[00:01] SPEAKER_02:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.
[00:06] Announcer:
Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center and Champion of High Performance Instructional Leadership, Dustin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.
[00:16] SPEAKER_01:
I'm your host, Justin Vader, and my guest today is Dr. Larry Steinberg. He is distinguished professor of psychology at Temple University and the author of more than 350 scholarly articles and a dozen books on adolescence. So I'm thrilled today to have one of our nation's leading researchers on adolescence here to talk to us about his new book, Age of Opportunity, Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence.
[00:42] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:45] SPEAKER_01:
Dr. Steinberg, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thanks very much. Glad to be here. Tell us a little bit about the book. What new insights are you bringing to us in this book about adolescence?
[00:57]
Because I think we've heard for a long time that adolescence is kind of stretching out, and we're familiar with the phenomenon of kids staying at home longer into their 20s. What are some of the key insights in this book?
[01:11] SPEAKER_00:
I think... The most important is this discovery in recent years that adolescence is a second period during which the brain is really malleable. The word that scientists use is plastic. So we've known for a long time that the brain is very plastic during the early years of life.
[01:29]
This is what has come to be called zero to three. But it's recently been discovered that there's a second period during which the brain is very sensitive to the environment and very influenced by experience. And that's adolescence. This wasn't known until fairly recently. And as I explain in the book, what this means is that adolescence is a time when we have great opportunity to help make kids better thinkers and to enhance their development in positive directions. But I don't think that we're taking advantage of that opportunity, perhaps because we didn't really realize it was there.
[02:06]
You know, I think that the conventional view that many people have of adolescence is that It's something that we just need to survive, to endure until it's over. argue in Age of Opportunity is that, no, we really need to think about it differently. We need to think about adolescence as a time when people can really thrive.
[02:24] SPEAKER_01:
So Dr. Steinberg, I noticed that one of the endorsements for your book comes from a researcher who's a very familiar name to educators, and that is Carol Dweck, whose work on mindsets, and particularly the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset, has had a lot of influence. And you mentioned the idea of plasticity. And obviously, as educators, we accept the idea that students can still learn new things, can develop new skills. But I think at the secondary level, we do tend to see some pretty major characteristics of students as fairly fixed. And we see students as kind of being sortable.
[03:02]
And only in the last couple of decades has there been a strong move away from trends like tracking and ability grouping toward instructional models that view students more flexibly and view their abilities as more plastic. What are some of the findings from your research that speak to that issue within schools?
[03:19] SPEAKER_00:
I think maybe the most important is knowing where the brain is plastic during adolescence. So when the brain goes through periods of great malleability, it's not always in the same region of the brain at all ages. So for example, the visual part of the brain is very plastic during infancy, but it really doesn't change very much after that. That's why our vision doesn't really get any better once we pass the age of two or three. The part of the brain during adolescence that's malleable is the prefrontal cortex, which is the front of the brain. It's the part of the brain that's important for all kinds of advanced thinking abilities, like decision making and planning.
[04:04]
And it's also very important for self-regulation. Self-regulation is a critical skill for students to have because it is one of the strongest predictors of success in school and in work. Some of your listeners may be familiar with the work of Angela Duckworth, who's known for her insights into the idea of grit. Angela is also someone who had some nice things to say about age of opportunity, and she actually is someone that I know very well. Schools can be doing more things during the high school years to help strengthen youngsters' grit, to help make them more determined and more persevering. And that's consistent with Carol Dweck's work in the sense that we want to help students really learn how to take charge of their learning and education and really apply themselves to it, which is something that you would be more likely to do if you have a more open
[05:03]
So in the book, I suggest some kinds of activities that schools ought to be incorporating into their daily curriculum that have been shown to build these, you know, what experts are calling non-cognitive skills that are so important to success today. in educational settings and in life in general.
[05:22] SPEAKER_01:
Well, let's talk about some of those kind of non-cognitive skills. And I think you're absolutely right that the idea of grit through the work of Angela Duckworth and journalist Paul Tuff I think is really catching on as a teachable skill. The idea that not only do some students have more grit and determination than others, but we can actually play a role in building and strengthening that. And I think we've seen in some of our most successful charter school networks that really get tremendous results in situations and with resources that other schools are not getting those same results, like the KIPP Academies. We attribute a lot of that success to their ability to foster grit. So what do you see schools doing and what do you even see parents doing to help students develop grit, particularly as they encounter new challenges?
[06:17] SPEAKER_00:
I think there are several concrete things that schools can do. One of them, which, and by the way, these are within the reach of all of our schools. They're not just limited to charter schools that have more resources. One thing that schools ought to do is to reincorporate physical education into the daily curriculum. It's something that's been eliminated in many school districts because of budget cuts. But, you know, we are seeing now how important aerobic exercise is for the brain.
[06:50]
And I have to say that I don't know a single educated adult who doesn't have some kind of regimen that he or she tries to follow in terms of physical exercise. So we recognize that it's really good for us. It's good not only for our physical health, but also good for our mental health and our thinking abilities. And yet we've taken it out of schools, which just doesn't make any sense given what we know about the brain. So that's number one. Number two is there's emerging research on the benefits of mindfulness training.
[07:22]
And there are schools around the country now that have been incorporating different approaches to mindfulness training into their curriculum. One that is well known, of course, is meditation. It turns out that mindfulness is actually good for the brain and it strengthens regions of the brain that are important for things like grit. A third would be to incorporate the kinds of things that Carol Dweck and others have talked about in the mindset approach. Because part of believing that your success is dependent on your effort, not your inherent ability, is cultivating grit and determination and optimism. And then finally, I can't emphasize enough how important it is to challenge high school students.
[08:13]
One of the disappointing things that I learned while doing the research for Age of Opportunity is how few high school students in America say that they've been challenged. Only one out of every six high school students in this country says that she's ever taken a single course that was difficult or challenging. And that is just appalling to me. And in international comparisons, these comparisons not only include achievement tests, that's what we often read about in the newspaper, they also include questionnaires that students fill out about their attitudes about school. American high school students rate their high schools as more boring than just about any students anywhere in the world. And 70% of American high school students say that they would learn more if their schools were more demanding.
[08:59]
So if our students are telling us this, you know, I think that's a wake-up call that we really need to make high school more challenging. You know, in earlier research that I've done on this, what we found is that many more students sort of disengage from school, check out, because they're bored than because they're confused. So I think we're, for some reasons that I don't understand fully, I think we've become afraid to really push our students and to challenge them. And I think that's what students want and that's what they need.
[09:31] SPEAKER_01:
Do you think that comes from a misunderstanding of failure? Because it seems like we fear failure and we fear putting our students in a position where they experience failure. I think from the time when I was a kid until today, it seems like that's just become more and more the case that we don't want to see our kids fail, whether they're our students or our own children. Is that something that shows up in your experience?
[10:00] SPEAKER_00:
Yes, I think so. I think you're exactly right. But I think as Paul Tuff so brilliantly pointed out in his book, failure provides an opportunity to learn. And failure provides an opportunity to work harder the next time. And if you never fail, you're never going to be motivated to get better. So we shouldn't be afraid of that as long as we can equip our students with the skills that they need to learn from that experience.
[10:31]
And we need to keep challenging people to do a little bit more, to work a little bit harder, to do something that's a little bit more advanced. than what they're currently capable of doing. This is a concept that many of your listeners are familiar with. It's called scaffolding. And what we've learned is that this region of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, is strengthened when we can scaffold students' learning experiences in a way that pushes them to do a little bit more than what they've been accustomed to doing.
[11:00] SPEAKER_01:
And I think that connects well to another finding from your research, which is that adolescence is extending farther and farther into the 20s. And one experience that I recall very vividly was seeing my peers in college really struggle academically for the first time. And I was speaking with another author recently who asked students to kind of choose a passion project to work on as part of their kind of genius hour or 20% time in their school. And he mentioned having students actually break down and cry because they didn't know what they were passionate about. Because they had never actually explored what they were passionate about and pushed themselves to the limits of what they could do. And I remember looking around in college and seeing people who maybe were valedictorian in high school experiencing challenge for the first time.
[11:51]
And I remember myself feeling that sense of real challenge for the first time in my third year of college when I was a junior. and thinking, wow, I really don't know what to do with this because this is harder than I've had the opportunity to experience coursework before. And I think when we don't give students that experience earlier, then we're not setting them up for success later in adolescence. And I wonder if you could speak a little bit to what that later adolescence looks like and how it's relevant to our work at the secondary level in K-12.
[12:26] SPEAKER_00:
Good question. Good question. Today's young people are taking more time to move from adolescence into adulthood. So 25-year-olds today are twice as likely to still be students than their parents' generation was when they were 25. And I think that the fact that we don't push students very much in high school comes back to bite us when we look at what's going on on college campuses. So you probably know that There's been a lot of discussion in the last year or so about the need to get more high school students to enroll in college.
[13:03]
That's important because to succeed in today's labor force, you really need a college degree, a four-year college degree.
[13:13]
But if you look at the United States compared to other countries, what you see is that we're not so bad when it comes to getting people to enroll in college. We have one of the highest college enrollment rates in the developed world, but we are last in college completion. So one third of all students that enter college in the United States never graduate. So our problem is not getting students to enroll in college. It's getting them to stay in college. And when we look at the reasons that students give for dropping out of college, some of them mention money.
[13:46]
And we need to be very cognizant of that and sympathetic with that. But a lot of them drop out for other reasons. And the survey indicate that they drop out because they say they can't handle the work. They can't handle the work academically. We know that between 30% and 40% of college students need remedial education, which is a whole other conversation. But they also can't handle the work psychologically.
[14:14]
They're not used to being pushed as hard as college pushes them or being able to manage their own academic life without parents or teachers managing it for them. So if we were to challenge students more in secondary schools, not only would we be building the academic skills that they need to handle college, I think we would also be building these non-cognitive skills that would help them persist and succeed in college. And if all we do is enroll more people in college but don't do anything about student attrition, all we're going to do is create more young people who can't compete in the labor force because they've dropped out of college, but who are carrying student debt. And so just enrolling people into college without equipping them with what they need to succeed there is not going to solve our problem.
[15:09] SPEAKER_01:
So from your research, Dr. Steinberg, what are some of the implications for parents? As adolescence continues to evolve and as we learn more about the adolescent brain, what are some of the findings for parents?
[15:22] SPEAKER_00:
Well, I think we know that there are certain approaches to parenting, certain parenting styles is what we call them, that have been shown to be associated with the development of these non-cognitive skills. So it's not simply up to schools to help facilitate this aspect of development. It can be done by parents too. There's a style of parenting that I discuss in the book called authoritative parenting, which is the combination of being warm and being firm. And I give a parent some specific concrete guidelines on how to do this at home. And that will help their youngsters develop better self-regulation, which then will make their youngsters more able to be engaged in school.
[16:06]
So it will really help teachers out for parents doing this part of their job well at home. And I think that's a really important connection between parents and schools that we don't talk about and don't think about enough, which is how we as educators can help parents learn how to do a better job in raising their kids. You know, not just coming to school programs, we want them to do that too, but to parent in ways that that make their kids more able to learn and more able to be engaged by their teachers.
[16:40] SPEAKER_01:
So Dr. Steinberg, for our audience of school administrators, I noticed one of your recommendations in your chapter on reimagining high school is around how we teach social and emotional skills, how we teach self-regulation, how we teach students strategies for coping. What can you tell us about what we can do to set students up for success in the area of social and emotional learning?
[17:04] SPEAKER_00:
Well, social and emotional learning has become increasingly popular, and that's because there now is a very good evidence base suggesting that students can be taught some of these social and emotional skills that are important, not only for being engaged and succeeding in school now, but important for their future. Let's remember that in the world of work that we're helping students prepare for, being able to work with other people has become more and more important. And schools should play a role in helping to develop those kinds of social skills as well. There are a lot of really good SEL, social emotional learning, programs out there. And educators and administrators who are interested in looking into it can go online and find a number of different clearinghouses that publish catalogs, really, of different kinds of programs that are appropriate for students of different backgrounds.
[18:01]
You know, I didn't have space in the book to go through them all because there are just so many of them, but I do provide resources in that chapter where educators can go online and find information on how to take these programs and put them in practice in their own schools.
[18:18] SPEAKER_01:
And I think if we were to ask the average high school administration, you know, why don't you have a program like this? I think it would often come down to time. And I think we tell ourselves, you know, we don't have time for extended physical activity. We certainly don't have time for, you know, God forbid, recess at the high school level. And we don't have time to teach these social and emotional skills. What do you say to that?
[18:41] SPEAKER_00:
I think we need to make time because I think that what we're seeing is that adding additional for academic instruction doesn't do very much. You know, there are a lot of schools around the world in which their students achieve much more than American students do and in which they spend fewer hours per day in school. So I think we do have time to spare and we can cut back on some of the traditional academic instruction and replace that with some of these other approaches which in the end will benefit students academically more than conventional academic instruction will.
[19:18] SPEAKER_01:
So the book is Age of Opportunity, Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence. Dr. Steinberg, thank you so much for joining us for Principal Center Radio. Thank you very much for having me.
[19:30] SPEAKER_02:
And now, Justin Bader on high-performance instructional leadership.
[19:34] SPEAKER_01:
So, high-performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my interview with Dr. Larry Steinberg? There's a lot of research going on now about adolescence, about grit, about teaching perseverance and social and emotional skills. And one takeaway for me is simply that we cannot ignore this issue. If we see our job as educating kind of only the academic students, half of students or the academic third of students, as some researchers would tell us, we're going to miss out on a lot of our biggest opportunities for helping students to be successful in life. If you look at the history of secondary schools in the early 20th century, there was a huge emphasis on hygiene and habits and physical activity.
[20:17]
And over time, we've narrowed that down more and more to just a few academic subjects. And I think the standards movement has been partly responsible for that, but I think we're responsible for that too. So if you have an opportunity, if a teacher comes to you and says, hey, I really want to teach a curriculum on systems thinking, or I really want to teach a course on life skills, and not a remedial course, but something that we want all of our students to have access to so that when they get to college or when they get to whatever they're doing after high school, they have the tenacity that it takes to push through their problems, to persevere, and to succeed. So it may mean piloting a new curriculum for social and emotional learning, but whatever you do, don't ignore what we call at elementary, the whole child. Look for ways to address the needs of students as people.
[21:08]
And that means paying attention to the domain of social and emotional learning.
[21:15] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
