Educational Leadership

April 2011 | Volume 68 | Number 7
The Transition Years    

Lives in Transition: What Students Say

Donna M. San Antonio, Elizabeth Marcell, Mara Tieken and Karen Wiener

Students express their hopes and fears about entering middle school, providing guidance for school strategies that can support this important transition.

Most students approach the transition to middle school with a mixture of apprehension and excitement. They look forward to enjoying more freedom, meeting new people, and making new friends. At the same time, they worry about having more homework and harder classes, losing their way between classes, and having to negotiate relationships with multiple teachers. Above all, they worry about fitting in socially.

The challenge of adjusting to a new school and peer group comes at a time when, developmentally, adolescents are also moving toward greater autonomy. The combination of new challenges and opportunities for independence makes this a particularly weighty period of development, laden with potential for both accomplishment and disappointment. Students learn much about self-efficacy as they enter this new environment and succeed or fail.

To explore the everyday concerns of students as they enter middle school, we analyzed in-depth interviews with eight students from the Adolescent Lives in Transition Project.1  We talked with students both before they entered middle school and after they had made the transition. The school in the study was a regional middle school serving students in grades 7–8, located in a rural area in the northeastern United States. Students transitioned to the regional middle school from elementary schools in six culturally and socioeconomically diverse towns, with different rates of poverty, special education rates, test scores, and unemployment rates. A better understanding of their concerns, discussed below, can suggest strategies for schools to support students during this challenging period.

Will I Meet Academic Demands?

At the most basic level, students said they needed practical knowledge—how to find the right school bus, how to get to their classes on time, how to open their lockers, and so on. A secondary concern was increased academic demands. On the one hand, they anticipated this challenge with some enthusiasm. Harder work and higher expectations represented getting older and being more capable. As one student explained,

I think every year teachers expect your brain to be working better because you've been going to school for more time. … I think it's good that they're pushing us to use our heads.

But increased academic demands also worried some students. They envisioned…

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