iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

“A boy at my table made fun of me during math today,” my second-grader told me one evening after bedtime. Worries tend to spill out after lights out.

“He said, ‘What?! You are still working on that packet? I finished that yesterday.’ ”

Swallowing my fierce first reaction, I said, “Oh, so how did you handle it?”

“I told him, ‘I like my learning pace. Your fast pace doesn’t work for me. I take my time.’ ”

I was stunned by her courage and her practical insight: speeding through the material is not the path to academic mastery.

In my work as an education journalist, I often take research about learning and the brain and translate it into usable chunks of information for parents and teachers. But this fall, I took on a personal challenge. Could I teach my 8-year-old about how the brain learns? And could this knowledge help her strengthen her academic confidence and agility?

“[Adolescence is] a stage of life when we can really thrive, but we need to take advantage of the opportunity,” said Temple University neuroscientist Laurence Steinberg at a Learning and the Brain conference in Boston. Steinberg has spent his career studying how the adolescent brain develops and believes there is a fundamental disconnect between the popular characterizations of adolescents and what’s really going on in their brains.

Because the brain is still developing during adolescence, it has incredible plasticity. It’s akin to the first five years of life, when a child’s brain is growing and developing new pathways all the time in response to experiences. Adult brains are somewhat plastic as well -- otherwise they wouldn’t be able to learn new things -- but “brain plasticity in adulthood involves minor changes to existing circuits, not the wholesale development of new ones or elimination of others,” Steinberg said.

Adolescence is the last time in a person’s life that the brain can be so dramatically overhauled.