I was recently in Johannesburg, South Africa speaking at the Future of Diverse Learning Conference at the American International School where I met Will Richardson. Will and I began talking in depth about the bind we are in as educators, as parents, and even as a society when it comes to committing to our students. I was asked to be on Will’s Podcast, Modern Learners. We talked about my book At What Cost: Defending Adolescent Development in Fiercely Competitive Schoolsin length. Speaking at boarding schools, public schools, and international schools; I kept finding a common theme – anxiety and depression – both of which emanate from the intense competition students experience in schools. As a psychologist and also as a parent, I understand these not only as a researcher, but I have also lived these experiences in real life. Listen to my full interview below.
About Modern Learners
Will Richardson and Bruce Dixon unpack some challenges that educators around the world are facing on a daily basis. They are articulating a mission that is focused on helping their readers become not just modern learners but modern leaders as well, leaders who are better informed and make better decisions for the students in their charge. You can become a subscriber to Modern Learners and you will receive free whitepapers, e-books, webinars, and more. In the coming months, you’ll hear more about their plans to build a global community of educators who can articulate and advocate for a different type of education for kids, not one that’s just a little better than it used to be.
Following up on last month’s post about psychological overuse injuries in adolescents, I bring readers an interview with Michael Delman,founder and CEO of Beyond BookSmart, a company that teaches executive function skills to children, adolescents, and to young-adult college students.
What is Executive Functioning?
In his forthcoming book, “Your Kid’s Gonna Be Okay: The Executive Function Skills Your Child Needs in the Age of Attention,” Michael Delman refers to executive functioning capacities as “the self-management skills that allow us to get things done.” As Delman notes, this is similar to ADHD expert Russell Barkley’s description of executive functioning as “the ability to use self-directed actions (self-regulation) to choose goals and to select, enact, and sustain actions across time towards those goals.” Among the many executive functions we – educators, parents, teachers — assume our adolescents to have mastered are:
taking initiative and having consistent, self -disciplined study habits;
being able to organize and manage their materials, time and their physical spaces,
particularly in the face of relentless and competing demands they experience every day;
being able to identify, understand, regulate and cope effectively with their own emotions;
controlling and/or inhibiting their impulses;
directing and sustaining their attention effectively;
thinking flexibly, particularly with regard to problem-solving from different perspectives;
setting and follow through on priorities; assessing and monitoring progress, and changing tactics or making “course corrections” as needed.
Variations in Executive Function Skills Development are Poorly Understood
Throughout his book, Delman correctly points out that in the same way that physical development varies normally among children and adolescents, so does the development of executive functioning skills.
As Delman points out, “Unfortunately, unlike someone’s physical growth, executive function weaknesses are poorly understood, so these kids often get labeled as ‘lazy’ or ‘oppositional’ instead of overtaxed, under-supported and discouraged.”
Like Physical Development, Kids Develop Executive Functioning Abilities Differently
I share an example from my own early adolescence to help make this case. When I was in the ninth grade, I was about 5’2” and weighed about 100 pounds. My friend George was about 5’8” and weighed about 165 pounds. Additionally, he could grow a full beard and played fullback for our school’s varsity football team. Although I was older than George by few months, he was physically much more developed than I was. I don’t think there is a physical education teacher or an athletic coach in any school, anywhere, who have would pitted George against me in an athletic contest for a grade … as I would have failed every single time. However, middle and high school teachers almost everywhere compare, evaluate, and grade their students with respect to their still-developing – or in many cases, their not-yet- developed – executive functioning capacities.
Too frequently, students whose executive skills are still developing get marginalized, if not pathologized, for not yet having learned to effectively inhibit, plan, organize, prioritize, initiate and otherwise self–regulate their thoughts, feelings and actions … through no fault of their own!
Over the past twelve years, Michael Delman’s work and mission has been to coach these executive skills to empower children and adolescents with these essential tools – specific skills they can be taught and can practice – gradually and over time, in the same way that a piano teacher would teach children and adolescents to practice and play. No one learns to play the piano in just a few lessons: it takes years of study and practice to master that musical instrument or to learn any analogous skill. Similarly, no one learns to “inhibit, plan, organize, prioritize, initiate and otherwise self–regulate their thoughts, feelings and actions” quickly, especially if teachers and parents make the faulty assumption that students know these skills intuitively, and therefore, don’t teach or coach these still-developing students how to “execute” these skills in the first place! I had the opportunity to interview Michael Delman about his new book and his work with Beyond BookSmart. What follows are excerpts and summaries of our conversation. Q: Why are executive functioning skills in such high demand, and how is Beyond BookSmart working to meet that demand?A: Delman described three basic trends that he has observed over the past several years, trends that combine on a regular basis and interfere with students’ abilities to both develop and reinforce effective executive functioning skills:
We expect more of younger children. “We are absolutely and indisputably expecting more of kids at younger and younger ages. In many schools, this isn’t just an ‘executive functions’ issue, this is also a curriculum issue. For example, Algebra I used to be a 9th grade math class, but now it is considered an 8th — or even 7th — grade class and in some schools, algebra is a 6th grade class. This is just one example of the increased academic curricular demands that we’ve seen over time in our work with kids.
Tension between teacher beliefs and teacher wishes. “Teachers feel trapped trying to serve two masters: on one hand, wellness and the best health interest of their students and, on the other hand, wanting their students to be able to keep up academically. What we see is that teachers tend to assign a lot of work, but they don’t always teach students how to actually do it. In situations like this, we frequently see a mismatch between students’ developmental readiness, and the executive functioning expectations they face every day.”
Increasing, omnipresent distractions in daily life. “Students are caught in a world of distractions that are omnipresent … distractions that encourage multitasking, which further impedes their executive function development. It’s not just more distractions; it’s better distractions. For example, at the end of a Netflix show, the TV typically shows a countdown before the next episode is about to start. This clever technological ‘distraction’ makes it much harder for child and adolescent viewers to turn the TV off and NOT watch the next episode.”
Teachers Need Training in Executive Function Coaching
Q: In light of these trends, what does this mean for effective executive skill development and coaching for our students? In the absence of effective teaching and coaching of executive function skills, how are students expected to learn them?A: “Teachers need to either lower their expectations about students’ executive functioning or make their expectations more realistic. Teachers also need their own training to be more effective instructors … or coaches … on how students can meet these increased curricular and executive expectations. From our many years of experience, one- or two-day executive function training programs for teachers are totally inadequate. Just as students need to learn and practice these skills … gradually and over time … so, too, do teachers need to learn and practice integrating the instruction of these skills into their own academic subjects. For this to happen, they need ongoing executive function training themselves in order to learn how to integrate these ‘how to’ instructions with how they already teach math, history, English, or science.”
Executive Function Development Varies Just as Physical Development Varies
With this in mind, we return to the developmental readiness issue, which I’ve written about before, as THAT is still primary. Schools and educators – including those such as Delman’s Beyond BookSmart – must realize that students’ actual development and mastery of these skills will naturally vary.
There is normal development variation in EVERY aspect of a child or adolescent: height, weight, physical coordination, academic motivation, and learning. So, of course, there is variation in their learning and eventually mastering of essential executive function skills, skills that neuroscience reveals do not fully develop until the late 20s or early 30s.
To be sure, all schools – and coaching agencies – need to recognize students’ natural, biologically-determined developmental trajectories. They must support and nurture their students’ developing capabilities without overwhelming them (as we, as well-intentioned adults, have been doing for years). Finally, we must instruct and coach these specific skills (as a piano teacher would teach students how to play that instrument). Keep in mind, though, that ALL piano teachers, ballet instructors, athletic coaches, as well as math, English, and history teachers know that even with their most effective teaching, instructing, and coaching, ALL students develop – and sometimes master these skills at DIFFERENT times, at DIFFERENT rate,s and in very DIFFERENT ways — in ways that, most likely, are in sync with each student’s unique neurodevelopmental trajectories!
High School Students’ Executive Function Skills in Face of Parkland Tragedy
In light of the recent school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, I would feel remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that small group of frustrated, infuriated, but very inspired adolescents actually ARE exhibiting tremendous executive functioning skills in the wake of the tragedy.
They have mobilized hundreds of other teens to rally in Tallahassee in demand of safer schools;
They have directly and outspokenly confronted government officials – including at the White House – to challenge the NRA;
They have inspired and organized a “March For Our Lives” in Washington and other cities, which as of now, is expected to be attended by over 500,000 participants.
In just a few weeks after the massacre at their own high school, this dynamic group of teenagers has rallied thousands of other teenagers and scores of adults, uniting others from around the country and around the world, in their mutual demand for reformed gun laws and safer schools.
In very striking ways, these “kids” have promoted more political activism and have ignited more political advocacy than many of the politicians who represent them. Without a doubt, this seems like another clear example of Margaret Mead’s famous quote: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that even has.”
How do we understand this? To be sure, words like “mobilizing,” “confronting,” “inspiring” and “organizing” seem to indicate that these kids have developed tremendous executive functioning abilities. Could this movement reflect a massive, collective “limbic system reaction” of these united adolescents … such that when they are emotionally charged and motivated enough, they are more capable of “executing” in these powerful ways? We have to ask: Why are these kids so “executively competent” when neuroscience suggests that they haven’t actually developed these skills? What can we adults learn from these kids? In a recent Slate article, Dahlia Lithwick details several aspects of these students’ educational experiences to date that seem to have prepared them for this very purpose. I will be thinking more about these compelling observations and sharing my thoughts in future blog posts. I invite your thoughts and opinions about why you think this small group of adolescents from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School is demonstrating such extraordinary executive functioning competence? Please share your thoughts in comments below.
This is the first of two posts devoted to executive skills in adolescents. In this first post, I focus on the role of executive functions and associated brain development – particularly as these functions/skills pertain to early adolescents enrolled in highly competitive schools – and the dangerous assumptions many educators and parents make about adolescents’ actual executive capacities in these ultra-competitive environments.
In my TEDx Talk, “Are We Overwhelming Our Students??”, I detailed ways in which high school students are over-scheduled, over-pressured, and over-worked. One of the pressures I highlighted was what I consider a “psychological overuse injury” that adults unintentionally inflict on adolescents. Or, as a senior administrator at a prominent independent school articulated this unrealistic and all-too-common expectation, “We expect our students to think like adults and to act like adults before they have actually developed those skill sets.”
In this blog post, I want to explore what ‘adultness’ we are asking of adolescents.
In my experience as an educator and psychologist, the most common adult-like functioning that we’re asking of most adolescents is based on the faulty assumption that their executive function capacities have fully developed. Brain science tells us otherwise.
Most Teens’ Brains Haven’t Developed Executive Function Abilities
One of the most important discoveries for educators and parents to understand and respect is that the human cortex develops from back to front, meaning that skills and abilities found in the frontal cortex – like executive function – develop later in life.
This discovery was first observed in a series of postmortem analyses carried out by pediatric neurologist, Dr. Peter Huttenlocher at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine the 1970s and 1980s. From his research, Dr. Huttenlocher “demonstrated that the frontal cortex is the latest brain region to develop in the human brain. [He] collected numerous postmortem brains from children, adolescents and adults, and found that the frontal cortex was remarkably different in the brains of pre-pubescent children and post-pubescent adolescents.”
Subsequently, psychiatrist Dr. Jay Giedd of the National Institute of Mental Health, using time lapsed photography of MRI scans of the brains of 52 developing children, produced a short video that showed the “ebb and flow of gray matter from ages five to twenty years.”
Remarkably, these MRI scans demonstrated and reinforced what Dr. Huttenlocher had observed many years earlier in his postmortem analyses. Giedd’s research more definitively claimed that brain regions most responsible for “more advanced functions — integrating information from the senses, reasoning, and other ‘executive’ functions (prefrontal cortex) — mature last.”
Giedd’s subsequent research established definitively that the prefrontal cortex — the region of the brain most involved with the development of executive skills — doesn’t fully develop until the late 20s or early 30s.
Isn’t it ironic that those executive skills we think all early adolescent students need first to be successful in school are the very ones that develop last?! We might – and should – ask ourselves: why aren’t all secondary schools teaching and/or coaching these essential skills to all their students?
Unrealistic Expectations and Pressures Can Have Dangerous Impact on Teens
You may be asking, “Why is teaching executive functions to early adolescents so important?” The answer lies in the neurobiological reality that when adolescents are expected to function as if they had developed these skills, then these students are being set up for failure. As a result, many of these teenagers experience crippling anxiety and depression, which often manifest in dangerous emotional conditions: substance abuse, eating disorders, sleep deprivation, cutting and other forms of self-injury, and too often, suicide.
As my friend and colleague, Professor Robert Kegan, has described, since adolescents develop physically in ways that resemble grown adults, and since adolescents also begin to speak and move with the sophistication we associate more with adults than with children, it is all too common for adults to be misled by adolescents’ adult-like appearance and composure, and to then treat those adolescents as if theywere adults.
However, Kegan warns in The Evolving Self, “If adults mistake [adolescents’] physiology and/or [their] verbal ability for [their] psychological age, and then expect those adolescents to function as if they’re actually young adults, then it’s the adults who create a situation which is dangerous for both themselves and for the developmentally delayed teenager.” As Kegan asserts, “The cost to a person of being unseen, of being seen as the person-one-might-become rather than the person-one-is, is a bewildering experience of being unfairly demanded of.”
Competitive Schools Can Be Environments for Psychological Overuse Injuries
Increasingly, in highly competitive schools, too many students are “being unseen” for who they actually are, and instead, are being seen as “persons-they-might-become.” Indeed, adolescents being “expected to think [and] act like adults before they have actually developed those skill sets” creates that “bewildering experience of being unfairly demanded of.” This is when students feel helpless, become anxious and depressed, and too frequently, suffer serious mental health crises.
To reinforce this psychological “set up” from a physical and medical perspective, consider the frequency with which highly competitive young athletes experience injuries to their bones’ growth plates because of too much training and not enough rest. The American Academy of Pediatrics has found that up to half of injuries seen in pediatric sports medicine are related to overuse.
Pediatric orthopedic surgeon Dr. Elizabeth Szalay explains“As adults, we can work ourselves to a higher level of performance – add miles or add pounds lifted. But in children, there is a finite point, which can’t be exceeded without damaging the growth plate, and there’s no way to get around that… Kids’ growing bones simply can’t endure the stress that adult bones can. This is when it becomes important for parents to keep their perspective”
Let’s Talk About the Impact of Psychological Overuse Injuries
What does this understanding of physical overuse injuries mean for how we think about adolescent mental and emotional health?
Just as the pediatric muscular skeletal system can’t train in the same way as an adult body, a child’s or adolescent’s neurological system can’t think and act in the same way as adult’s.
In all of my work, I promote what I have termed “developmental empathy,” an approach to teaching, coaching, advising, and parenting children and adolescents in ways that are more carefully aligned with their developmental integrity, in ways that are utterly respectful of children’s and adolescents’ still-developing brains.
From this perspective of developmental empathy, it is simply irresponsible – if not negligent – for educators and parents to do anything else but to commit to educating and parenting children and adolescents accordingly.
In my next post, I’ll explore these themes further and share insights from my recent interview with Michael Delman, Founder, and CEO of Beyond BookSmart, a company that teaches and provides coaching in executive function skills to children, adolescents, and even to young-adult college students.
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to present to the faculty of a local independent school on the topic of the developing adolescent brain. Specifically, they were interested in how they could apply the findings of “The Heart of the Matter: The Adolescent Brain,” chapter five in my book, At What Cost: Defending Adolescent Development in Fiercely Competitive Schools.
Since the school had recently engaged a different speaker who had focused on the intense and competing pressures on students – and since several of this school’s administrators had read my book – they were eager to “home in” on the five recent neurobiological discoveries which I detail in that chapter. These discoveries provide indisputable, authoritative reasons for why any school faculty should strive to be more “developmentally empathic” in its overall approaches to educating their students.
What I want to share with you here is how, during the course of an afternoon, these educators were able to move from the broad topic of the adolescent brain to concrete ideas about how they could introduce changes that would truly embrace developmental empathy into their school environment.
Five Neurobiological Discoveries of Brain Development
Here’s how it unfolded. In my opening presentation, I reviewed the following five neurological discoveries of brain development in adolescents:
Back to Front Development: The human cortex develops from back-to-front. The prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain most involved with the development of executive functioning skills – does not develop fully until a person reaches their late 20s or even early 30s.
Limbic System and Prefrontal Cortex – Uneven Development: The brain’s limbic structures (amygdala, hippocampus, etc.) that are responsible for processing and expressing emotions come “online” with full force in the early stages of puberty, long before the prefrontal cortex has the capacity to fully regulate the intensity of the limbic-generated emotions.
Neuroplasticity: “Neurons that Fire Together, Wire Together:” The brain is “plastic” or pliable; it matures mostly by becoming more connected (white matter), not larger (grey matter) from puberty onward. These neuronal connections are totally dependent on the environments in which they exist or function.
Environment Shapes the Brain: Interactions between genes and environment shape human development. Early experiences determine both how genes are “turned on and off” and whether or not some genes are even expressed at all. Healthy brain development depends on both how much and when certain genes are activated within the environment to do certain tasks. Essentially, experiences leave chemical signatures (epigenetic markers) that determine whether and how genes are expressed.
Adolescence is a Developmental Sensitive Period for the Brain: Adolescence is a developmental window of time within which the effects of environmental stimulation – or lack of it – on brain structure and function are maximized because so much brain maturation and development is occurring so rapidly and simultaneously.
With this foundational knowledge about the adolescent brain, the participants assembled in groups around circular tables and worked together to respond to the following question.
“In light of the constant and unrealistic pressures that so many students are experiencing, within your school’s already-sensitive and intentional educational environment, what other ideas/suggestions/changes can you IMAGINE as possible ways of becoming a more developmentally empathic school?”
Social-Emotional Functioning
Teach social-emotional learning for students in ALL grades
Schedule more free time for students
Facilitate students’ connecting with each other in meaningful ways
Encourage parent education about these neurobiological issues and collaborate with parents about empathic changes for kids\
Academic Work Load
Reduce the amount of homework we assign: be sure homework reinforces learning and is not homework for the sake of homework
Review our assumptions about end-of-term assessments. Do we really need them? They put A LOT of pressure on kids.
Revise our schedule: it is too packed … daily, nightly, and weekly!
Reconsider our testing and assessment policies for all age groups.
Prioritize what we really value!
Remove numerical grades. Imagine NO grades!
Age-Appropriate Expectations
Review our age and grade level expectations. Are they developmentally appropriate?
Align our expectations with kids’ development. We are grading many kids on expectations they can’t meet!
Integrate appropriate study skills instruction within all academic areas for all grades
In summarizing their focused work on these issues, one faculty member stated, “We need to be brave enough to go against the norm … as educators, parents, and as an entire institution.”
To me, the four most important take-aways from this afternoon session – which sparked the creation of this blog post – are the following:
The members of this entire school’s faculty and administration were eager to learn about the five recent neurodevelopmental discoveries. They were eager for this kind of professional development in their collective effort to become a more developmentally sensitive and empathic school.
After about a 90-mintute presentation of these five neurodevelopmental discoveries, these faculty members and administrators assembled into working groups and responded to the question (above) that challenged them to “imagine possible ways of becoming a more developmentally empathic school.” That is, they were eager to segue from a broad, scientific presentation to a focused discussion on its implications.
In less than an hour, this group of about 75 committed teachers and administrators generated a long list of very specific possible ways of becoming a more developmentally empathic school.
The speed with which they worked and the specificity of their suggestions speaks volumes of their underlying and collective desire to be as “developmentally empathic” as possible.
I applaud this school – and others with whom I have conducted similar workshops – for their focused and deliberate efforts to understand the developmental integrity of the students they teach, and then, to teach to these students accordingly, in ways that are deeply respectful of their students’ actual developmental capacities.
At the end of my work with this motivated group of faculty members and administrators, I reminded them of Margaret Mead’s famous quotation: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
One of the constant concerns I hear from faculty members, administrators, counselors, and parents of adolescents from all around the world is “We expect them to think and act like adults.” This expectation arises not simply because so many of today’s adolescents, for various reasons, appear physically mature; it’s also because we, adults, assume that in their school lives, adolescent students are fully capable of appropriate “executive skills” in their school work, in their social lives, and in how they cope with the multiple and competing demands we place upon them.
We assume that adolescents are able to manage their time, prioritize homework, juggle athletic practices and community service with regular sleeping and eating, manage their social lives, and their online lives – and somehow, get straight A’s.
But these so-called “executive skills” are part and parcel of a host of neurological capacities that, generally, are not fully developed until humans are 30 years old! What are we missing here?
Expecting Executive Functioning Before Kids’ Brains Have Developed
Thanks to the wonders of neuroimaging, we have learned much about the developing human brain, particularly about how self-regulating executive functions, manifest in the expectations noted above, originate and develop over time.
Executive functions, officially, refer to a host of cognitive processes required to plan and direct various activities, to manage our time and materials effectively, to initiate and follow-through with tasks and expectations, to engage and sustain working memory, to maintain consistent and sustained attention, to inhibit impulses, to understand and regulate our emotions, and to engage in effective goal-directed behavior.
To be sure, these executive skills are needed by all people, at all ages, and in varying degrees, according to the demands of the environments in which they function.
The problem I’m addressing here is that, once again, we – that is, adults — demand these fully-formed executive skills of our kids too early, and we often denigrate the students who don’t “measure up.”
“Schools expect more independent application of previously learned skills, including improved time management, sustained attention to tasks, and self-regulation of behavior. In fact, consistent with this assumption, adults believe that as students age and progress through school, providing continued support may be a disservice to the student, undermining the development of independence and self-management, and creating a roadblock on their path to adulthood. How often have we heard from parents, teachers, and school administrators that students need to be more responsible, self-motivated and independent, and that if we support them or modify tasks they are expected to do, they will not learn to sufficiently manage on their own and will not be prepared for the next level of school development? Such supports are sometimes derogatively referred to as ‘babying’ or ‘enabling the student,’ or as ‘dumbing down’ the task.”
To be blunt, we insult our kids for being…kids.
Academic Transitions are Particularly Perilous Times
Alarmingly, Dawson and Guare highlight what has become a developing trend of “a naturally occurring drop-off in adult and institutional supports” as students leave the lower grades and progress into their middle and high school years.
Significantly, many students are particularly vulnerable during these times of transition – progressing from one grade to the next, and most commonly, moving from one school to another. It is at these times that the presumably learned executive skills, which may have been effective in their previous environment, might not be sufficient to manage the increased demands of their next environment. This means that if we are assuming that the “executive skills” are up and running, and then – as a consequence of these transitions – these presumably learned skills falter, we are (still) blaming our kids for being kids.
Dawson and Guare identify the potential pitfalls of adult assumptions around academic transitions and have strong recommendations:
“We urge school personnel and parents who are involved with students during these transition times to avoid the assumption that because a student moves up a grade [or moves to a new school], that a drop in [her or his academic] performance must be related only to increased demands and more difficult content to which the student will adjust in time. While some of this may be true, these performance problems often relate to greater demands on executive skills that, until now, have not been sufficiently taxed.”
“This is especially true when students move from elementary to middle school, from middle to high school, and from high school to college, where executive skill demands are greatly increased and where teachers often attribute students’ drop in performance to the necessary learning curve, and therefore, to be expected, or to a student’s lack of motivation or responsibility, given the demand for increased effort.”
Since too many schools have worked on the assumption that the least amount of support necessary is useful to help students achieve successfully – and then phase down these supports so the students will gradually internalize them – Dawson and Guare highly recommend:
“Services rarely, if ever, [should] be discontinued across the change of environments (e.g., one year to another, one school to another) since such a discontinuation assumes that the students have sufficiently mastered the skills to transfer to environments with new and unknown demands.”
Given what neuroimaging has recently revealed about the developing human brain, these adults’ assumptions are both flawed and misleading.
Scans Show Executive Functioning Develops Well After Adolescence
Most importantly, this aforementioned “trend of a naturally occurring drop-off in adult and institutional supports [for continued instruction and coaching of executive skills development] as students leave the lower grades and progress into their middle and high school years” stands as a blatant contradiction to what neuroscience has shown, unequivocally, over the past 10 to 20 years.
Specifically, psychiatrist Dr. Jay Giedd of the National Institute of Mental Health, using time-lapsed photography of MRI scans of the brains of 52 developing children, each of whom was scanned four times over a 15-year period, produced a six-second video that showed the ebb and flow of gray matter from ages five to 20 years. These MRI scans not only reinforced but demonstrated, in real, time-lapsed images of living human brains, what researchers had observed many years earlier in postmortem studies in the 1970s and 1980s.
Giedd’s longitudinal research more definitively showed that the first areas of the human brain to mature are those with the most basic functions, such as processing the senses and movement, followed by the areas involved in spatial orientation and language development.
Further, Giedd’s research also showed that the brain areas responsible for more advanced cognitive processes – integrating information from the senses, abstract reasoning and judgment, and other “executive functions” (the prefrontal cortex) mature last – and not fully until the late twenties or early thirties.
As I asked in my book, At What Cost?, isn’t it ironic that the neurocognitive executive skills that, for most people, develop last are the very ones that all new students need first to make a successful transition to high school, particularly to the most rigorous and high achieving schools?
In light of these indisputable findings, why would any school decide either to discontinue or to not even offer instruction and coaching of these executive skills for their still-developing early adolescents, particularly during their times of transition?
