Adolescent Brains Need Structure, So Why Not Give it to Them?
“As your students move through adolescence, their brains are going through a dynamic change from chaos to clarity. These developmental changes have profound implications for how you’ll be able to guide students during these transformative years.” — Judy Willis
Flashback to when you were an adolescent. Those angsty years were not only before three-pound laptops and pocket-sized 12-megapixel cameras were developed. In fact, it was also a time before your prefrontal cortex was fully developed. Scientists used to believe that human brain development was finished around age 10, which we now know isn’t at all the case (Knox, 2010). From adolescence through early adulthood, the human brain goes through an extremely important maturation phase located in the prefrontal cortex region.
What exactly is the prefrontal cortex region? It’s where the “highest cognitive and emotional control networks are being constructed, especially during the school years. These networks are what neurologists call executive functions” (Willis, 2016). These executive functions are crucial, they allow us to perform many of the mental tasks that we most likely take for granted today. These include the ability to organize information, prioritize tasks, and solve problems.
Since adolescent brains are still developing in the prefrontal cortex region, the opportunities that teachers can “provide to guide them in using these executive functions also provide the activation to strengthen these networks when they are at peak neuroplastic responsiveness” (Willis, 2016). Basically — practice makes perfect, and if we can start “exercising” our students’ brains during their prime, we can teach their brains how to independently solve problems, organize information, and carry out other executive functions as effectively as possible!
So, how can teachers help guide and support this? Willis outlines seven strategies, and Comprendio’s platform can support teachers as they integrate four of them:
1. Teacher Modeling of Organization
Comprendio’s concept-map functionality allows teachers to maintain the highest level of organization with their teaching materials at all times. Students receive a blueprint of the teacher’s visually laid-out unit plan in a concept map-esque fashion, which we call “Learning Schemas”. What better way for a teacher to model organization than to allow students to always see how they’ve organized the learning material that they’re covering?
2. Feedback
Students receive feedback from Comprendio whenever they want to. Say, for example, that the class is halfway through a lecture, and a student wants to know how much of the lecture he understands. When a student hits the Feedback button, he can quickly see in every section of his notes/learning schema where alignment and misalignment exists.
3. Check for Understanding
Teachers can check for understanding with Comprendio just as efficiently as students can receive feedback. Comprendio’s “check for understanding” feature allows teachers to create checkpoints at any moment in time by aggregating student data. Whenever a teacher creates a checkpoint, she has the opportunity to label her checkpoint to track various instructional strategies and their effectiveness over time. In the example below, it is clear that the class is steadily improving over time. The last activity (group reflection) was the only activity that brought down the class performance averages.
4. Gradual Release of Responsibility
Willis (2016) suggests that teachers should plan a gradual release in the scaffolding that they provide for student organization. Comprendio’s learning schemas can be created by teachers and students. When students are first introduced to Comprendio’s organized schema structure, students can learn with the schemas their teachers have developed. Gradually over time, as students become more familiar with the academic vocabulary and relationships that exist between concepts, students can become the learning schema creators! Giving students the reigns to create their own learning schemas could function as a great end-of-unit assessment; students would be challenged to develop their own learning schemas based on everything that they have learned during the unit.
Comprendio is an edtech startup that was developed by teachers, for teachers. Comprendio’s potential to support the teaching and learning processes extends far beyond the four strategies mentioned above. If you’re interested in learning more about Comprendio, check out how Comprendio can help students develop a growth mindset. Want to connect with us? Email us at info@comprend.io. You can also find us here on Twitter.
Lizzy Schiller is the author and serves as Comprendio’s Director of Community Operations.
