Taylor E.

Elton

REDG 605

Dr. Debra Mishak, Ph.D.

29 May 2020

Adolescent Brain Research Report

The adolescent brain has always been an enigma, of sorts. I recently asked some college

friends a question: “If you could to go back to a time in your life for one week, what time would

you choose?” No one, including myself, would return to the emotional and nonsensical hellscape

that is one’s young adult years. As a society, teachers and other adults tend to joke about

teenagers and their brains not being fully developed to rationalize the seemingly irrationality of

adolescent behavior. While harmless sentiments such as these are usually said in jest, studies

have shown this to be overwhelmingly true. In the frontal lobe of the brain is the prefrontal

cortex. This area of the brain is responsible for advanced cognitive functions such as reasoning,

decision-making, planning, problem-solving, and impulse control (S.P.O.T.S. 7). Because this

part of the brain continues to develop well into the 20s, other areas of the brain must do the work

of the frontal lobe. These areas include the temporal and parietal lobes of the brain, and the

amygdala; these parts of the brain are heavily involved in emotional & reward processing

(Blakemore, 2012). Because of this, adolescents tend to be deficient in impulse control, tend to

demonstrate more irrational behaviors, and make decisions based on feelings rather than logic

(S.P.O.T.S., 7). The advancements in scientific knowledge about adolescent brains has unleashed

waves of research about how to best teach students considering these developments.

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 How do I, as an educator, teach young adults when there’s so much going on inside their

heads that they, literally, cannot control? It starts by making the information that is being taught

have an applicable meaning to students, because meaning enhances learning and retention of

information (Sousa, 2001). Establishing a connection with the students’ interests and the material

being taught will increase student motivation to learn (Ambrose et al., 2010). As an educator,

I’m always looking for ways to make lessons more engaging and applicable to my students’

lives. Now that I know more scientifically what is going on in their brains, I will be able to make

better decisions about how to best instruct them. Since I teach social studies, but am pursuing my

licensure in science, I have a unique position to come at teaching from two different angles, and I

will comment on the strategies I have found from that lens. The strategies that will be discussed

are interdisciplinary teaching, healthy competition, teaching controversial topics, metacognitive

skills training, and social learning.

In my school district, interdisciplinary teaching is an initiative that has gained quite a bit

of traction in recent years. Our district has multiage classroom offerings from kindergarten up

through eighth grade. This upcoming school year, our district will offer a Houston County CEO

class, where 9-12th graders would get to explore, learn, and complete tasks regarding local

businesses in the area. The assistant-superintendent at Spring Grove was a Montessori teacher

before becoming an administrator, and is a big proponent of project-based, interdisciplinary

teaching methods. She has good reason to support this method, because neuroscience suggests

that the interdisciplinary approach may increase students’ ability to make meaning (Robinson,

2017). Creating meaning is important because if we can’t make students invested in what is

being taught, and thereby learn the material, their brains will eliminate the information as

unnecessary in a process called “synaptic pruning.” This process involves the purging of

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synapses that are weak or not used (Blakemore, 2012). Connections in the brain that are deemed

important are kept and get myelinated, which increases the impulse transmission speed and

efficiency in the brain (S.P.O.T.S. 7). Accomplishing these connections across different brain

regions requires teaching that intertwines concepts and information from differing disciplines.

Incorporating the interdisciplinary style can be as small as mentioning a connection between a

one teacher’s subject and another. However, more complex practices yield the best results

(Robinson, 2017).

A discussion that was had in my district among myself and other seventh grade teachers

was what to do with the last month of distance learning. Some of our students thrived when we

left the building, but most of them found it to be extraordinarily difficult to keep up with their

work. We talked about doing a final, multidisciplinary project for the month of May, with a

focus on the book the students were reading for English: The Giver. The book provides great

source material for a variety of subjects, so I thought it would be a great way to increase student

engagement and to lessen the number of different subjects they would have to sift through in a

week. The students didn’t want to do the project because they were already stressed, and most

were just getting the hang of distance learning. Nevertheless, if I was going to weave the book’s

content with multiple disciplines, it would look something like this: for science, there could have

been lessons on memory formation and its importance, or how isolation affects our emotions

(which would have been particularly apt). For social studies, lessons on differing governments

and levels of societies in the world and where the book’s society would fit; or exploring rules

and traditions and their impact on our lives. I had a hard time thinking of a connection to math or

physical education, but I found a probability activity that went with the book that involves

childbirth; as for physical education, potentially discuss what would the world be like if we

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couldn’t feel physical pain (a bit of a stretch to physical education but it’s the best I can think of

at this point). For computer and English, a “final” essay or presentation could be done that

involves discussing the themes of the book.

Interdisciplinary teaching is an important tool that, when used effectively and in more

complex ways, could drastically improve student engagement and increase their ability to

connect information that may seem unrelated, an important cognitive skill (Robinson, 2017). As

an educator that would like to be licensed in both science and social studies in the future, this

method of teaching is something that I want to implement in my classroom, and I know that I

would get the chance to do this at my current district.

As a highly competitive person, I believe having competitive components to my

classroom are an appealing and fun way to learn or reinforce concepts, and so do my students.

Studies show that healthy competition in classrooms may help students focus on learning

content. This is due to the highly active reward processing region of the brain in adolescents.

Young adults are extremely reward-oriented, so if they can compete in a healthy way, that could

enhance their knowledge of the material (Robinson, 2017). In my classroom, we would do what I

like to call “Kahoot Day.” Kahoot is an online quiz platform that the students absolutely go nuts

for; there are millions of different quizzes on there and students or teachers can make their own.

Kahoot Day was always a review day, usually a day or two before a test. So, I would make about

a 25-question Kahoot and word the questions how they would be done on a test. The system also

allows images with each question, so I try to put a picture that relates to the question for added

memory enhancement. The system has a leaderboard feature after each question, so students get

to see where they are and who is in the lead; the students answer each question on their own

computers, so I know how everyone did and if we needed to do anymore review before the test.

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The reward: whomever would win the review Kahoot would get a piece of candy and to pick the

topic of the next Kahoot. There was always a little extra excitement in the class on those days.

Another method that would instill competition are group activities, where one group of students

are responsible for learning subject matter in order to compete against another group would

provide motivation and engagement in students (Robinson, 2017). Young adults are highly

competitive and implementing controlled, healthy forms of competition in classrooms provides

an outlet for that energy.

In today’s divisive and contentious social climate, teaching students controversial topics

are murky waters to tread. However, employing discussion about controversies in our country

and world can develop meaning and passion about the content, enhancing learning of the

material. Students often find content-based instruction to be inapplicable to their lives unless it

challenges their worldviews in notable ways. Academic discussion is the most widely

recommended approach for teaching topics involving controversy, because it permits students to

hear and understand others’ viewpoints (Robinson, 2017). Teaching topics that cross disciplines

would also enhance connections in their brains. Topics could include capital punishment,

Electoral College, abortion, evolution vs. intelligent design, climate change, racism, privacy laws

and surveillance, etc. Living in a very small, conservative town, a lot of my students have

opinions on subjects that they don’t know anything about, they just regurgitate talking points

from their parents. Most of them view themselves as “Trump supporters” without really knowing

what that means. So, when we learned about political parties, I had them take a “quiz” about

their views on differing mainstream topics like healthcare, climate change, and gun control.

When they finished, they had to write a three-sentence reflection on their results. Most of the

students were surprised to find out that they don’t fall squarely on one side of the political

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spectrum, just like most Americans. Giving them an introduction, albeit brief, to interdisciplinary

topics that are controversial and debated in everyday America provides meaning and importance

for them in their young lives.

Training young adults metacognitive skills can enhance their ability to learn content in

school. As adolescents age, their brains begin to mature into more adult-type processing of

executive functioning skills, such as strengthened impulse control, increased ability to shift

within and between tasks, and more updating of their working memory while undergoing a task.

As teachers, we are the ones that have to teach students these skills. This involves giving the

students opportunities to sift through information and be able to eliminate unnecessary or

extraneous information, making inferences and generalizations, and to find relationships within

presented information (Robinson, 2017). Robinson suggests having students take a course that

strictly works on developing these cognitive skills, but at a small school like mine, I’m not sure

how feasible that would be. Instead, it should be each teacher’s task to help develop these skills

in their specific discipline. In science, thinking critically and being able to make inferences based

on sets of information is tested when students have to come up with hypotheses for different

experiments or laboratory work. In social studies, reading primary texts and having the students

practice asking good questions would build up these skills. Since I started teaching seventh grade

social studies, I have noticed a severe deficiency in metacognitive abilities of the vast majority of

my students. When distance learning became the norm, I made my students keep a journal,

where they write about how all of this has impacted them. A lot of them weren’t good at the

beginning, because they had never been asked to do something like it. By the end of the year,

they were considerably better, and that proves that we need to spend more time integrating

metacognitive strategies within our content area. Thinking critically, reflecting on their work,

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and following directions is just not something that adolescents do on a regular basis anymore,

and I largely believe it’s because we, their teachers, don’t ask them to nearly enough. Instead of

just giving assignments for the sake of giving assignments, educators need to challenge students

in these higher-functioning cognitive skills if we want them to become effective, independent

members of society when they leave our building.

Finally, involving students in collaborative, social learning can enrich their learning

experiences and increase retention of material. As has been discussed, the reward-processing part

of adolescent brains are highly active, which heightens their response to stimuli. The particular

stimuli that elicits the strongest response in adolescence are social stimuli (Robinson, 2017).

Humans evolved to be social creatures, because thousands of years ago, people stood a better

chance of survival when part of a group versus independently. Human brains need socialization

in order to function and survive in the world (S.P.O.T.S. 8). When students work collaboratively

with their classmates, they are constantly receiving feedback, both positive and negative, which

develops social interaction skills and heightens learning. Doing activities that are as simple as

think-pair-share, or more complex like simulations and reciprocal teaching, enables students to

engage with each other and to take responsibility for their own learning (Robinson, 2017;

S.P.O.T.S. 8). I would argue that “jigsawing” activities could fall into this category. This would

allow the students to focus and learn from their peers, which is where their attention is already

directed (Robinson, 2017). During the last week of our unit on the legislative branch, I had my

students do a bill simulation, where they would pretend to be members of Congress and write

bills that they would try to get passed into laws. I had two sections of students, so one class was

the House of Representatives and the other class was the Senate. Each section got to elect the

leaders of their respective chamber of Congress, and the president of the entire class was the

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President of the United States, and all students were assigned to a committee by their leaders.

The first two days we spent on directions, format, and bill writing, before I let them take the

reins. It was a blast, not just for me, but the students enjoyed trying to enact change in our school

and community and partaking in the legislative process. We had done a concept map of the steps

that a bill goes through before it becomes a law, so they had a rough idea before the simulation.

But after, they could recite the steps to near perfection. In my end of the year course evaluation,

the students overwhelmingly thought the bill simulation was the best part of the class. This, of

course, was about two weeks before the closure of school, so we didn’t get to do more applied

activities like that, but the feedback from my students solidifies my belief in implementing more

hands-on activities and social aspects to my classroom.

In conclusion, the young adult mind goes through remarkable changes from early

adolescence into early adulthood. Knowing the specific, scientific changes going on in their

brain can better inform educators on how to apply best practices that would enhance learning and

retention in adolescents. Young adults are reward-driven, social beings whose brains will retain

information that is deemed important and prune out unnecessary synapses. In order to get their

minds to consider a concept important, educators need to develop meaning and connect material

to student interests or impart reward-based methods. Using interdisciplinary teaching, integrating

healthy competition, discussing controversial topics, developing metacognitive skills, and

including social teaching mechanisms are methods that I want to utilize in my future classroom

so that my students can influence their education and become lifelong learners.

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 Bibliography

Sun Protection Outreach Teaching by Students (S.P.O.T.S) Training Manual, 4th ed., S.P.O.T.S
Pub., St. Louis, MO, 2008. 7-11.

Blakemore, Sarah-Jayne. “The Mysterious Workings of the Adolescent Brain.” TED. June 2012.
Lecture.

Sousa, D. (2001). How the Brain Learns, 2nd Edition. Corwin Press.

Ambrose, S., Bridges, M., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M., Norman, M. (2010). How Learning Works:
7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching. Wiley.

Robinson, Rebecca. “Implications for Middle Schools from Adolescent Brain Research.”
American Secondary Education 45.3 (2017): 29–. Print.