Mel Levine, Opening General Session speaker at the ASCD Annual Conference, confirmed what educators have long understood: brains don't develop at the same rate in every child, and teachers had better pay attention to that fact or risk losing students who are perfectly capable of learning.
The rapid brain development that happens from age 11 through young adulthood not only makes learning challenging but also makes learning happen. Levine says brain research supports education strategies that
- Avoid labels. "The trouble with labels is that they are reductionist—they seek to name a condition and not address it," Levine said. "The vast majority of kids who are labeled as having reading comprehension problems are probably having active working memory problems. They need to find ways to hold short-term memory in their minds."
- Use appropriate assessments. Timed tests and memorization don't have much of a place in Levine's world. "It's much better to understand where you can go on the rivers of Africa rather than to be able to name all the rivers of Africa," Levine said. "Better still is explaining the contributions of Africa's rivers to the people who live there."
- Recognize developmental readiness. Fidgety or bored students are behaving in ways that reflect how their brains are growing. "One of the most important things we can teach kids to do is work slowly," Levine said. "As the prefrontal cortex develops, children are dealing with problems of impulsivity and learning not to jump to the first conclusion they draw." That has implications for testing. "It's much better to say, ‘Take as long as you need, but you can only use two pages’ than it is to say, ‘You have an hour to tell us as much as you can,’" Levine said.
- Build on strengths. Instruction needs to match not only developmental readiness but also what students can actually do with their learning. Getting kids to tap into relevant learning is what education is about. Levine said young brains have trouble filtering what's important to know.
"Problems with significance detection are probably the most common issue among high school kids," noted Levine. "Many high school kids just cannot separate what's important from what's not."
He recalled a young Stanford math professor who had a firm grasp of the problem. "I asked him what it was like to teach calculus to college freshmen," Levine recounted. "He said, ‘Well, you know how it is. Some of them just get it, and the others you have to teach.’"