Critical Window

What factors contribute to the development of literacy skills in adolescence? 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. Tare is a senior research scientist for the Learner Variability Project at Digital Promise, where she leads the synthesis of research on the cognitive, social-emotional, and student background factors that affect K-12 learning. Specifically, Tare studies the factors that affect how children and adults acquire new skills and knowledge including individual differences, learning environment, and the medium through which they learn. She shares these factors and how Digital Promise’s Learning Variability Project helps students, parents, and educators navigate literacy development on Critical Window. What is Learner Variability? “Recognizing learner variability is something many teachers have tried to do for decades,” explains Tare on Critical Window.  “It's understanding in a whole-child way a students' challenges and strengths and then tailoring instruction to meet each learner's needs.” What does this look like in practice? Tare shares an example: “One learner may struggle with working memory, their ability to hold information in mind and kind of manipulate it. But is this challenge a learning difference, or is it because they're getting too little sleep? Maybe they're taking care of younger siblings while their single mom works the night shift. So research supports both assumptions and we also show strategies for working with students in both situations.” Learner Variability vs. Learning Styles There is a difference between learner variability and what many know as “learning styles.” Research does not support the existence of learning styles, or “the idea that learners have a particular modality like visual or auditory where they learn best,” explains Tare. Instead, learner variability is steeped in research of factors that matter in learning. “These could be students' attention abilities, how much exercise they're getting, the safety of their neighborhood, and building block skills such as background knowledge,” says Tare. “We know that these factors interact with each other, so we know that greater physical fitness can improve attention and focus in the classroom.” Why Does Learner Variability Matter for Adolescents? There are specific learner factors that predict successful literacy outcomes, including argumentative reasoning, disciplinary literacy, and critical literacy, explains Tare. “Those are skills that are developing and really coming online for adolescents at this age.” But, there are also other factors at play for adolescents, including identity exploration, cultural lenses, and changes in motivation. “Students are now using those foundational reading and writing skills that they developed in elementary and middle school to build knowledge and then write and read authentic text and write for authentic audiences and purposes that are meaningful to them, that motivate them,” says Tare. To learn more, listen to full episode of Critical Window below. RESOURCES FROM DIGITAL PROMISE: Adolescent Literacy Learner Model: https://lvp.digitalpromiseglobal.org/content-area/literacy-7-12 Learner Variability Project: https://digitalpromise.org/initiative/learner-variability-project/ Designing for Learner Variability: Examining the Impact of Research-based Edtech in the Classroom: http://digitalpromise.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/lvp-examiningimpact.pdf 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.

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 of kids are bored more than 50 percent of the time when they’re peeking in their sensation-seeking,” explains Dahl. “Sitting in a desk being told what is important often doesn’t tap into biological shifts.” To learn more from Dahl, listen to full episode of Critical Window below. 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

Gifted programs are structured to cultivate and maximize the strengths of an individual. Through enriching instruction and engaging curriculum, students in gifted education are put on a path to achieve their full potential. But shouldn’t these ideals be applied to all students? In New York City, a panel appointed by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio thinks so. It has proposed eliminating the city’s gifted and talented programs, which largely enroll White and Asian American students, in favor of an approach that reduces inequality and segregation that is often perpetuated by gifted programs. “Simply put, there are better ways to educate advanced learners than most of the current ‘Screened’ and Gifted and Talented programs, which segregate students by race and socioeconomic status,” the panel wrote in a report to de Blasio. “Today they have become proxies for separating students who can and should have opportunities to learn together.” In a new episode of our Critical Window podcast, Dr. Yvette Jackson, adjunct professor at Teacher’s College at Columbia University and a senior scholar at the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education, shares 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. We learn quickly that Dr. Jackson, who previously was the director of Gifted Programs for the New York City Board of Education, doesn’t like the term “gifted” or other terms frequently used to label students. We asked her about this term and others that have been used to categorize students in the United States and what these words convey about students. Dr. Jackson: One [term], like you said, is gifted. The other term would be low-achieving, the other term would be subgroup, the other term would be minority, disabled, we can go on and on…I think those are enough, though, because immediately you get an image of you're either talking about those who have intellectual capacity when you label them as gifted, or those who, when you say low achieving, the expectation is there is nothing about them that could be termed in a high achievement world because they're low achieving. Dr. Jackson then compared terms used for muscle development to child achievement to emphasize how terms change the way we go about addressing underachieving students. Dr. Jackson: If you say that you have weak muscles, that's very different than saying you have underdeveloped muscles. Underdeveloped means if you just worked out with the right program, right strategies, and that's what I'm saying also for these terms. That children are not low achievers, they could be underachieving. They could be in situations where there are cognitive misfirings because of what they're in but they're not low achieving because that then puts the onus on the child. The issue is the onus is on us as the pedagogues to bring forward what the child innately has to offer. But before you think Dr. Jackson is talking badly about the effectiveness of gifted programs, she’s not. In fact, she’s saying that there are a lot of things that we can learn from gifted programs that we should apply to the education of all students, such as: 1. Believe that all students have the potential to achieve at high levels. This is a key foundation of gifted programs, explains Dr. Jackson. Students are brought into gifted programs because they are believed to have the potential to get to the next level. While in these programs, they often have access to a more expansive curriculum reflective of what is going on in the world, says Dr. Jackson. But these opportunities should be available to all students to develop their strengths and help them grow academically. 2. Pair teachers from gifted programs with those not in gifted programs. Schools can create professional development opportunities that involve teachers from gifted programs learning from teachers who are ...

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 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. To learn more about the Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program, visit: https://www.aspeninstitute.org/programs/sports-society/ Expand Transcript Collapse Transcript Hans Hermann: Welcome to Critical Window, a podcast from the Alliance for Excellent Education that explores...

When you step into your classroom each day, do you believe that all your students can succeed? Does this belief shape how you teach and engage your students in learning? On this episode of Critical Window (listen below) a podcast by the Alliance for Excellent Education (All4Ed), we spoke with Dr. Yvette Jackson, adjunct professor at Teacher’s College at Columbia University and senior scholar at the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education, about her concept of the “pedagogy of confidence.” Dr. Jackson, who has a book titled after this concept, is internationally recognized for her work applying neuroscience, gifted education, literacy, and cognitive mediation theory to elicit high intellectual performances from under-achieving and historically underserved students. A core concept of Dr. Jackson’s work is based on the idea that teachers should teach from a place of confidence in every students’ ability to learn, regardless of background or zip code. “When you have confidence about the potential of students, you help to push them to the outskirts, the limits of their mind,” explains Dr. Jackson on Critical Window. In this strategy, “learning becomes something that pulls [a student’s] potential to the next level.” What are the core ideas behind the “pedagogy of confidence,” and how can educators use this style of pedagogy to support adolescent learning? Here are six key strategies from Dr. Jackson: 1.Identify and activate student strengths. Instruction should help students believe “I can do this.” Teaching to students’ strengths helps them become more confident in their abilities and empowers them to perform better, all while establishing a growth mindset. 2. Focus on high intellectual performance. High intellectual performance should be the target for all students, not only those who have been identified for gifted and talented programs. Teach with the knowledge that all students are highly capable. 3. Build on existing skills and knowledge. Look at what students need to progress in their learning. What type of background knowledge do they need to have as a baseline and what additional skills do they need to build to succeed at the next level? 4. Situate learning in students’ lives. Are students seeing a connection between what you’re teaching and what’s happening in the world? Focus on issues and events happening in the world around them and incorporate those trends into the learning experience. 5. Acknowledge the impact of culture. Culture impacts the learning process and is a fundamental building block for students; however, it also can hold children back, even in school. If the school culture doesn’t represent the culture of the students, then you’re going to get all kinds of dysfunction. 6. Assess growth in every learning experience. Make every learning experience an opportunity for assessing growth. Receiving feedback on their performance and areas of growth helps students feel confident that they can progress in their learning. Listen to more from Dr. Jackson 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 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. Expand Transcript Collapse Transcript [Music] 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, policymakers, and communities. This week on Critical Window,

There’s no question that our country is diversifying. By 2030, immigration will overtake births as the dominant driver of population growth. Soon, there will be a majority-minority population in the United States, meaning that not a single ethnic or racial group will make up over 50 percent of the population. Students of color already make up the majority of K-12 students. How is this shift changing school environments and student learning? To answer this question, Critical Window, a podcast by the Alliance for Excellent Education (All4Ed), turned to Dr. Joanna Lee Williams, associate professor in the Curry School of Education and Human Development at the University of Virginia. Dr. Williams researches race and ethnicity as social contexts for youth development. “Adolescence is a critical time for thinking about racial and ethnic group membership,” explained Dr. Williams. “During this time, young people's cognitive abilities start to grow and develop in ways that allow them to think more abstractly about the world and their experiences in it…this often becomes a time when young people begin exploring this ‘who am I’ question in general.” Listen as Williams explores how racial and ethnic identity development impacts students and their learning environments, and how educators can support students in their identity development, 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. Expand Transcript Collapse Transcript 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, policymakers and communities. This week on Critical Window we're learning about racial and ethnic identity development during adolescence and how educators can support students in their identity development. Dr. Joanna Lee Williams is an associate professor in the Curry School of Education and Human Development at the University of Virginia and is affiliated with Youth-Nex, the U.Va. Center to Promote Effective Youth Development and previously served as the director of research for Young Women Leaders Program, a mentoring program for middle school girls. She is also an affiliate of the Curry School News Center for Race and Public Education in the South. Dr. Williams' research interests focus on race and ethnicity as social contexts for youth development. Specifically, her work examines ethnic identity as a form of positive youth development in the face of discrimination and other stressors and ethnic identity in relation to youths' beliefs and behaviors. She has also applied interests in understanding diversity, peer relations and positive outcomes in youth development programs. In 2014, Dr. Williams was one of five scholars in the country to be awarded the William T. Grant Foundation Award for a five-year study for the benefits and challenges of ethnic diversity in middle schools and Dr. Williams received her Ph.D. in 2008 in Developmental Psychology from Temple University. Welcome to the show, Dr. Williams. Joanna Lee Williams: Thank you for having me. Hans Hermann: Before we start, I just want to reference a couple of numbers for folks. We're in a country that has a changing level of diversity and especially as we see in our schools and our younger populations. By 2030, immigration is gonna overtake births as the dominant driver of population growth.

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. Expand Transcript Collapse Transcript 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. Hans Hermann: I would like to set the stage before we get into questions. While the opioid epidemic has received a great deal of press coverage and has been repeatedly called out as a top priority of both the Obama and Trump...

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.   Expand Transcript Collapse Transcript 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, policymakers and communities. Robyn Harper: This week on Critical Window, we're learning more about trauma, the impact it can have on the mental health and learning of students and what educators can do to create an environment that effectively support...

As a professor of human development in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology at the University of Maryland, College Park, Dr. Kathryn Wentzel researches the nature of teacher-student relationships and how these relationships predict young adolescents' goal pursuit, prosocial behavior, and academic performance. On this episode of All4Ed’s podcast, Critical Window, Wentzel walks through the process of building positive student-teacher relationships and how it affects student engagement and learning. In the below excerpts from the episode, Wentzel explains that teachers can…   Capitalize on Collaboration “The more [teachers] are tuned in to the peer relationships in their classrooms, the better able they are to create a classroom climate where [students] can interact with their peers but also engage in good instructional activities. So the challenge is to enable students to interact with each other but also in structured contexts where they're able to learn.” Act as a Safe Haven for Adolescents “During middle school and high school, teachers have the ability to create safe environments for students, physically safe environments as well as emotionally safe. And this is very important for adolescents because, as supportive and friendly as peers can be, they can also be mean spirited. They can also create a lot of stress. And so, teachers need to continue to be there as a safe haven for adolescents.”   Model Good Relationships When a trusting relationship exists between students and their teachers, “students are willing to engage in things that the teachers would like them to.” “A positive relationship also allows teachers to model good relationships with others, and so these social and emotional skills are very valuable for kids to learn and to demonstrate with each other.” This results in positive social behavior in the classroom, including “being helpful, cooperating, sharing, being nice to each other, and engaging in positive social exchanges with others.”   Create an Engaging Classroom “If a student feels that a teacher cares about them, is going to be supportive of them as an individual, they're more likely to listen to the teacher, to engage in what the teacher wants them to. It [will] create a very calm, but at least an engaging classroom climate which allows everyone to learn more and better. It just creates a better climate for everybody to engage in the process of learning. And so there are academic benefits as well. Kids are more engaged and motivated to learn academically.” To learn more about how to build positive relationships between teachers and students, listen to the full episode of Critical Window below. 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.   Expand Transcript Collapse Transcript Robyn Harper: How can positive relationships between teachers and students help to keep students more engaged in the classroom? This week on Critical Window we're looking at how positive relationships can be a crucial tool for teachers and how education leaders need to take a key role in developing the structures that help teachers create and foster these relationships, especially when it comes to adolescent students. Hans Herman: We have a great guest today whose work focuses on the nature of teacher-student relationships and how they predict young adolescent goal pursuits, social behavior, and academic performance. Kathryn Wentzel is a professor of human developme...

March for Our Lives. DREAMers. Black Lives Matter. Young people are lifting up their voices and demanding a seat at the table to discuss issues of immigration, gun violence, and inequality that permeate their lives. These are problems that students carry from their homes to their schools each day. As an educator or school leader, student activism may lead to difficult questions. Should you support your students when they stand up for change? What if your beliefs differ from theirs, or you have trouble relating to their experiences? If you want to support them, what’s an appropriate way to do so? To answer to these questions, All4Ed spoke to Ben Kirshner, professor of the learning sciences and human development at the University of Colorado, Boulder and author of Youth Activism in an Era of Education Equality. As a guest on All4Ed’s new podcast, Critical Window, Kirshner shared three key points to address student voice and navigate student activism.   Lead with Empathy Handling student participation in protests and walkouts is a complex issue that is entwined with safety and liability concerns. But there are ways that adults in the school building can support students without losing facetime or harming the learning process, explains Kirshner. “If students are feeling like there’s an issue that really affects them and they care about it, it affects their daily lives, and a teacher is not showing any empathy with that, or, at least a willingness to listen and hear what that issue is and, maybe, show solidarity with their students, then, all the facetime in the world isn’t going be helpful for that learning relationship,” Kirshner says. Leading with empathy is key. “I think it’s important that school leaders, teachers, faculty try to understand where students are coming from. They’re not required to agree with them, in my view; but, if they show an effort to listen and take them seriously as people who are interpreting their world and have mature ideas about the world, then, I think that goes a long way.”   Create an Infrastructure That Supports Student Voice “One way to support student learning and voice is to think about how a student council, student advisory group could actually have some input into substantive issues that the school is facing,” says Kirshner. This moves beyond the benefit of providing students with leadership opportunities and enables them to create change in their schools. “Frankly… [that] will help [principals and superintendents] develop practices and policies that are really responsive to young people’s lived experiences,” Kirshner explains.   Make Learning Relevant to Students’ Interests “Think about how civic learning and voice and agency can be integrated into the academic curriculum,” Kirshner posits. What would that look like? Take English class as an example. If some of the goals of the class are for students to improve their reading ability, understand the difference between evidence and opinion, and learn to write or speak persuasively, then have students do their own research about issues that matter to them and develop policy proposals on what they’ve learned, Kirshner explains. “You could call that participatory action research,” he says. “From the perspective of a learning scientist, like myself, [this] is actually really consistent with what we know to be high-quality, deeper learning.” Listen to the full episode below. 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. Expand Transcript Collapse Transcript Robyn Harper: This week on Critical Window,

If you regularly interact with adolescents, whether as a parent, educator, or community member, you’ve likely noticed that there are factors that set teens apart from children of other ages. But did you know that adolescence is the second most active time of neurodevelopment in a human’s life? By better understanding what’s going on developmentally with adolescent students, educators can create learning environments that capitalize on the unique opportunities that adolescence offers. For some practical advice on the subject, I looked across the pond to speak with Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, PhD, professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and author of Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain. The following are edited excerpts from our discussion, but I encourage you to listen to the full conversation below on Critical Window, a new podcast from the Alliance for Excellent Education. Critical Window highlights how research from the science of adolescent learning can inform middle and high school design and the practice of school and district leaders.   "Adolescence Isn't an Aberration" Bob Wise: You open your book with a chapter, "Adolescence Isn't an Aberration." In that chapter you state that adolescence is a unique stage of human development…Could you explain why? Sarah Jayne-Blakemore: Some people have argued that adolescence is a recent invention and it doesn't really exist as a biological period of development, but actually there's really good reason to think of adolescence as a unique period of biological and psychological and social development. You see increases in risk taking and impulsivity and changes in social behavior for this age group across species, culture, and history.   “No Such Thing as an Average Adolescent” Bob Wise: There are different stages of adolescent development, the physical process is occurring as well as other individual differences. What does this mean for the educator? Sarah Jayne-Blakemore: I think educators themselves know all about individual differences. They work with adolescents every day of their lives and they know there's no such thing as an average adolescent, there's no such thing as an average teenager, every teenager is different and that's absolutely what we're finding in the neuroscience in the psychological research, that although you can look at averages, it's probably more meaningful to think about differences between individuals within adolescence. That might have translational and real-world implications into different teaching strategies for different types of adolescence, but we're nowhere near there yet.   “It’s Not Too Late to Intervene in Adolescence” Bob Wise: You write that "education policy tends to emphasize the importance of early childhood intervention…however this emphasis on early interventions is at odds with the findings that the human brain continues to develop throughout childhood and adolescence and into early adulthood.” Are we suggesting that the way we often think about interventions is wrong? Could you elaborate further on how you think education leaders and policy makers might think about decisions about interventions? For many years there has been this emphasis in education policy or economics that the first three or five years is most critical to intervene. But the problem with that is that you can't just intervene in the first three years of life. You can't just try to help children, say those from low socioeconomic groups, in the first three years of life and then stop the intervention and expect them to be fine from then on. If a child slips through the net early on in life, and they don't have that early intervention, that doesn't mean that it's too late to intervene in adolescence. It's not. The evidence from brain research suggests that in fact the brain continues to develop very substantially during adolescence and provides an important window of opportu...