: Like where are you going? What do you think you're doing? And they're like, well, it's middle school. We can just like leave the classroom to go to the bathroom. And I was just like, no, you can't. Like that doesn't happen till college people. Is there anything that in high school, you get to do differently than in middle school?

[00:18:48] Brittany: privileges you get in high school.

[00:18:53] in high school than, middle school and obviously it's when you get older sometimes there's something called open lunch and you actually get to leave for lunch

[00:19:02] back.

[00:19:04] Ellie: that's true. And I'm sure it varies from school to school and teacher to teacher, and I'm sure there are a lot of differences. I know like at our school, if you have a study hall at the end of the day, you can leave it early, which that would never happen in middle school or I don't know if they have late starts too, like if there's a study hall in the morning they can come late.

[00:19:27] Ellie: I don't know if that's for freshmen though, so that might be a little bit

[00:19:31] when they have extra slots in their schedule.

[00:19:35] Brittany: And then of course driving. But that wouldn't be for freshmen.

[00:19:41] Andrea: But in high school you do have more opportunities to do different kind of electives or different tracks and so sometimes especially now coming in as a freshman, it can be a little daunting to figure out whether you want to be, you know, gungho, ap, taking all the AP classes, or whether you want to try the tech classes or whether you're going to the, in, like the ag classes or

[00:20:12] a lot more opportunities for trying different things out.

[00:20:24] There's like physical and sculpture and pottery and Yeah.

[00:20:44] Brittany: You might find a passion you didn't know you had.

[00:20:51] Brittany: Sure. Let's wrap up with parental support. How could parents support their child's transition into high school? Are there any particular strategies that help students develop independence or responsibility? A passion for learning?

[00:21:20] Some of it is that there's not as much communication as there was in middle school.

[00:21:28] Andrea: I think every teacher has ways that they are happy for parents to contact them but the teacher is not necessarily going to be contacting you if your child fails a test.. expectation is that that student

[00:21:45] to take that responsibility of, well, telling the parents that they fail the test. But you know what they need to do is, does the teacher offer makeup work? Does the teacher offer study sessions? It's really trying to get the student to start advocating for themselves and knowing where help is available and how to get that and so sometimes parents can support that by saying, Hey, did you talk to your teacher about X?

[00:22:40] Ellie: Yeah. Yeah, because they have to learn how to solve problems and it's a safe space in which to do it, to start learning those skills.

[00:22:59] schools. High schools love for parents to help, but the PTAs are usually pretty bare bones because parents are kind of worn out, burned out, but there's still ways for parents who want to kind of tap into their high school community to tap in and not necessarily be lording over their student and watching their student.

[00:23:26] the high school

[00:23:29] Brittany: those teachers still need like, love

[00:23:39] Andrea: 100%

[00:23:46] Brittany: Yeah.

[00:23:46] Brittany: Yeah.

[00:24:00] Andrea: I don't think so. I'm sure there'll be something once we sign off that.

[00:24:08] Andrea: You can find me on my website, History Gal.Com. Also, obviously on teacherspayteachers and

[00:24:19] Brittany: Great. Well, whether you're helping kids come in or go out of middle school, we hope you have found some understanding and empathy from a different tool in the toolbox. If you enjoyed this episode, please shout it out out on your favorite social media platform, and thank you for listening.