Strengthening Transitions To and From Middle School

During the 2022 – 2023 school year, the Tang Institute partnered with ten educators from across the United States to launch the Action Research Program—a collection of projects aimed at implementing stronger approaches to student support in the educators’ school environments. Throughout the year, they learned to apply the principles of improvement science with guidance from Dr. Rebecca Stilwell, organizational psychologist at Teachers College, Columbia University. Now that a year has passed, we’re catching up with the educators to learn how their projects have progressed.

In this post, Bee Stribling shares the learning from his Action Research project, ​“Ready for the First Days?” which aims to support students in the transition from middle school to high school. Formerly an administrator at Moorestown Friends School (NJ), where the project was conceived of and initially carried out, Stribling now serves as Middle School Director at St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes School in Alexandria, Virginia.

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Describe your Action Research project.

My former colleague Will Miller and I were looking at students who were transitioning from eighth to ninth grade at Moorestown Friends School, with a specific focus on students who were already enrolled at Moorestown Friends, as we already had in place robust orientations for those who were new to the school. We wanted to make sure that students who were already part of the community and who were moving from the middle school division to the upper school division felt a sense of belonging, alongside our new students.

What did you hope to achieve at the start of the project and what have you achieved up to this point?

We looked carefully at how we could take care of those who were already part of our community and did not want to assume that just because students were already enrolled at the school that they necessarily felt a strong sense of belonging. So, we aimed to share information about what it means to be part of a Friends school, including details about worship meetings and the campus experience, and, specifically, what that means as an upper school student.

One major outcome is that I wrote a guide on what it means to be a middle schooler with hopes of creating a similar companion guide for what it means to be an upper school student at the school. Will and I conducted a series of empathy interviews with ninth- and tenth-grade students to understand what students in the upper school division were feeling, what they appreciated about the support for their transition, and how they were faring as upper schools students. We were seeking practical advice —what actually made the most sense for students as they embarked on their upper school lives.

Going into the project, our assumption was that students wanted more information — about device policies, about coursework, about the technical details of being upper school students — from the adult community.

Our empathy interviews revealed, however, that they were looking for more maintenance support related to the transition and related to belonging within the upper school community. We’d assumed they needed better information or more detailed documents or more orientation days, but the feedback we received spoke to the idea of students desiring to meet peer mentors — for human development support. As a result of this finding, we ended up focusing less on redesigning orientation days and more on how the end of eighth grade and the summer months leading into ninth grade could focus on building bonds rather than on completing tasks. We turned our attention to ​“handoff meetings” between grade deans, the dean of students, and counselors. We focused on making summer peer buddy groups even more robust.

What is your learning through the current phase(s) of your project work? Is there something that has further inspired your work or served as a reminder of the continued relevance of the work?

As I look back on that experience and consider my current setting, as Middle School Director at St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes School, I find myself having adopted a similar mindset from my time with this work at Moorestown Friends. Middle school students are…in the middle. Our school is nestled between lower and upper schools and there are transitions on both ends of the middle school experience. We’ve emphasized the parent dimension in the transition experience here at St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes. We’ve provided opportunities for parents to get to know the middle school better through various welcome and preview events. We’ve laid out the process so that it is as clear as possible for families — and this year, we will expand our orientation so that it is for everyone: students and families. We’re also looking at the first trimester of middle school as a time to support students as much as possible by reducing anxiety and emphasizing belonging. As a result, the transition involves a number of months of engagement for students and their families.

As I reflect further on last year’s project and my current work, what stands out is the importance of values. Programs don’t always necessarily scale very well, but values do. In thinking about students transitioning from lower to middle school or from middle to upper school, there is an invitation to think deeply about what love looks like in a lower school or middle school or upper school context and to consider how we can scale such a value to support the development of all of our students.

Please share your thoughts about your experience working with the Action Research cohort, including guide and facilitator Dr. Rebecca Stilwell. How did working with fellow educators help you design and develop the ideas and research at the center of your project?

Earlier, I had taken a class with Dr. Stilwell and so I really appreciate the action research process. I’m grateful for this approach because it aims to minimize assumptions and biases by looking at one variable at a time and then measuring each variable by implementing change and taking note of the outcomes. In the case of our project, it allowed us to honor the student experience — one that we were considering, of course, from our perspective as adults. I am reminded as well of the Action Research cohort experience and how it emphasizes the social dimension of learning. There were amazing educators who were part of the cohort, all of whom were meditating on different aspects of the theme of transition. Being able to hear from other educators who were wrestling with how to enact change was inspiring — and it was meaningful that we were doing the work together.