Developmental Mismatches in our Schools

I'm going to fire this blog back up but will be shifting its orientation.  As a I write my thesis, I have many side-thoughts I would like to flesh out.  Many of them don't have to do with world history.  This blog may become a space for my general pedagogical reflections - a space for me to work out my thoughts (and hopefully to get feedback on them). 

I spent the morning reading a chapter from the truly remarkable Handbook of Adolescent Psychology - basically its an up-to-date (2009) encyclopedic review of the subject.  Because adolescents spend so much time in schools, there is a chapter on how schools influence adolescent development and motivation.  Obviously, schools have a significant influence on a teenagers sense of autonomy, self-esteem, ability to work with others, (including how they view and work with others across demographic lines), etc.  The chapter breaks down what factors in schools influence development, starting from the classroom and moving out from there to the school, district, and then to state policy and the place of school in society.

This chapter expanded my understanding of how to care for teens by pointing out a plethora of developmental mismatches in the way schools are designed.  Many are utterly simple, but I've never considered them.  For example, teenagers need more sleep than kids.  At the same time, the natural sleep cycle of teenagers is shifting to staying up later.  Yet, they are asked to start attending school earlier when they go to middle-school.  I'm guessing this is because adults feel that as kids reach adolescence, they should take on more autonomy and responsibility.

On that note, as kids enter adolescence and go to middle school, they are given more autonomy in the form of attending much larger, less intimate schools, where they spend only one hour a day with their many teachers.  It's as if our society has equated autonomy with having less support and intimacy.  The middle school structure being so much less supportive and intimate is so normal that I didn't realize what an obvious developmental mismatch this was - but if I hadn't been through it myself, and had some distance from the system, I think the mismatch would stand out starkly.  We've set up a system where kids get deprived of close adult relationships - of teachers who know them inside and out, who can give them life advice, who understand their learning needs - right at that developmental moment when kids need it most.  As the Handbook of Adolescent Development puts it, in middle school it becomes

      "...very difficult for students to form a close relationship with any school-affiliated adult precisely at the point in development when there is a great need for guidance and support from non-familial adults.  Such changes in student-teacher relationships are also likely to undermine the sense of community and trust between students and teachers, leading to a lowered sense of efficacy among the teachers, an increased reliance on authoritarian control practices by the teachers, and an increased sense of alienation among the students".  (p.420)

Clearly, teens should be given more autonomy and responsibility - that's what is developmentally appropriate.  A teen who is not given autonomy, responsibility, and meaningful tasks is a teen who will likely disengage and dis-identify with school (as I remember rather vividly from my own experience). Teens need autonomy with support, autonomy with guidance and care.  I hope to post more about teaching practices that counteract these developmental mismatches and support healthy autonomy in the near future.