Teaching for Adolescents' Deep Learning: A Classroom Observation, Interview, and Neuroimaging Study of Secondary Teachers

• In Event: The New Science of Adolescence: Integrating Socio-Emotional and Academic Development in Research, Practice, and Policy

Abstract

Perspective: When done well, teaching is incredibly difficult and important social, emotional and cognitive work. Establishing a classroom culture of reflective, agentic and authentic work, and then facilitating students’ productivity and learning within it, clearly requires extensive knowledge of adolescents’ thinking and development, as well as specialized social skills for purposefully engaging with young people and modeling scholarly habits of mind. However, especially at the secondary level, teachers are generally deemed competent if they can merely demonstrate adequate content knowledge and classroom management skills. The result is predictable: widespread disengagement among students, low levels of social and emotional wellbeing among students and teachers, poor academic performance relative to other nations, and widening achievement gaps (Becker & Luthar, 2002).

Purpose: Effective teachers know their content area, but they know much more than that. The best teachers strategically build a classroom culture of intellectual curiosity, agency and safety, which sets the stage for deeper exploration of ideas and skills, in relation to young people’s developing interests. We describe an interdisciplinary, empirical, collaborative effort to characterize the work of teaching.

Methods/Data Sources: This paper reports on an innovative study of secondary teachers identified by their administrators as “exceptional”, working in public schools serving high proportions of low-SES youth of color. The collaborating authors are experts in teacher education, psychology and social-affective neuroscience, and worked together to develop aligned interdisciplinary protocols combining teacher interviews, classroom observations, psychophysiological recording in the classroom, and specially designed neuroimaging and laboratory measures. The study connects detailed characterizations of individual teachers’ classroom practices with their nuanced reflections about teaching and their students’ learning. These, in turn, are used to decipher complex, dynamic patterns of neural activity and bodily arousal as teachers engage with ecologically valid teaching tasks in the laboratory, including grading their own students’ work and evaluating model teachers’ pedagogical strategies. The methods were intentionally developed to support participants’ experiences as partners in the work.

Results: All participants reported engagement with the laboratory protocols and many expressed that the protocols honored what they hoped to showcase about their craft. This paper presents the findings from the first round of 15 teachers from the 2018-2019 school year. The in-depth neurobiological analyses highlight the importance of teachers establishing emotionally safe and appropriate relationships with students, but moving beyond this to facilitate in strategic ways their autonomy, agency, curiosity and scholarly identity in authentic problem solving.

Scholarly Significance: By tracing teachers’ pedagogical practices and neuropsychological dynamics when evaluating teaching videos and providing feedback on their own students’ work, this study provides a unique view into the interacting mind, brain and education processes involved in teachers’ promotion of scholarly habits of mind. The patterns of findings, connecting teachers’ neural dynamics, documented pedagogical practices and expressed beliefs about learning, aim to afford unprecedented insights into the habits of mind and social-emotional engagement that characterize effective teachers’ support of adolescents’ deep learning. The findings may contribute to teacher training programs, and to justifying the professional supports teachers reasonably need to be successful.

Authors

• Christina Krone, University of Southern California

• Jeffrey Garrett, LAUSD

• Douglas R Knecht, Bank Street College of Education

• Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, University of Southern California