“When we asked experienced middle school teachers ‘What are the most important concepts and principles for students to learn during the middle school years?’ one of their frequent responses was, ‘To learn to to be organized.'” (Understanding the Young Adolescent’s Physical and Cognitive Growth, pg. 28)

Sometimes as I walk around my sixth grade class to monitor progress during a lesson and to help students I am reminded that they are in a developmental period where organization needs to be explicitly taught.  This causes me to think back to my own experience and I see similarities.  I can remember explicitly being taught how to create a proper outline with roman numerals.  Fast forward to the present day and I can see that my students need guidance learning the same concepts that will help to organize their thoughts with an impact that will last a lifetime.  At this stage in my student’s development, it not enough to provide them with power point slides covering the day’s content and in return to expect them to transcribe the slides into their notebooks in an organized fashion.  Sometimes we need to be very specific otherwise, students’ notes are literally all over the place: different pages, non-chronological order, different notebooks, and using unrealistic margins.  At the same time, if we merely teach organization arbitrarily and without context, it falls on deaf ears. The overarching theme of being organized, if taught as a way to order student’s thoughts which can later be used as a reference tool, has an application that reaches far beyond the confines of the classroom and well extends to putting order into their lives. Back to the present, I am content to see that sometimes student’s remember to keep their many class notebooks and folders separate and am hopeful that our overarching lesson of organization does not fall on deaf ears.