Peer Rejection Among Early Adolescents: Are Teachers Aware of this Problem? What Can Teachers Do? 

Early adolescence is a time when peer acceptance ranks high among student priorities. Yet there is ample research evidence that many students perceive that they are rejected by their peers, mistreated by their peers, or simply not accepted by their peers. Recent episodes of violence in schools often point to the fact that perpetrators of the violence had a history of being bullied or of bullying others. Yet research commonly suggests that teachers in middle schools are not aware of the frequency of peer rejection among students in their classrooms. 
     In my research, I have surveyed middle school teachers to ascertain their perception of characteristics of students who experience peer rejections and the extent to which the teachers themselves feel they can assist students to experience more peer acceptance. I am working to identify teaching strategies that can prevent active peer rejection in the classroom and facilitate greater peer acceptance. 

What Can Teachers Do to Encourage Middle School Students to Develop Responsible Behavior? In What Way Do Teachers Inadvertently Encourage Students to Avoid Accepting Responsibility In the Classroom? 

One of the roles of middle school teachers is to help students make the transition from the elementary self-contained classroom to the departmentalized settings they will encounter in high school. A common complaint is that students have not learned to accept responsibility for their actions, academically and socially. In an internship in middle school classrooms in which I recorded dialogues of teachers and students, I found that some teachers actively promote responsible behaviors while others communicate in ways that suggest that they will take responsibility for the students instead of encouraging students to behave more responsibly. In my research, I suggest ways to encourage student responsibility, using sample dialogues of communication that facilitates and that which discourages student acceptance of responsibility. 

While microteaching laboratories have traditionally been used to assist pre-service teachers to practice teaching methodology, they have less frequently been used to work on classroom discipline techniques. In my educational psychology and classroom discipline class, I have developed a microteaching laboratory with a series of short lessons that allow prospective teachers to simulate the use of a number of different discipline and communication techniques. Students are able to practice the activities with their peers and ultimately to present their own discipline plan before they move to their internship and student teaching experiences. I am presently working to assess the students' reactions to the microteaching experience and to follow-up their use of the strategies in their student teaching and their first year of teaching. 

I am using webconferencing through LocalNews Groups as a response to student internships in my educational psychology and discipline classes. Students enter descriptions of dilemmas and dialogues they have encountered in their classroom internships. They are asked to respond and reflect on the experiences or cases described by their peers. In my research, I have analyzed the levels of thinking that are demonstrated in the webconferencing as compared with that in traditional journals. I have found some striking differences, using Bloom's taxonomy, in the levels of thinking that students use in the two different reporting mediums.