Brain-Friendly Practices vs. Traditional School Policies

Traditional School Policies and Their Drawbacks:

• Zero-tolerance discipline policy: Doesn’t give adolescents the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and make better choices next time.
• Emotionally flat classroom climate: Ignores or suppresses the youthful exuberance of the limbic system, thus inhibiting potential positive linkages between the emotional brain and the prefrontal cortex.
• Ban on social media apps in the classroom: Limits a potentially useful medium through which peers can learn from one another.
• More homework, tougher requirements, and a longer school day: Creates stress that can impair mental and physical health at a time when the adolescent is particularly vulnerable to the negative impact of stress.
• Early start time for the school day: Exacerbates adolescent sleep deprivation, which can have brain-altering consequences and contribute to a range of behavior problems.
• Public posting of grades and test scores: Embarrasses students at a time in their lives when they are acutely sensitive to what their peers think of them.
• Locking students into a set program of college-preparatory courses: Prevents adolescents from sampling a variety of potential work and lifestyle choices and choosing elective courses that are interesting to them.
• Requiring students to declare a major or course of study in 9th grade or earlier: Has students make crucial life-altering decisions when their own decision-making capacities are still in the early stages of development.
• Elimination or shortening of recess, physical education programs, and physical activity in the classroom: Contributes to adolescent obesity (thus compounding problems regarding adolescents’ own self-images) and fails to take advantage of the neuroplastic cerebellum’s role in higher-order thinking.
• Teacher-centered, lecture-based, textbook-driven curriculum: Stifles key aspects of adolescent brain development, including the need for peer interaction, self-actualization, decision-making opportunities, creative expression, and emotionally salient learning activities.

Brain-Friendly Alternatives:

1. Opportunities to choose: Helps adolescents make less risky and more sensible decisions in life.
2. Self-awareness activities: Assists adolescents in defining their still-developing sense of identity.
3. Peer learning connections: Capitalizes on adolescents’ preference for hanging out with peers.
4. Affective learning: Integrates the emotional brain (limbic system) with the rational areas of the brain (prefrontal cortex).
5. Learning through the body: Capitalizes on the highly plastic cerebellum by providing physical learning that teaches higher-order skills.
6. Metacognitive strategies: Takes advantage of the adolescent’s emerging capacity for formal operational thinking (“thinking about thinking”).
7. Expressive arts activities: Channels burgeoning adolescent emotional energies into thoughtful and socially appropriate artistic products and processes.
8. Real-world experiences: Gives adolescents an opportunity to practice executive functions under conditions of “hot” cognition.