A Design for Improving Middle Grades Education (Ch.2)

Abstract
The second chapter of Turning Points 2000 begins to highlight the reforms made to the concepts and plans to the original Turning Points. These changes are a result of the past years spent implementing and reviewing the results in schools all over the country. This chapter emphasizes the number one goal of the entire project, which is to help middle schools work to encourage a “whole” child in each individual. That child would be a student who was to “think critically, work industriously, to contribute to their communities, to care about other, and to care about their own physical and mental health.”(p. 23) The chapter clearly makes the recommendations for reforms and then supplies each change with a description of the ultimate purpose for changes and the reasons behind them that support the new ideas. This structure provides a certain confidence in the way these changes could truly show results closer and closer to the number one goal.

Reflection
This chapter clearly explained the changes in ideas between the first developments of this movement and the reasons why reforms need to be made. The way the changes are setup in the text and explained was incredibly easy for me to understand and process and therefore put me in a nice place to really think about the changes and the way they could each work and where the new ideas stemmed from. The “system” that the chapter discusses was an entirely different and interesting concept. It got me wondering whether the book would go into further detail of the interconnectedness of each of the new recommendations and how that could create an even stronger jumping off point for the implication of this program. It seems like a simple connect the dots concept, but with all of the questions and ideas presented in that section of the text, I was baffled to whether this type of system would even work without changing to be completely interconnected, given all of the ways each section throws off another. Knowing how this could work or does work will come with time and possibly in more pieces than just one large interconnected section.