The vision for educational innovation described by Jal Mehta accords nicely with new research on youth brain development. This research also provides some clues as to why the grammar of schooling matters so much for young people’s intellectual and personal growth, and about the conditions needed in schools to achieve the outcomes he describes.
Our schools tend to be preoccupied with what kids know and can do. However, it seems to be how kids think and feel — their dispositions of mind and heart — that have the strongest effects on their learning, civic engagement, personal well-being, and even brain development, as my research team and I are finding from a rigorous study of a diverse group of 65 young people (beginning when they were 9th and 10th graders and continuing over five to six years).
We began by asking each participant to watch and discuss with us over two hours a set of documentary videos that tell compelling stories about challenges faced by real teens from around the world (such as, for example, Malala Yousafzai, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for her advocacy on behalf of human rights and girls’ educational opportunities in Pakistan). This private interview was videotaped and teens were encouraged to feel comfortable explaining their genuine feelings about each story. Next, participants underwent brain scanning while they watched and thought about these stories again and pressed buttons to tell us how emotionally engaged they were as they thought about each story. We took additional scans of the participants’ brain activity while they were just resting and thinking about whatever they’d like, as well as images capturing their brain’s anatomical development. Finally, we interviewed each participant for roughly an hour more about their own hopes and dreams, their academic interests and goals, their friendships and family relationships, and pressing community issues (such as incidents of crime or violence that they knew about, and their ideas for why they happened and what might help). Two years later, when they were in 11th or 12th grade, we conducted IQ and other standardized testing and repeated the interviews and neuroimaging. We followed up with these young people twice more with questionnaires and phone conversations as they transitioned to young adulthood.
Our initial findings were interesting: All of the participants demonstrated empathy and direct engagement with the specifics of the videos and interview topics (for example, relating that they feel sad or happy for the teen in the story, or describing what they think that teen should have done differently). However, the more empathy and engagement they demonstrated, the more they reported getting along well in their daily lives — having diverse friends, not getting into trouble, and so on (Gotlieb et al., 2022 in press), and the more activity we saw in their brain scans as they watched and thought about the documentary stories (Gotlieb et al., 2021a).
Even more striking, all participants also went beyond brief empathetic reactions to become emotionally involved in discussing the bigger issues and values at stake in the stories, including the personal lessons they could draw from others’ perspectives and situations, and the questions they had about why these things happened and how to help. These deeper reflections predicted specific patterns of brain activity in networks associated with executive control and reflective thinking, and especially so when the participant reported feeling strongly emotionally engaged with the story (Gotlieb et al., 2021a).
Our final set of findings was truly astounding: The more the participants spontaneously engaged in thinking about the big issues and personal lessons they could take from the stories — what we are calling a “transcendent” disposition of mind — the more they grew their brains over the next two years (and we saw this regardless of IQ and socioeconomic status). In particular, key brain networks associated with executive control, reflective thinking, emotion, and memory became more strongly connected to each other over time. This result was apparent even when participants were just daydreaming in the scanner. The structural thickness of key brain regions, and the “wiring” between these regions, also showed effects (Immordino-Yang & Knecht, 2020).
These effects in the brain were linked to all sorts of important outcomes for the participants
(Immordino-Yang et al., in preparation). The more a participant had been inclined to think about the big issues, and the more that participant’s brain had changed across the two years, the more positive was that participant’s description, when they reached young adulthood, of how much they like themselves, enjoy their close relationships, and have a strong sense of who they are and what they stand for. These patterns of brain growth also predict participants’ enjoyment of school and belief that working hard at school is important to their future (Immordino-Yang et al., in preparation). Critically, as above, these findings held true regardless of participants’ IQ scores and socio-economic status, suggesting that they reveal something fundamental about how adolescents’ proclivities to think and feel deeply may grow their brains and minds in beneficial directions over time.
What does this mean for schools?
When we set up this giant gamble of an experiment, we believed that participants would show us not only what they can do, but, more importantly, what they actually do — and what goes on in their brains — when given opportunities to engage with the sort of complex, potentially fraught, curiosity-provoking and highly relevant content that we showed them in the documentaries and discussed from their lived experiences.
As they go about their daily lives, how inclined are young people to think deeply about what they are seeing, learning and experiencing? Much as one’s physical fitness improves when one adopts healthy eating and exercise habits (no matter one’s talent in sports), our data suggest that young people’s development and learning depend less on their starting point than on their inclination to think and feel deeply about complex issues, to build personally relevant connections, and to find purpose and inspiration in their lives (Gotlieb et al., 2022). In the end, our findings underscore the active role youth play in their own brain development as they make meaning of the social world. They also underscore the need for support, safe spaces, and rich opportunities to cultivate these dispositions in school (Riveros & Immordino-Yang, 2021). The networks in the brain that are associated with these beneficial outcomes are activated during deep, emotionally engaged reflections and conversations, but are deactivated during the kinds of fast-paced and often impersonal activities that are the staple of many classrooms, testing experiences, and digital learning games (Immordino-Yang, 2016).
The question is, how can our schools, and the profession of teaching itself, be reworked to provide the conditions and opportunities that encourage such dispositions in students (and, for that matter, in teachers)? Enacting the progressive structures, practices, and relationships that Mehta reviews would go a long way toward this goal.
References
Gotlieb, R., Yang, X-F., & Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2022, in press). Concrete and abstract dimensions of diverse adolescents’ social-emotional meaning-making, and associations with broader functioning. Journal of Adolescent Research.
Gotlieb, R., Yang, X.-F. & Immordino-Yang, M. H. (2021a). Default and executive networks’ roles in diverse adolescents’ emotionally engaged construals of complex social issues. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2016). Emotion, sociality, and the brain’s default mode network: Insights for educational practice and policy. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 3(2), 211-219.
Immordino-Yang, M.H. & Knecht, D.R. (2020) Building meaning builds teens’ brains. Educational Leadership, 77 (8), 36-43.
Immordino-Yang, M.H., Gotlieb, R., Yang, X.-F. (in preparation) Beyond IQ, diverse adolescents’ transcendent thinking predicts brain development and young adult outcomes.
Riveros, R. & Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2021). Toward a neuropsychology of spiritual development in adolescence. Adolescent Research Review, 6 (3), 323-332.
This article is an invited response to “Toward a new grammar of schooling” by Jal Mehta, part of Kappan‘s Reimagining American Education: Possible Futures series, sponsored by the Spencer Foundation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang is the Fahmy and Donna Attallah Professor of Humanistic Psychology; professor of education, psychology, and neuroscience; and director of the USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning, and Education at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
