"Marvel" at the neuroscientific reasons why smart teens make dumb decisions! "Behold" the mind-controlling power of executive function! "Thrill" to a vision of a better school for the teenage brain! Whether you're a parent interacting with one adolescent or a teacher interacting with many, you know teens can be hard…

Effective educators value young adolescents, are prepared to teach them, and are knowledgeable about this age group. Middle level educators' understanding of adolescent brain development and developmentally responsive teaching strategies can help to support all adolescents' cognitive and social-emotional development in school. This article…

Using the water molecule as a metaphor, Marilyn Doerr presents a study of a Montessori high school that combines the elements of Montessori with International Baccalaureate (IB) and other institutions in the surrounding community that enrich the experience of the students. The pedagogy of the high school, she explains, must be based on an…

Changes in their brains, combined with a greater awareness of peers and events around them, make adolescence a key time for students to figure out who they are, what they aspire to be, and what they want to do in the world. This Alliance for Excellent Education report explores how human identity and self-regulation develop during adolescence and…

Declining academic performance, along with a growing apathy of students toward the value of education, demonstrates that students in the United States public education system do not recognize the value of a positive experience in middle schools. A plethora of research and writing has been done on elementary schools and secondary schools, but…

Middle school students are walking dichotomies. They can talk about world peace and then hit the kid next to them. They can recycle to ease global warming only to leave the cafeteria a mess. Why? Well, scientifically, it is because their brains do not work. When people look at middle school students, they can plainly see evidence of physical…

While you don't need to be a scientist to understand brain-compatible teaching, you'll be far more effective when you base your teaching practices on the very best scientific information. This expanded and updated ASCD best-seller delivers that essential information in clear, everyday language that any teacher can immediately incorporate into…

"Educational Theories, Cultures and Learning" focuses on how education is understood in different cultures, the theories and related assumptions we make about learners and students and how we think about them, and how we can understand the principle actors in education--learners and teachers. Within this volume, internationally renowned…

What does brain-based research say about how adolescents learn? The 1990s was declared as the Decade of the Brain by President Bush and Congress. With the advancement of MRIs (Magnetic Resonance Imagining) and PET (positron emission tomography) scans, it has become much easier to study live healthy brains. As a result, the concept of…