Category: Personal World

PBS’s Inside the Teenage Brain is online (for free)

The full FRONTLINE documentary, Inside the Teenage Brain can be found online at PBS’s website. PBS has an entire website dedicated to the documentary which includes transcripts of interviews with neuro and cognitive scientists.

This is an excellent program (and website) that really delves into a lot that is counter-intuitive about adolescents. It is strongly recommended for both teachers and students, because it goes into the fundamental question of why your teens seem like aliens. Indeed, it describes the type of research upon which the Montessori Middle School program is based.

Naps

Image by Lewis Collard, via Wikimedia Commons

We take half an hour each day, usually just after lunch, for personal reflection. Practicing metacognition. Some students have used the time for quick naps, and I’ve been thinking about how useful this is, or if the time might be used more effectively.

On one hand students wake up a little refreshed, and given the sleep deficit many adolescents have it’s not surprising that they need a little extra. In fact, I found one study (Gradisar et. al., 2008) that found that quite a number of adolescents catch up on sleep by napping during the week (many nap 4 times a week for around 16 hours). And studies with adults have found that naps help you learn. A recent USA Today article on the work of Matthew Walker reports:

sleep clears the brain’s short-term memory storage to make room for new learning. – USA Today (2010)

On the other hand, students need practice with introspection. I believe it’s one of the most important skills they can learn by practice.

Ultimately, I don’t have a problem with students napping during Personal World, as long as they don’t overdo it. And if they do overdo it, it may well be an indication that they need to work more on their sleep cycles at home.

How much sleep do Middle Schoolers need?

Effects of sleep deprivation (from Wikimedia Commons)

I’m often surprised by how late my student get to sleep. It can range from 9 pm to past midnight, and I’d love to be able to recommend to parents that their kids should go to sleep earlier. However, the research on sleep patterns among adolescents shows the issue is a bit more complex.

First off, adolescents should get about 9 hours and 15 minutes of sleep per night according to Bill Dement (1999) who guided a lot of the foundational studies on sleep patterns. Not getting that much sleep, especially on recurring basis, results in sleep deprivation, which is well known to have a negative effect on school performance (Mayo Clinic staff, 2009). And a lot of adolescents are getting less than 9 hours.

But just setting earlier bedtimes may not work. Late in puberty adolescents’ biological clocks change, creating a window in the evening when it is difficult to get to sleep:

“[M]any adolescents … actually feel great at night and, for many of them, that makes it harder for them to even consider trying to go to bed earlier. So they’ll say goodnight to Mom and Dad and they’ll go into their rooms and read or play video games or talk on the phone. And they’re perfectly content and happy doing that, because they’re also at a phase where it’s easy for them to become aroused and stimulated by these activities. So it really does turn into a Catch–22. When people just say, “Well, all they have to do is go to bed earlier,” well, they really can’t go to sleep earlier necessarily.” – Mary Carskadon in Frontline (2002).

However, Mary Carskadon‘s research (and others) has shown that despite the changes in the biological clock that occur during adolescence, children still need the same total amount of sleep, even if they’re not getting it.

reduced habitual sleep time reported by adolescents may be related more to environmental factors (social, academic, and peer pressure) than to declining “need” for sleep. – Carskadon et. al. (1980)

Circadian rhythm (from NIH)

So the fact that adolescents are not getting enough sleep is likely because of how society has changed. An interesting Brazilian study found that children living in homes without electrical lighting had significantly earlier sleep times than those with electricity (Peixoto et. al., 2009). Another study found that sleep deprivation was related to the amount of multitasking students did at night.

So to get enough sleep, we need to adjust the environment (wilderness training anyone?). The Mayo Clinic has a useful site on teen sleep. They recommend:

  • Adjust the lighting. As bedtime approaches, dim the lights. Turn the lights off during sleep. In the morning, expose your teen to bright light. These simple cues can help signal when it’s time to sleep and when it’s time to wake up.
  • Stick to a schedule. Tough as it may be, encourage your teen to go to bed and get up at the same time every day — even on weekends. Prioritize extracurricular activities and curb late-night social time as needed. If your teen has a job, limit working hours to no more than 16 to 20 hours a week.
  • Nix long naps. If your teen is drowsy during the day, a 30-minute nap after school may be refreshing. But too much daytime shut-eye may only make it harder to fall asleep at night.
  • Curb the caffeine. A jolt of caffeine may help your teen stay awake during class, but the effects are fleeting. And too much caffeine can interfere with a good night’s sleep.
  • Keep it calm. Encourage your teen to wind down at night with a warm shower, a book or other relaxing activities — and avoid vigorous exercise, loud music, video games, text messaging, Web surfing and other stimulating activities shortly before bedtime. Take the TV out of your teen’s room, or keep it off at night. The same goes for your teen’s cell phone and computer.

Finally, I’m still thinking about what this means for students taking naps during personal world time. I’m not usually opposed to the occasional short nap, but just how much does this help?

Addictive behavior

Image adapted from JTR on Wikipedia Commons

In talking about video game addiction it was suggested that I also look at the parallels with other types of addictive behavior. Mrs. P. sent me a list of links that I’ve been carefully going through. What’s important here is that, no matter what the subject, be it video games, psychoactive substances or even food, many of the symptoms of addiction are the same. Ruth Eng (2003) from the Applied Health Science department at Indiana University has a nice website about addictive behavior. She points out some common characteristics:

  1. The person becomes obsessed (constantly thinks of) the object, activity, or substance.
  2. They will seek it out, or engage in the behaivor even though it is causing harm (physical problems, poor work or study performance, problems with friends, family, fellow workers).
  3. The person will compulsively engage in the activity, that is, do the activity over and over even if he/she does not want to and find it difficult to stop.
  4. Upon cessation of the activity, withdrawal symptoms often occur. These can include irritability, craving, restlessness or depression.
  5. The person does not appear to have control as to when, how long, or how much he or she will continue the behavior (loss of control). (They drink 6 beers when they only wanted one, buy 8 pairs of shoes when they only needed a belt, ate the whole box of cookies, etc).
  6. He/she often denies problems resulting from his/her engagement in the behavior, even though others can see the negative effects.
  7. Person hides the behavior after family or close friends have mentioned their concern. (hides food under beds, alcohol bottles in closets, doesn’t show spouse credit card bills, etc).
  8. Many individuals with addictive behaviors report a blackout for the time they were engaging in the behavior (don’t remember how much or what they bought, how much the lost gambling, how many miles they ran on a sore foot, what they did at the party when drinking)
  9. Depression is common in individuals with addictive behaviors. That is why it is important to make an appointment with a physician to find out what is going on.
  10. Individuals with addictive behaviors often have low self esteem, feel anxious if the do not have control over their environment, and come from psychologically or physically abusive families.

For additional reference, the American Council for Drug Education has a good list of symptoms of substance abuse for a number of psychoactive drugs, while psychcentral.com has a much simpler list titled “Symptoms of Substance Abuse“. WebMD has a similar site that addresses food addiction.

A reason to draw

MILTON GLASER DRAWS & LECTURES from C. Coy on Vimeo.

Why do we use our hands? Milton Glaser (above) uses his to think, and he cites Frank Wilson who argues that the hand and the brain are so connected as to be a single almost indistinguishable system. In fact, Wilson extrapolates this connection to education where, he makes the arguement, “less rigid more individualized approach to education will yield a student with a unified body and mind” (according to The New Yorker, 1998).

“The hand speaks to the brain as surely as the brain speaks to the hand” – Robertson Davies in The Cornish Trilogy

Drawing is thinking for some people at least. Perhaps that’s one of the things that defines kinesthetic learners? It certainly is something to bear in mind when designing and implementing the curriculum. Teachers tend to use teaching methods that fit their learning styles, so it is important to bear in mind we will have a variety of students. It’s certainly something about which I have to keep reminding.

It is also important to remember that all students benefit from experiences with different modes of learning. Students, especially adolescents whose brains are rapidly developing new neural pathways and pruning others, need to experience variety, because once we are set in our ways, it becomes a lot harder to learn new tricks.

This is where preparing the environment becomes so important. We want student to have choices, but we want them to try new things, and sometimes these two objectives conflict. The video above does make a persuasive argument to me about why we should draw and practice drawing. Perhaps it will do the same for our kids.

How much technology in the classroom?

The title of Mark Bauerlein‘s book is somewhat provocative. It’s called, “The Dumbest Generation, How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.” As I am very much an advocate for incorporating technology in the classroom, it’s not too unexpected that I disagree with large parts of his thesis.

Yes there is probably an important link between the brain and the hand that facilitates creative work. But it does not necessarily follow that, “Writing by hand, students will give more thought to the craft of composition. They will pause over a verb, review a transition, check sentence lengths …” (Bauerlein, 2010). As we work on habits of revision there seems to be no real reason why they should spend more time on improving a sentence they’ve hand written than one they’ve typed. True, if students are conditioned to write in short rapid bursts of texting it will translate into their other writing, but it is the role of the teacher to help them delineate these different genres of writing. I also have not seen the evidence that writing by hand is any less abstract than writing by typing on a keyboard. We are already expressing ideas using an abstract medium, words, why is one form of expression better than the other?

Where I do agree with Bauerlein is on the need to take breaks, even substantial ones, from technology and the online world. Where I see the greatest need for this is in aiding student’s comprehension of the natural world. You live too long in the virtual world and you begin to translate that experience into the real world. Yet the virtual world remains a model of the real one. It is simplified and enhanced to make it a more enjoyable experience, so the lessons you learn there do not truly apply to the real world. In addition, physical experience in the virtual world, at least for now, cannot create the kinesthetic, mind-body understanding of the laws of physics and biology that you learn from real-world games and just walking along the nature trail. This is why I am a firm believer in our week-long immersions every six weeks.

So I continue to allow my students to introduce new technology to the classroom, as long as they can show me that it is effective in helping them learn. The latest thing is the proliferation of iPod Touches. I like the iPods because of apps like iSeismo that lets you monitor vibrations in 3D. However, on our recent visit to the Le Bonheur Hospital a number of my students took their notes on their iPods. I personally don’t believe that these are more effective than pencil and paper because you can’t combine text and images very effectively on an iPod, but they did take copious notes (which they were quite proud to show me). I’m planning on giving them a quick quiz to see what they learned from the trip so we’ll see just how effective their note taking was.

We’re all swimming in a sea of new technologies, and we can’t really tell what will benefit and what will hinder without trying them out. So, I at least conclude that the key goal of middle school education should be to create in students a core competence and confidence that will help students navigate steadily in this world of much information and rapidly changing fads. A fundamental understanding of the mechanisms that underlie people’s behavior is key. Know yourself and understand how societies behave. The first is not trivial and the second requires drawing general conclusions from a lot of historical data, which is quite challenging for most adolescents, but that’s why we teach the way we do.

Note: There is an interesting discussion of the use of technology in the traditional classroom going on now on Will Richardson blog post “The Big Questions: Now What?“

The importance of thinking about thinking

Know thyself - Socrates (and others) from Wikimedia Commons.

Personal World is the time for introspection. Every day students get a chance to think about themselves and, hopefully, about how they think. Thinking about your own thinking is called meta-cognition, and there is growing scientific evidence that it is an important life skill that leads to better decision making.

According to Jean Paiget’s theory of cognitive development students only begin to develop the capacity for abstract and meta-cognitive thinking in the middle school years. However, further research has shown that only about 30-35% of high schoolers actually develop the skill (it’s called “formal thinking” or “formal operations“). The brain develops the capacity for formal thinking in early adolescence, but people do not naturally move into that stage; school and the right environment are important.

For formal operations, it appears that maturation establishes the basis, but a special environment is required for most adolescents and adults to attain this stage. – Huitt, W., & Hummel, J. (2003)

The requirement that students spend some time in introspection is one key way that Montessori adolescent programs try to promote formal thinking.

Finally, Jonah Lehrer, a journalist who writes a lot about how people think and makes decisions, points out the importance of metacognition in the qualities that make for a good president.

some studies suggest that when confronted with a complex decision – and the decisions of the president are as complex as it gets – people often do best when they rely on their gut feelings …
However, it has also become clear that listening to your instincts is just a part of making good decisions. The crucial skill, scientists are now saying, is the ability to think about your own thinking, or metacognition, as it is known. Unless people vigilantly reflect on how they are making an important decision, they won’t be able to properly use their instincts, or know when their gut should be ignored. Indeed, according to this emerging new vision of decision-making, the best predictor of good judgment isn’t intuition or experience or intelligence. Rather, it’s the willingness to engage in introspection” – (Lehrer, 2008; emphasis mine)

Other sites linking to this post

    How science works

    Artist's impression of the Big Bang. By cédric sorel: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Big_bang.jpg

    Science progresses from failure. When experiments don’t work, we often learn more from why they did not work than if they had given us the results we expected. Frequently, it is how scientists deal with this adversity that results in advances in science.

    We build models of the world, but by definition these models are incomplete. They are only metaphors for the actual world. When our models fail, we learn, and we expand our models.

    Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson won the Noble Prize for Physics for discovering the background noise left by the Big Bang. They only did so after spending a year trying to figure out why their radio telescope kept giving them too much static for them to use for their intended purpose (to map the universe’s bright stars).