How this affects our capacity to learn: Because we have a highly developed brain, we have the ability to choose unlike other animals that operate on instinct. Self-determination is an inherent part of our make-up. People want to make their own decisions. On a large scale, this is borne out with groups of people striving for self-determination across the globe and across the millennia. On an individual level, this inherent need to choose, to be independent is more evident at age two and during adolescence.
How this influences our educational design: Providing opportunities for making choices, making decisions where appropriate and possible should be a part of the design. This is a natural development of a human being. Not providing these choices subverts this natural trend and sets up resistance and resentment to learn which becomes more evident in middle and high schools. Furthermore, we want our students to be independent and learn how to make good decisions so we must provide opportunities for them to practice making decisions.
How this affects our capacity to learn: The beginning of critical thinking emerges but is not fully developed until age twenty-five. Middle schoolers begin questioning, much as they did when they were age two. Experimentation occurs naturally because the capacity of the brain has almost doubled just before adolescence. Along with the experimentation, comes lack of judgment and impulsivity because the prefrontal cortex or seat of judgment which influences the capacity to make good decisions is not fully developed until age twenty five.
How this influences our educational design: Since adolescence is about experimentation and learning how to make good judgments, mistakes or poor decisions must be viewed as opportunities to learn. Students need to feel emotionally safe when they make mistakes. If they are treated with anger or disdain or a judgment that they can’t learn or can’t be responsible, they become defensive (“fight or flight” reaction) and do not use the cerebral cortex or rational part of their brain to reflect and learn from their mistakes to make better judgments in the future. In other words, mistakes must be seen as part of the process of learning. At the same time, they must be held accountable for their actions with consequences that are not punitive, but logical; that are clearly communicated ahead of time. When mistakes are handled in this manner, students feel respected, learn how to be respectful, and slowly model the value of respect with their teachers and with their peers. The school’s culture becomes an emotionally safe place where bullying declines significantly and responsible decision-making grows.
A discipline system should include the process of reflection with a mentor who facilitates this process of reflection in an emotionally safe way. How humans change their behavior is from thinking about the choice, the consequence, and making a decision to make another choice. When teachers have a trusting relationship with their students, students will work with their teachers in this reflective process. Also, this kind of metacognition (thinking about their thinking) should be included in the academic choices, embedded in the assessment throughout lessons and at the end of units.
How this affects our capacity to learn: These are important questions that need to be answered by adolescents in their psychological development in order to mature into emotionally healthy adults. Focusing solely on standards without providing an outlet or a process to deal with these questions in an emotionally safe environment will negatively affect their ability to learn. Test scores alone don’t motivate students in middle school. Fulfilling their psychological and emotional needs increases their capacity to tackle the intellectual challenges of school. Otherwise, these issues that are important to them pull their focus away from academics.
How this influences our educational design: Rather than going against the natural tendency of adolescents to focus on these important questions, we must therefore provide appropriate opportunities for students to reflect. Helping them through the important process of figuring out who they are strengthens their sense of self, develops self-reliance and resiliency. The result is a maturity that is advanced for this age group.
Embedding these important issues wherever we can within the teaching of standards to make the standards more personally meaningful to them will help them focus on those lessons as well as help them retain the standards.[7] For instance, teaching the significance of the Magna Carta as a historical document can be greatly enhanced when it is viewed through the students’ point of view. Use of analogies that mirror the lack of individual liberties within a school or family setting can illuminate what students now take for granted; e.g., “If the Magna Carta and other subsequent documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that protect individual freedoms had not occurred, what would your life be like today? What would schools be like today?” Many themes in literature lend themselves to embedding these existential questions into the lessons and units.
Furthermore, simply teaching facts, skills, and forms without meaning robs students of a rich experience that defines the generative aspect of our development and achievement through the ages.
How this affects our capacity to learn: When adolescents are in a classroom, they do best when they have meaningful and emotionally safe contact with others in that class. This meaningful interaction and dialogue are also important in the development of critical thinking because the logic or illogic of their thinking is being mirrored back to them where they can discern gaps in thinking and learn from those experiences.
When they are feeling emotionally safe with their teachers and with their peers, they engage in the class discussion, ask questions and volunteer their opinions. When they make a mistake, they are not afraid because they trust that they won’t be ridiculed. And since mistakes are part of the process of how we learn every skill, students have to feel safe to make mistakes and they gain this safety from the teacher creating the learning environment, setting expectations for the students to encourage, rather than ridicule.
How this influences the educational design: The significant adults – parents, the primary educators, and teachers – must connect with students in a caring relationship. If an adolescent senses the standards are more important than who he or she is; their capacity and desire to learn standards will decline and their ability to care and be compassionate will also decline. They become less sensitive to others and are more likely to engage in bullying behaviors. When the adults are not modeling caring, the students don’t model it either. The classroom becomes less emotionally safe; students begin not engaging in discussions, their ability to develop their critical thinking through dialogue suffers.
Specific ways to develop meaningful contact can be accomplished by:
How this affects our capacity to learn: Since the invention of MRI, scientists have been able to study how the brain functions and learns. Brain researchers have seen that the brain learns best when:
When the learning process employs the above, more of the brain is being tapped; there are more ways that knowledge is being introduced in the brain. When more of the brain is being tapped, retention of knowledge is enhanced.
How this influences our educational design: In teaching the State standards, we must find ways to connect the standards and integrate them into a meaningful whole, wherever possible and appropriate. Curriculum integration is therefore an important process we use in designing our curriculum. We try to make connections between the content knowledge classes of science and social studies. Because of our belief that the world is interconnected and interdependent, we believe that the teaching of the standards must reflect that nature of the world.[11] This is very challenging when the format of the standards does not lend itself to showing connections and interdependence easily. We also try to connect teaching language arts skills with the content of social studies where connections can be made. Teaching technology skills is also embedded in lesson designs for language arts, science, and social studies.
How this affects our capacity to learn: Critical thinking occurs when the brain makes connections. Creative thinking is the brain’s ability to make connections that are unusual or unique to the individual. The generative power of the brain has forwarded civilization. The development of the arts is important to developing critical neural pathways in the brain which can help develop organized ways of understanding, encourage cognitive reasoning, and improve the ability to explore new associations of concepts and ideas.
Shirley Heath, in a study at Stanford University, linked art classes to academic achievement. The research demonstrated that children in the arts use linguistic and cognitive thinking skills such as long term planning, critiquing, and focused attention that can result in positive social and academic benefits.[13] Delaine Eastin, California’s former Secretary of Education, reported that a Stanford study of 1995 college admission test scores found that students who had studied the arts for more than four years scored higher than students who did not.[14] An extensive study of arts education conducted in 1997 by University of California, Los Angeles, found higher levels of student involvement and educational achievement among students taking advanced art courses.[15]
How this influences our educational design: Providing opportunities for creative expression and creative problem solving is critical to both the development of higher forms of thinking as well as development of the self. When students are expressing themselves through visual arts, especially, when the content of the art is dealing with issues of self; when they are expressing themselves through performing arts – music and drama, they gain insights into themselves, they gain confidence in who they are, and the result is self-assured and mature individuals.
This in turn results in better academic performance. When they feel good about themselves, they care, they try harder, which in turn breeds more success and more confidence.
[4]Alfred Adler. Understanding Human Nature (Oxford, 1992); Dreikurs, Rudolf. “Toward a Technology of Human Relationships,” paper read at the fourth Brief Psychotheraphy Conference, Chicago Medical School, Chicago, March 1972.
[5]Strauch, B.,The Primal Teen, (New York: Doubleday, 2003).
[6] Adler (1992); Gianetti, C & Gagrese, M. The Roller Coaster Years (New York: Broadway Books, 1995). This notion of the self and the community is also reflected in Fritjof Capra’s The Turning Point, (Simon and Schuster, 1982), a discussion on system theory where there are two opposite tendencies: an integrative tendency to function as part of the larger whole (movement toward community), and a self-assertive tendency to preserve its individual autonomy (movement toward self). These opposite tendencies are seen in both biological and social systems. A healthy system is one that balances the two tendencies in a dynamic interplay which makes the system flexible and open to change.
[7]National Middle School Association position paper on Curricular Integration, www.nmsa.org
[8]Strauch, B. (2003); Adler, (2002).
[9]Stephen Covey, The 8th Habit (New York: Free Press, 2004). H. Scott Glenn, Raising Self-Reliant Children in an Self-Indulgent Age, (Rocklin, California: Prima Publishing, 1989).
[10]Renata and Geoffrey Caine (Making Connections: Teaching and the Human Brain, Addison Wesley, 1994) and NMSA Position Paper; Eric Jenson, Brain-Based Learning (Brainstore, Inc., 1995).
[11]Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982); Edward T. Clark, Designing and Implementing Integrated Curriculum, (Vermont: Holistic Press, 1996).
[12]Bloom’s Taxonomy.
[13]Shirley Brice Heath. Professor of English and Linguistics, Stanford University.
[14]“State Schools Chief Backs Arts Education,” by Lori Olszweski in the San Francisco Chronicle, March 29, 1997.
[15]James S. Catterall, The UCLA Imagination Project. (Los Angeles: University of California at Los Angeles, 1997).