Making the Most of High School Curriculum

©2008

Making the Most of High School Curriculum

Unit One – Where You Are Right Now - Chapter One Goals and Objectives: •

Define benefits of maximizing the high school experience

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Create a community of interdependent learners

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Generate personal understanding of where students are in their lives

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Set expectations for: • Reading • Class participation/Asking questions • Completing assignments

Reading and Comprehension Checkpoints: These questions are designed to help you facilitate a powerful in-class discussion based on student reading assignments. The answers are included.

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Q: What are some factors discussed in the book that shape the teen experience and lead us on an individual adulthood path?

A: tough environments, hormones and self-absorption

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Q: How does one reach success, as discussed on page 22 of the book?

A: capitalizing on good opportunities, bypassing the “dead spots”, turning around the problematic situations

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Q: What are some of the pressures teens commonly face? Give an example of how one of these pressures has impacted you.

A: academic issues, social issues, responsibilities, fears

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Q: What advantages does high school offer?

A: education, friends, self-discovery

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Making the Most of High School Curriculum

Powerful Coaching Questions for Chapter Review: Use to initiate discussion after the chapter is read and activities from the book are completed.

1. What is one thing you have to offer to your high school?

2. Name one thing you will commit to taking advantage of in high school that will help you in the future.

3. What can you specifically do when the pressures of high school become overwhelming?

4. What do you feel responsible to? Who do you feel responsible to? Why?

Journal Topics: Below are topics from Making the Most of High School to be used for student journaling. The objective here is for the students to write as freely and openly as possible. It is not about punctuation, grammar and style.

1. The text discusses personal environments. Write about your personal environment. What advantages does it offer you? How can you maximize your advantages to make the most out of high school?

2. Examine the hardships your personal environment presents for you. Write about how you might be able to face such hardships and rally support for yourself so that you can create the best possible experience for yourself over the next four years.

3. Write about one action you can take to move beyond where you are now in your life so that you positively influence someone else’s world. Be specific. How can such an action in turn affect you?

4. Write about an aspect of high school that frightens you. Does this fear limit your choices and actions? During this journal activity brainstorm ways you may be able to face and conquer this fear.

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Making the Most of High School Curriculum

EXPLORATORY Activities: These activities can be used for cursory exploration and to expand upon chapter content.

1. Identity Game Benefits: • Class interaction • Discover who inspires students • Learn about world leaders Materials needed: Index cards (or paper), tape Ask students to write down the name of someone who inspires them on a 3 X 5 card. The person must be someone who is well known in society. Collect and shuffle the cards. Tape one card on the back of each student without revealing the name written on it. Students then mingle with one another, asking questions about the person whose name is written on their back, as they try to discover their “identity.”

For example: “Am I a man or a woman?”

“Am I alive now or dead?”

“Am I a politician?”

After the student guesses their identity, he or she may pull the card off of their back. They can continue to answer questions for the other students.

To Further the Learning Pass out the list on Handout #1. Ask students to take home the list and research a few facts about each one of the people. During the next class write these names on separate 3 X 5 cards and tape one card to each student’s back. Now ask them to mingle and ask questions to discover their identity.

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Making the Most of High School Curriculum

2. Interviewing Classmates Benefits: • Class interaction • Team building • Practice interviewing skills • Create self-awareness • Share “Where you are now” Materials needed: Handout #2 Divide class into pairs, grouping students who do not normally spend time with one another. Ask them to interview each other using the questions from Handout #2.

To Further Learning Ask students come in front of the class one at a time and present a few new things that they learned about their partners and about themselves.

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Making the Most of High School Curriculum

RIGOR AND RELEVANCE Activities: These activities encourage students to further explore textbook concepts while facilitating more in-depth classroom discussion.

1. Combating Self-Absorption: Recognizing the Needs of Others Benefits: • Enlarge perspective • Generate compassion • Help students identify Materials needed: Blackboard or large piece of paper Begin this activity by discussing self-absorption.

• What is it?

• How do we engage in it?

• What is detrimental about being self-absorbed?

• How can we fight it?

Create Circles of Compassion on the blackboard, as demonstrated below. The center bulls-eye represents the self, the first ring out represents family, the second ring represents friends, the third ring represents community (school, town, etc), the fourth ring represents country and the final ring represents the world. Ask students to reflect on how they can move away from self-absorption to see the needs of their family (perhaps it is one specific person). Continue this process from ring to ring, having students identify people, places, ideals and world problems that compel them. Perhaps in the “world” ring, they are moved by fighting in Sudan. The objective here is to move them beyond their immediate surroundings to see their family, friends, community and world from a larger perspective.

After students have time to reflect in these areas, ask each to write one thing in every circle. This diagram can then become your classes’ Circles of Compassion and can serve as a great reference point for future discussions.

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Making the Most of High School Curriculum

2. The Teenage Brain: A Work in Progress Benefits: • Understand brain development and function • Exposure to brain research • Practice generating questions from reading materials Materials Needed: Handout #3 Pass out copies of “The Teenage Brain: A Work in Progress” by the National Institute of Mental Health. Students should independently read the article and generate three questions about it. Facilitate a discussion based on the students’ questions.

Other possible questions to initiate discussion: • • • •

Why should teens consider their brains as a work in progress?

What is significant about researchers discovering that there is a second wave of overproduction of gray matter - the thinking part of the brain - just prior to puberty?

What do the striking growth spurts, seen with MRI’s during ages 6 to 13, say about specific types of learning?

What have these MRI studies revealed about how teens process emotions differently than adults? What does this mean to you?

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Making the Most of High School Curriculum

Handout #1 The Identity Game: Famous People

Alhazen (also known as al-Basri) – Persia Crazy Horse – USA, Lakota Erasmus Darwin (Not Charles) – England Galileo Galilei – Italy Genghis Khan – Mongolia Golda Meir – Israel Ida Pfeiffer – Austria Jane Goodall – England Jesse Owens – USA Montezuma – Mexico, Aztec Oum Kalthoum – Egypt Pharaoh Hatshepsut – Ancient Egypt Qiu Jin – China Queen Elizabeth I – England Raden Adjeng Kartini – Indonesia Richard Feynman – USA Sally Ride – USA Simon Bolivar – Latin America Temple Grandin – USA Wernher von Braun – Germany/USA

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Making the Most of High School Curriculum

Handout #2 Interviewing Classmates 1. What is your name?

2. What are your favorite hobbies?

3. What is your favorite movie?

4. What is your favorite book?

5. What is your ethnic background?

6. Tell me a little about your immediate family.

7. Why did you want to come to high school?

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Making the Most of High School Curriculum

8. Why did you not want to come to high school?

9. What were your best subjects in middle school?

10. Have you traveled outside of the U.S.? If not, where would you like to go?

11. Who inspires you the most in your life?

12. What has been the best moment in your life?

13. What has been the worst?

14. What is your greatest dream in life?

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Making the Most of High School Curriculum

Handout #3 The Teenage Brain: A Work in Progress New imaging studies are revealing – for the first time – patterns of brain development that extend into the teenage years. Although scientists don’t know yet what accounts for the observed changes, they may parallel a pruning process that occurs early in life that appears to follow the principle of “use-it-or-lose-it” neural connections, or synapses, that get exercised are retained, while those that don’t are lost. At least, this is what studies of animals’ developing visual systems suggest. While it’s known that both genes and environment play major roles in shaping early brain development, science still has much to learn about the relative influence of experience versus genes on the later maturation of the brain. Animal studies support a role for experience in late development, but no animal species undergoes anything comparable to humans’ protracted childhood and adolescence. Nor is it yet clear whether experience actually creates new neurons and synapses, or merely establishes transitory functional changes. Nonetheless, it’s tempting to interpret the new findings as empowering teens to protect and nurture their brain as a work in progress.

The newfound appreciation of the dynamic nature of the teen brain is emerging from MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) studies that scan a child’s brain every two years, as he or she grows up. Individual brains differ enough that only broad generalizations can be made from comparisons of different individuals at different ages. But following the same brains as they mature allows scientists a much finer-grained view into developmental changes. In the first such longitudinal study of 145 children and adolescents, reported in 1999, NIMH’s Dr. Judith Rapoport and colleagues were surprised to discover a second wave of overproduction of gray matter, the thinking part of the brain – neurons and their branch-like extensions – just prior to puberty.

Possibly related to the influence of surging sex hormones, this thickening peaks at around age 11 in girls, 12 in boys, after which the gray matter actually thins some.

Prior to this study, research had shown that the brain overproduced gray matter for a brief period in early development – in the womb and for the first 18 months of life – and then underwent just one bout of pruning. Researchers are now confronted with structural changes that occur much later in adolescence. The teen’s gray matter waxes and wanes in different functional brain areas at different times in development. For example, the gray matter growth spurt just prior to puberty predominates in the frontal lobe, the seat of “executive functions” – planning, impulse control and reasoning. In teens affected by a rare, childhood onset form of schizophrenia that impair these functions, the MRI scans reveal four times as much gray matter loss in the frontal lobe as normally occurs. Unlike gray matter, the brain’s white matter – wire-like fibers that establish neurons’ long-distance connections between brain regions – thickens progressively from birth in humans. A layer of insulation called myelin progressively envelops these nerve fibers, making them more efficient, just like insulation on electric wires improves their conductivity.

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Making the Most of High School Curriculum

Advancements in MRI image analysis are providing new insights into how the brain develops. UCLA’s Dr. Arthur Toga and colleagues turned the NIMH team’s MRI scan data into 4 – D time-lapse animations of children’s brains morphing as they grow up – the 4th dimension being rate-of-change. Researchers report a wave of white matter growth that begins at the front of the brain in early childhood, moves rearward, and then subsides after puberty. Striking growth spurts can be seen from ages 6 to 13 in areas connecting brain regions specialized for language and understanding spatial relations, the temporal and parietal lobes. This growth drops off sharply after age 12, coinciding with the end of a critical period for learning languages.

While this work suggests a wave of brain white matter development that flows from front to back, animal, functional brain imaging and postmortem studies have suggested that gray matter maturation flows in the opposite direction, with the frontal lobes not fully maturing until young adulthood. To confirm this in living humans, the UCLA researchers compared MRI scans of young adults, 23 – 30, with those teens, 12 – 16. They looked for signs of myelin, which would imply more mature, efficient connections, within gray mater. As expected, areas of the frontal lobe showed the largest differences between young adults and teens. This increased myelination in the adult frontal cortex likely relates to the maturation of cognitive processing and other “executive” functions. Parietal and temporal areas mediating spatial, sensory, auditory and language functions appeared largely mature in the teen brain. The observed late maturation of the frontal lobe conspicuously coincides with they typical age-of-onset of schizophrenia – late teens, early twenties – which, as noted earlier, is characterized by impaired “executive” functioning.

Another series of MRI studies is shedding light on how teens may process emotions differently than adults. Using functional MRI (fMRI), a team led by Dr. Deborah Yurgelun-Todd at Harvard’s McLean Hospital scanned subjects’ brain activity while they identified emotions on pictures of faces displayed on a computer screen. Young teens, whom characteristically perform poorly on the task, activated the amygdala, a brain center that mediates fear and other “gut” reactions, more than the frontal lobe.

As teens grow older, their brain activity during this task tends to shift to the frontal lobe, leading to more reasoned perceptions and improved performance. Similarly, the researchers saw a shift in activation from the temporal lobe to the frontal lobe during a language skills task, as teens got older. These functional changes paralleled structural changes in temporal lobe white matter.

While these studies have shown remarkable changes that occur in the brain during the teen years, they also demonstrate what every parent can confirm: the teenage brain is a very complicated and dynamic arena, one that is not easily understood.

(Source: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/teenage-brain-a-work-inprogress.shtml)