6th Grade Transition: Part 1 in a Series

During ten years as a high school teacher and school improvement specialist I developed a keen interest in the successful transition of ninth grade students to high school. Research and data repeatedly show ninth grade is the most significant stumbling block in the schooling of most young people. While at Princess Anne High School I and others developed a summer program to address many of the issues ninth graders face.

During the first couple of weeks of school my first year as a middle school assistant principal, I watched with bewilderment as 6th grader after 6th grader dissolved into tears for one reason or another, whether it was the challenge of opening a locker under pressure, panic over being lost in the building, fear of tardiness, confusion during class changes, difficulty in the lunch lines, missing buses, mean words uttered by other students, stress from extra responsibility and too much homework, and on and on.

Over the course of the year, I spoke with parent after parent who asked me “what’s going on with my child?” or “what can I do?” Students who had always made As and Bs were suddenly bringing home Cs, Ds, and worse. Previously happy-go-lucky kids were now surly, selfish, and withdrawn pre-teens. Mama’s boys and Daddy’s girls were now more interested in their peers and social networking than their parents. In the worst cases some made monumentally poor decisions resulting in life-changing consequences ranging from expulsion to retention.

While the vast majority of students make it through sixth grade with only minor setbacks and many others succeed with flying colors, my interest in transition turned to sixth grade, a period in a child’s schooling I now believe is virtually as crucial as the ninth grade transition. As an assistant principal at Salem Middle School, I spent a great deal of time and energy developing a transition program designed to address the needs, questions, and anxieties of both students and parents as they step into the singularly challenging world of middle school. Those experiences inform the information I am now sharing.

Why so challenging? Sixth grade is the confluence of physical, emotional, organizational, procedural, social and academic trials that are collectively more than any child can be expected to handle well. This is where adolescence begins in earnest, where the stew of hormones in a young person’s body causes unprecedented self-consciousness exacerbated by a highly dramatic social world marked by children doing an extremely poor job of trying to act like adults. At the same time, responsibility is shifted to the student in degrees no elementary school has prepared them for. Make no mistake, the social arena of middle school is a direct and powerful competitor of academic focus, and it usually wins. Add to this the fact that middle school students are expected to keep themselves organized and to independently adapt to countless procedural challenges, and here is a recipe for disaster.

So, let me be frank. This is NOT the time to let your child go it alone. Unbelievably, I have heard many parents say they had made the decision to let their child try to take responsibility for themselves “now that they were in middle school.” This is an extremely poor decision. Rising 6th graders are children—immature, vulnerable, sensitive, confused, dramatic, fickle, distracted children. On the contrary, this is a crucial time to make sure you are standing by your child, and to steadfastly give them your full attention and support even if they don’t want it and no matter how hard it gets; and chances are, it will get hard.

Over the next several posts, I will share some of the biggest challenges students (and parents!) will face while transitioning to middle school, as well as strategies for working through and coping with those challenges. As I add to the posts, please feel free to pose questions, or to suggest topics you would like to hear more about.