Curriculum Supervisors Study Teenage Brain

High-school teachers might spend every day opening up their students’ minds to new academic concepts, but that doesn’t mean they know exactly what’s going on inside the teenage brain.

The district’s supervisors will try to fill that knowledge gap with an in-house training next school year. Over the summer, they plan to read up on the adolescent development, create a website and prepare a series of workshops that will help teachers integrate the latest scientific findings into their day-to-day lessons.

The curricular experts presented those plans to the Board of Education’s Teaching & Learning Committee Wednesday evening at the district’s headquarters on Meadow Street.

That professional development, they said, will be part of a wider effort to bridge the transition between 8th and 9th grades, along with expanded summer offerings and targeted support for students at the highest risk of falling behind.

In the leap to high school, an unfamiliar environment with new teachers and classmates, too many Elm City students never find their footing. Last school year, 12.9 percent of the freshman class failed a core class, making it unlikely they’ll graduate within four years. That’s down five points from the year before, but supervisors believe they can do even better.

Currently, each high school principal receives a report about who’s joining their next class of freshmen. That might ready the teachers, but it doesn’t prepare the incoming students.

YouthStat, the mayor’s signature initiative to put students in danger of dropping out back on track, will keep a special watch on 80 students headed to one inter-district magnet, High School in the Community, and two comprehensive schools, Wilbur Cross and James Hillhouse. As part of a new Freshman Project that launched this year, students are grouped into ​“houses” of about 10 students each, an intimate setting where they receive three-on-one support from a tutor, a mentor and a ​“house parent.” Jason Bartlett, the city’s youth services director, said he hopes to see students go up by a full letter grade.

Administrators want to spend more time welcoming other students, too. Starting over the summer, they say, could help with the adjustment.

“We have to develop these relationships so that they feel at home when they start,” said Ellen Maust, the performing and visual arts supervisor. ​“That’s why the athletics are so successful, because they do that in the summer.”

Taking a look at their own classrooms — and making sure they’re primed for teenagers to learn — will carry their work throughout the rest of the academic year.

The idea to study the teenage brain began in the English department.

Lynn Brantley, the reading supervisor, reached out to several companies to find someone who could talk about adolescence, then she said she realized, ​“Yale is right in our backyard.”

She reached out to Dylan Gee, an assistant psychology professor who studies normal childhood development and how it can be altered, especially by trauma in early life, to see if she might want to talk to a roomful of public-school teachers. ​“I’m glad you’re even thinking about kids in this way,” Brantley recalls Gee saying. The professor volunteered to do it at no charge.

During two sessions, with about 70 teachers each, Gee spoke about what’s going on inside a teenager’s head, and together, the educators came up with ways to adapt their teaching methods to better fit that reality.

“Now that you know how a teenage brain works, how do you teach to that?” Brantley asked. ​“What does it mean to be able to help kids label emotions, to pull away from confrontation? How does that look in the classroom?

In English classes, for example, teens want options, whether in the books they can read or the projects they can do to demonstrate comprehension, Brantley said.

“You can’t run a curriculum where you are the lead when their minds want to have a choice, want to have a say,” she explained. ​“You want to be more controlling because kids are more apt to push your buttons or boundaries. But being more controlling is just going to make it worse.”

Jessica Haxhi, the foreign language supervisor, is now spearheading an effort to implement the developmental concepts across all subject areas.

This summer, she’ll lead supervisors through their first book study together. They all plan to read ​“The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults,” by Frances Jensen, a University of Pennsylvania neurologist who writes about why teens can be impulsive, stressed, addiction-prone and seemingly irresponsible.

Haxhi said she’s particularly excited that they can work ​“across content areas.” ​“It’s really ideal, because a world-language teacher could work with a P.E. teacher and a social-studies teacher about this,” she said. ​“Because it’s really not about the content, it’s about how we’re teaching the kids.”

The supervisors said they’ll take the highlights and create a professional development course for teachers. For those who want to stay engaged, they also plan to continue the discussion online and at ongoing workshops.

They’ll also study the results at a small elementary school and a large high school, with surveys and classroom observation, to see if the lessons stick.