Whether we have taught for one year or 30 years, there is a newness that accompanies cool August nights. We enter our first meetings and professional development training with anticipation of the yet-to-be-written prose of the school year, wondering how we, and our students, will contribute to the narrative that unfolds over the next10 months.
Proctor’s faculty was incredibly fortunate to welcome educator, author, and neuroscientist Allison Posey to campus for an all-day training and to engage deeply with our Student Experience team regarding training as advisors, dorm parents, and how to best become trusted adults for our students.
Over the summer, teaching faculty read Allison Posey’s book Unlearning in preparation for her workshop. Posey discussed her own journey as an educator and shared research on how our brains change based on how we use them, challenging us to think more deeply about our students’ journeys to and through Proctor.
Among the many nuggets of wisdom Posey shared was her presentation of jagged profiles of our learners. There is always variability in cognition and emotion, but there should not be labels. When we label students with a specific learning difference, we underestimate their neuroplasticity and our creativity as educators.
We must continue to hold expectations high, even for those students for whom learning is most challenging, while supporting their uniquely jagged learning profiles along the way. This concept of balancing rigor and support is not new for Proctor. However, Posey’s work provides a new context through which we can apply it across learning environments with our students.
When our students arrive in our classrooms each fall, they come with brains and hearts eager to connect with their friends and their school community. Posey helped us understand that their brains are both plastic and deeply ingrained in the neural pathways they have developed over the last 14 to 17 years of their lives.
Our brains can change based on how we use them, but our neurobiology parallels our lived experiences. Emotions activate physiology, drive attention, and impact cognition. Therefore, we must design our learning environments so we can reduce our students’ cortisol levels, by understanding the emotions tagging along in their backpacks and developing clear, tight goals for our classrooms.
If you are interested in the adolescent brain, we encourage you to read Posey’s book and to learn more about how our brains function, so we can all help our students understand how their brains impact their behavior, emotions, and learning.