What Every Parent and Educator Needs to Know About Learning and the Teenager Brain

Copyright (c) 2008 SharpBrains

Dr. Robert Sylwester is an educator of educators, having received multiple awards during his long career as a master communicator of the implications of brain science research for education and learning. His most recent book is The Adolescent Brain: Reaching for Autonomy (Corwin Press, 2007). He is an Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Oregon.

I am honored to interview him today.

Alvaro Fernandez (AF): You recently published a book titled The Adolescent Brain: Reaching for Autonomy. What advice would you give to parents and educators of adolescents?

Robert Sylwester (RS): Biological phenomena always operate within ranges. For example, leaves fall from trees in the autumn, but typically not all at once. Developmental changes similarly do not occur at the same time and at the same rate in all child and adolescent brains. And just as it's possible for wind or temperature to alter the time when a leaf might fall, unexpected events can alter the time when an adolescent has to confront and respond to given environmental challenges.

The important thing for adults to do is to carefully observe an adolescent's interests and abilities, and insert challenges that move maturation forward at a reasonable level. If you push too fast, you end up with a stressed out adolescent. If you do not challenge sufficiently, you end up with a bored adolescent. No magic formula exists for getting this just right. This means, for example, that we celebrate the skills of artists and athletes who function beyond typical human capacity, and we create judicial sanctions for those whose behavior does not reach culturally acceptable levels. Most human behavior is personally chosen and executed within wide ranges. We can easily observe this wide range in such phenomena as political discourse and religious belief or practice. Adolescents strive towards autonomous adulthood as they gradually discover their interests and capabilities, and what is biologically possible and culturally appropriate. They adapt their life to wherever they're most comfortable within the marvelous sets of possible and appropriate ranges that exist.

Adolescents take risks, no doubt about that. If you want to eventually function within any range, you have to locate its outer positive and negative limits. Speed limits and other regulations provide direction, but adolescents (and adults) still tend to move towards the limits - and maybe just a smidgen beyond.

In short, parents and educators need to pay attention to observe where adolescent's interests and abilities lie, and engage them with experiences that will enable them to move forward.

Alvaro Fernandez (AF): I find that, in an emerging field like cognitive science, we need to start by clarifying the language we use. Can you define some words such as Learning, Education, Brain Development and Cognition.

Robert Sylwester (RS): Sure.

LEARNING: Most organisms begin life with most or all of the processing systems and information that they need to survive. Humans are a notable exception in that an adult-size brain is significantly larger than a mother's birth canal, so we're born with an immature one pound brain that develops additional mass and capabilities during its 20 year post-birth developmental trajectory. Parenting, mentoring, teaching, and mass media are examples of the cultural systems that humans have developed to help young people master the knowledge and skills they need to survive and thrive in complex environments. Learning is one the main activities we do, even if we often are not aware of it.

EDUCATION: Education, like the culture it subsumes, is a conservative phenomenon. Science and technology move rapidly, but education doesn't. So if schools often resemble the schools of 50 years ago, that should not be surprising. Parents remember their school experiences, and since they survived them, they are typically leery about educators experimenting with their children. This explains in part why schools have not incorporated many of the recent developments in neuroscience and cognitive psychology.

BRAIN DEVELOPMENT: Childhood brain development is focused on systems that allow children to recognize and remember the dynamics of environmental challenges - challenges that protective adults will solve for them. Adolescent brain development is more focused on frontal lobe development, the systems that allow us to respond appropriately and autonomously to the challenges we confront.

COGNITION: Every experience will alter our brain's organization at some level, so our brain's processing networks continually change throughout our life. This process is called brain plasticity. For example, since my brain has adapted to my switch from a typewriter to a computer, it would now be difficult (but not impossible) for me to write again on a typewriter. Now, cognition is linked to other concepts: emotion is the processing system that tells us how important something is; attention focuses us on the important and away from the unimportant things; problem-solving determines how to respond, partly on the basis of our memory of prior related experiences; and behavior carries out the decision. The general term cognition encompasses these various processes.

AF: Prof. Sylwester, thank you for your great information and advice.

RS: My pleasure.