Skip to main content

The Power of the Adolescent Brain


Photo from goodpsychology.files.wordpress.com
Looking back on my high school days, I often wonder how I managed to retain most of the information I learned. By the end of senior year, I was mentally exhausted and completely convinced that senioritis wouldn't wear off in time for college. Unmotivated and disinterested, the only time the classroom seemed interesting was when I was working on something that related to my future college career.

After studying the vast changes that occur in the adolescent brain, I'm not surprised that "senioritis" has become a popular term to describe the lack of motivation that comes with senior year. What I am surprised about is that senioritis isn't actually "teen-itis," especially since secondary education seems less geared toward formal thought processes and more focused on lower-level thinking.

The biological changes that take place during adolescence provoke an increased desire for peer acceptance, risk-taking, and reward-seeking, among other behaviors that are typically associated-- although often misinterpreted-- with teenagers. As a future middle-high school teacher, it is my goal to study proven teaching strategies to better incorporate the changes in my students' cognition in order to better engage them in the curriculum. With opportunities to promote healthy risk taking (i.e. performing a creative skit in front of the class despite fears of social repercussions), learn from peers (through group work and presentations), and earn rewards (with game-based lessons), I will be able to transform the classroom into a stimulating environment that keeps students active and in charge of how they learn.

Using the changes in my students' cognition to enhance my teaching style, I hope that my future classroom will become a solution to senioritis.
Labels:

Comments

  1. mbFebruary 4, 2018 at 4:01 AM

    Allison, what interesting connections, thank you! I am especially pleased that you are using this platform to make connecitons beyond "requirements." Let's get you some followers!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Teaching Alternatives: Book Reports

As a part of my elementary school's annual community-building program, students in all grades (which, for us, meant Kindergarten through 5th Grade) were asked to read the same short novel at home. Now, I know that sounds odd, considering the average kindergartener is likely at a lower reading level than the average fifth grader. However, with the option to have your parent or guardian read the story with you at home, I assure you that I was able to make it through some higher level reading with little trouble. By participating in year-round activities as a whole school, students were able to relate to each other across grade levels, all because they had read the same book and had followed the same characters. I will never forget how excited I was when I won a dictionary (Yes, a dictionary... I'd be less excited now, too) for answering the most trivia questions correctly about The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs . Though, if I had one complaint about the school- wide
1 comment
Read more

Place-Based Learning: Museums and the Importance of Physical Space in Middle School Education

Before there were formalized schools, there were living rooms, church halls, back steps, battlefields, and the great outdoors. Education came in all shapes and sizes, from the modern understanding of “traditional” study through the analysis of past writings and artifacts to the natural signals one learned to recognize on the farm before an approaching storm. Students were not just young people hunched over a book shielded from the world behind brick walls. They were citizens learning how to manage a family business, reading and printing newspapers, planting seeds, plowing land, and striving to better prepare themselves for the future, whatever it held for them. Today’s students aim to do the same. Yet their education seems to have restricted itself to the boundaries of school property, or perhaps it occasionally wanders beyond county lines. What happened to learning about your environment— and all the life that lived and lives within it— by experiencing everything it has to offer fir
7 comments
Read more

Troublemakers, by Carla Shalaby

Out of any word in the English language, I think I am most intimidated by “power.” It is full of contradictions: Power provokes a sense of accomplishment while implying the achievement and maintenance of power requires competition, hierarchy, and domination. Power is given and taken easily, and it yields to external factors beyond its control. Some people fear power, others are generous with it, and still more meet their doom when pride becomes its companion. Power allows for advancement. It provides a sense of order and control, but it can also create and fuel chaos. Individuals, groups, small islands, and large nations all possess a certain degree of power. As a future educator, the environment of my classroom will depend entirely on how I and my students handle the power we are given in our teacher-student relationships. More importantly, my power as a potential change-maker in their lives— through traditional lessons, personal relationships, worldly guidance, and honest compassion
4 comments
Read more