ABSTRACT
The author explores the dispositions that make teachers well suited to teach and reach young adolescent learners. Middle level education acknowledges the value of relationships as the foundation of learning, and these relationships can guide and enable students to become thinkers, community members, problem solvers, and innovators. Alternatively, relationships can also guide students to become self-focused, complacent, compliant re-callers of information. To achieve the former, teachers need to be disposed to be critical, challenging, facilitative, creative, empowering, connected, change-driven, and inclusive. These are referred to as responsive dispositions in action and are reflective of middle level thinking and effective teacher attributes. Middle level teacher candidates can develop dispositions that best fit young adolescents by using a clear, practice-based framework, dispositions in action (DIA). DIA examines how teacher dispositions come to life in the classroom and impact student learning. Intentionally defining and cultivating professional dispositions that work with young adolescent learners should be a core element of middle level teacher education programs.
