Learners in Context Class: For Assessment: Child/Adolescent Development

tell about what you know about child/adolescent development. This can be from a practical perspective or even what you have experienced in your family.  Also, describe how your current knowledge of development informs your philosophy of instruction.

To be perfectly frank, I don't know all that much about childhood development - I've never taken any classes that cover such material. What little I do know, I know from personal experience in the classroom, and from the reading for this blog post. Since my intent is to teach high school, I will focus on how that limited experience and knowledge applies to adolescent development in this post.

Teenagers are weird and confused little humans. Their bodies are changing, and therefore so are their thought processes. Freshmen in high school tend to be less mature in every sense of the word, and much less serious in their academic study - my (admittedly limited) understanding is that they can't quite handle academic rigor yet, because they're too busy figuring out the physical stuff. Other high school teachers have told me there is an enormous jump in maturity from freshman to sophomore students.

Attention span is also tied to development - it increases as a child ages, and tops out at about 10 minutes for most individuals (Medina). And yet, classes are usually at least 45 minutes long. What this means, as Medina points out in this week's reading, is that teachers have to cleverly bust up their lessons into digestible 10 minute sections, so that they maximize their students' attention spans. Fortunately, these every-10-minute breaks lend themselves to review and question sessions, which (hopefully) reinforce learning instead of causing attention to wander.

The Medina reading also reminded me that repetition is a key and useful tool in the classroom - repetition leads to remembering! I tend, when teaching, to use repetition to emphasize and to reinforce concepts. Since most of my teaching experience is in a karate classroom, that means having students do techniques in drills until they can do the drills in their sleep. In my limited academic teaching experience, it means teaching something, and then having students write it in their own words - so that the students repeat what they learned, but in language that both is easier for them to process, and gives them some ownership of their new knowledge.

Medina's chapter on sleep is also fascinating, and strongly relates to child/adolescent development. It's common knowledge that teens need about 9-11 hours of sleep per night. But we load our students up with so much homework, and start the school day so early in the morning, that kids often can't get enough sleep *and* finish their mountain of homework. So I wonder how we, as future teachers, can manage this conundrum - do we give less homework, knowing that would cater to kids' sleep needs and attention spans, but would lessen the repetition they'd get that would reinforce learning and remembering? Or do we pile on homework assignments, and hope that kids will do what they can or what they feel they most need to do?


**Note: I leaned very heavily on the Medina reading here. I'm having technical issues with Kindle, which is preventing me from accessing the other textbook - that should be resolved by tomorrow.