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BOOK REVIEW

By Tim Pappageorge




Book Review

If this book is filled with so much common sense--offer choice, give students a voice in their learning-- then why do I find myself invigorated by the potential of my students as I read it?

We want to offer answers, students want questions. We offer safety, they love risk. We want them to play the role of the dutiful student, and they want to play a socially important role, an expert or daring personality. Basically, Armstrong drives home the point that the intense neuroplasticity of adolescent brains makes teaching teens a bit of wild fun, but it's not a game whose rules we, as adults, often fully understand or remember.


For example, one chapter focuses on peer learning communities. In my experience, and through my home school district, we have focused consistently on Cooperative Learning modalities which are informed by the research of David and Roger Johnson at the University of Minnesota. They remind us that cooperative learning is not an activity to do, but it is an awareness that everything that goes on in the classroom should be viewed with the lens of the social scientist. Armstrong, here, offers a similar insight but gets us, as teachers and leaders, to understand the biological bases for this.


In the past 10 years or so, differentiated instruction has continued to enter into the instructional conversation at the high school level. We are learning what our grade school colleagues have been telling us for decades: offering choice and recognizing the important sense of agency in our adolescent learners are really of central concern to the educational process. And yet, we often standardize our approach, and in so doing, we abdicate our own choice to offer students this kind of agency. Armstrong leans into this important issue with specific learning ideas such as homework menus.


Like all brain-based books, the work here tends to over-conclude based on the amount of empirical data available. However, Armstrong is a veteran teacher whose sensibilities--developed over 34 years in the classroom--very much run sympatico with my own. His ideas are practical, and his tone energizes my vision for what my students will accomplish this year.






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