Critical Window

On this episode of the Alliance for Excellent Education’s Critical Window podcast, Dr. Medha Tare breaks down what research on the science of adolescent learning says about the development of literacy skills during adolescence, and how educators can support this development.

Too often people think stereotypically about the period of

adolescence as a time of vulnerability, risks, and problems. You may even be

guilty of this. How often have you participated in or overheard conversations between

parents that sound something like “my daughter is headed to middle school next

year” and the response is “yikes, good luck!”?

But the reality is that adolescence is the healthiest period

of the lifespan, explains Professor Ronald Dahl, MD, a pediatrician and

developmental scientist, on the latest episode of our Critical Window podcast.

“Almost everything you can measure—if you go from elementary school across

adolescence into early adulthood—gets better,” says Dahl. “Strength, speed,

reaction time, reasoning abilities, cognitive skills, immune function,

resistance to cold, heat, hunger, dehydration, and most types of injuries.”

This sounds like good news, but we also know that “the

overall death and disability rates jump 200 to 300 percent between elementary

school and early adulthood.” Dahl explains that those jumps don’t come from “mysterious

medical illnesses.” Instead, such increases result from teens still learning

how to control behavior and regulate emotion. Therefore, we see “increasing

rates of accident, suicide, homicide, depression, alcohol and substance use,

violence, reckless behaviors, eating disorders, sexually transmitted diseases,

health problems related to risky behaviors broadly, [and] worsening obesity.”

Dahl calls this the “health paradox of adolescence.”

In this episode of Critical

Window, Dahl breaks down stereotypes and popular assumptions about

adolescent health and focuses on the opportunities to support positive

development and shape the future of young people. 

Here are some takeaways:

Adolescent brains do

what they are supposed to do.  

“Adolescent brains are very well adapted to the tasks and

challenges of adolescence,” says Dahl. “They’re focusing and prioritizing

learning about their complex social world and their place in it as an

individual.”

Dahl gives an example of how understanding this shift in

priorities can shape learning environments. “If it’s a way to increase [their] social

world, adolescents will master the learning very rapidly. If they’re being told

that they need to learn something because it’s going to help them sometime in

the future, then their brains may not look like they work very well. But it’s

not because something’s wrong with their brain.”

Adolescents are passionate.

“We’re doing a disservice to the brain if we think that it’s

all about rational thought,” says Dahl. The adolescent brain is figuring out

what matters and what doesn’t matter and is establishing heartfelt goals and

priorities that can lead to positive impact, especially when given proper

support. “Feelings can be smart, wise feelings,” says Dahl. “We can have

passions for good causes and purposes that guide our value systems, and shaping

these systems are as important as shaping the ability for the thinking brain to

suppress emotions.”

Adolescents aren’t

“just being impulsive.”

Increasingly, adolescents seek sensation, something that

Dahl describes as “having an appetite for, an inclination for excitement,

arousal, novelty, bursts of unusual experiences and feelings.” This isn’t “just

being impulsive.” This is what drives kids to learn and explore. “A huge number

Gifted programs are structured to cultivate and maximize the strengths of an individual. But shouldn’t these ideals be applied to all students? This week, Dr. Yvette Jackson, adjunct professor at Teacher’s College at Columbia University and a senior scholar at the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education, returns to Critical Window to share her knowledge about gifted and talented programs, what they tell us about how we structure our education system, and what we can learn from these programs.

Sports provide a place for young people to grow, learn, and enhance

their physical skills, but, with the help of good coaches, they will learn more

than how to throw a pitch or perfect a layup.

On this episode of Critical Window (audio link below) a podcast by the Alliance for Excellent Education (All4Ed), Jennifer Brown Lerner, deputy director for Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program, explores how sports and coaching influence the social, emotional, and academic development of students, and what educators and coaches can learn from one another.

Building Student Agency on the Field

“While sports might be a unique arena, it's part of a broad array of places in which young people learn, grow, and develop,” explains Brown Lerner. “There's unbelievable opportunity to think about sports as a place in which young people can take ownership of their own learning.”

Into early adolescence, students have “a unique opportunity for voice and choice on the sports field that they don't have in the classroom,” says Brown Lerner. This space, outside of the traditional learning environment, “is really allowing them to come into their own.”

Sports as the

“Ultimate Performance Assessment”

“You could view sports as the ultimate performance assessment,” says Brown Lerner. “Every game, every practice is really an opportunity for young people to put on display a core set of physical skills and social-emotional skills that they're learning.”

Not only are players demonstrating their skills, they are

also receiving real-time responses of their performance. “There's instantaneous

feedback right there, a win or a loss.”

Coaches as Role

Models

Coaches play a significant role in modeling the skills they

hope to see exemplified by their players.

“Sports are a critical space in which [kids] get to both see modeled, and practice, this core set of competencies across the social, emotional, and cognitive domains,” explains Brown Lerner. “It's a really important opportunity in which young people can get, and create, a continuous feedback loop with their coaches and with other athletes.”

A large part of this learning opportunity is dependent on relationships between coaches and their players. “One thing that great coaches do is really focus in on that individual relationship with each player,” explains Brown Lerner. “They also create a space and environment and a culture that honors the relationship that other players have with each other.”

What Can Teachers

Learn from Coaches, and Vice Versa?

“If we truly believe that learning happens in relationships, we need to give all educators in the classroom, and on the sports field, the time, the tools, and the opportunity to cultivate the fire and passion within each student, which only happens when you have the opportunity to build a relationship,” says Brown Lerner.

“There's a real opportunity to build a bridge between what

educators do really well in terms of planning and articulating for young

people, and how coaches create relationships and environments which are truly

young people centered.” With this combined effort, “we can just see an

explosion of growth of these core skills across all the places and spaces young

people learn.”

Listen to more from Brown Lerner in the episode below.

Critical Window is a podcast from the Alliance for

Excellent Education that explores the rapid changes happening in the body and

When you step into your classroom each day, do you believe that all your students can succeed? This week, Dr. Yvette Jackson, adjunct professor at Teacher’s College at Columbia University and senior scholar at the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education, shares her concept of the “pedagogy of confidence,” and how can educators use this style of pedagogy to support adolescent learning.

Who Am I? Podcast Episode from @All4Ed Explores Racial and Ethnic Identity Development During Adolescence

The opioid crisis is shaking the nation and greatly impacting young people. In just one year, 42,000 people died of drug overdoses involving opioids. That same year, 2016, 38,000 individuals died in car crashes or car-related injuries.

There’s no question that this epidemic is affecting families, communities, and schools across the country. How can educators help support students impacted by the crisis?

To help answer this question, Critical Window, a podcast by the Alliance for Excellent Education (All4Ed), turned to Dr. David Patterson Silver Wolf. As a professor at the Brown School at Washington University, in St. Louis, Dr. Patterson Silver Wolf teaches substance abuse courses and works to bring science and research to addiction services. He has over fifteen years of experience providing clinical services in the substance abuse disorder treatment field.

This issue is also incredibly personal for Dr. Patterson Silver Wolf, who shares the story of his own experience dealing with substance abuse – from childhood into his twenties – on this episode.

“I would look out on the world, and everybody looked good but me,” he recalls thinking as a young child. “I would compare my internal turmoil to people's external life, and think, ‘Boy, everybody looks like they're doing okay but me.’”

Listen to his story of triumph and learn how to support students experiencing similar hardships on this episode of Critical Window.

Critical Window is a podcast from the Alliance for Excellent Education that explores the rapid changes happening in the body and the brain during adolescence and what these changes mean for educators, policymakers, and parents. 

Subscribe to Critical Window on Apple Music, Stitcher or wherever you find podcasts.

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Hans Hermann: Welcome to Critical Window, a podcast from the Alliance for Excellent Education that explores the rapid changes happening in the body and the brain during adolescence, and what these changes mean for educators, policy makers, and communities.

This week on Critical Window, we're learning more about the opioid crisis, how it affects adolescent students, and how educators can support students impacted by the crisis. Dr. David Patterson Silver Wolf is professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.

A faculty scholar in the Washington University Institute for Public Health, and a faculty affiliate for the Center for Violence and Injury Prevention. At the Brown School, he teaches substance abuse courses, serves on training faculty, and chairs the American Indian and Alaska Native concentration in the Master of Social Work program.

He's the director of the Community Academic Partnership on Addiction, which works with several St. Louis based organizations to bring science to addiction services. Dr. Patterson Silver Wolf has over 15 years of experience providing clinical services in the substance abuse disorder treatment field. He investigates how empirically support interventions are implemented in community-based services and factors that improve underrepresented minority college students, academic success, and American-Indian and Alaskan Native health and wellness, particularly issues related to college retention.

He was recently appointed to the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicines Committee on Medication Assisted Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder. Welcome to the show, Dr. Patterson Silver Wolf.

David Patterson: Thank you.

Feeling frustrated that your lesson plan isn’t resonating with your students? Before you throw it out, you should know that there may be more going on with your students than meets the eye.

For students to learn, they must feel safe, engaged, connected, and supported in their classrooms and schools. But experiences like chronic stress or trauma from exposure to violence can have a tremendous impact on students’ ability to learn.

Students that have been through at least four adverse childhood experiences, such as emotional abuse or neglect, sexual abuse, living with a drug-addicted family member, losing a parent to divorce or death, were 32 times more likely to have learning and behavior issues in school.

Michael Lamb, executive director of the Washington, DC office of Turnaround for Children, shared this and other staggering data points on this episode of Critical Window, the Alliance for Excellent Education’s podcast exploring the rapid changes happening in the body and the brain during adolescence.

The episode dives into how students experience trauma, the impact it has on mental health and learning, and what educators can do to create an environment that effectively supports students affected by trauma.

 

Breaking Down the Science of Trauma

What happens inside a child’s brain when they encounter a traumatic experience? The amygdala, the area of the brain that acts as a “smoke signal” when individuals experience a stressful situation, takes over to activate a fight or flight response throughout the body. When this area is in charge, the other parts of the brain that manage learning and memory, including attention, self-regulation, executive function, etc., are inhibited.

Lamb explains the importance of this natural human response to threats: it helps individuals react to potentially dangerous situations, and not spend time determining whether a threat is real or not. “It's wonderful if you're in the forest and you see a bear and you need to act,” says Lamb. “It's terrible in a classroom or a hallway.”

“You could have a wonderful lesson plan as a teacher, you could have really great, engaging content, but if that child is feeling stress…then that long-term memory won't actually take root,” says Lamb.

It’s not just about making the classroom a safe space with caring adult that students trust. The whole school must be involved to create a positive learning environment.

“If a classroom felt like a safe, predictable place, but then the hallways were very chaotic, the cafeteria or the playground became a place where students were re-triggered…the rest of the day would be really difficult for learning to take root,” says Lamb.

So, how can educators and school leaders create classroom communities that are calm, safe, and predictable, while also building positive school climate? Listen to this episode of Critical Window to find out.

Critical Window is a podcast from the Alliance for Excellent Education that explores the rapid changes happening in the body and the brain during adolescence and what these changes mean for educators, policymakers, and parents. 

Subscribe to Critical Window on Apple Music, Stitcher or wherever you find podcasts.

Featured Image by Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action.

 

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Hans Hermann: Welcome to Critical Window, a podcast from the Alliance for Excellent Education that explores the rapid changes happening in the body and the brain during adolescence and what these c...

How do students look to teachers and school leaders for support? What can a positive relationship between students and teacher do for students’ motivation? This week, Dr. Kathryn Wentzel walks us through the process of building positive student-teacher relationships and how it affects student engagement and learning.

How can teachers and school administrators navigate the waters of student activism? This week, our guest, Dr. Ben Kirshner, dives into what student activism is, its role in student development, and the challenges educators can experience when faced with student activism.