ModKathryn: Welcome everyone!

ModShane: Hello everyone. What have you learned about adolescents so far this week?

Lucia: I was excited to see the journal Nature launch a special collection on Adolescence, which includes more traditional research articles, as well as podcasts, videos, and popular science articles.
Many of the reviews invite us to rethink how we talk about adolescence, and how to move the research forward

ModShane: @Lucia From an educational perspective or more broadly?

Lucia: More broadly, but it definitely includes relevant topics for learning and education. The nature collection link is here: https://www.nature.com/collections/vbmfnrsssw

ModShane: “It’s widely accepted that adolescents are misunderstood. Less well known is how far we still have to go to understand adolescence itself.” That is a quote from the Nature collection

ModKathryn: The Centre for Educational Neuroscience Seminar at Birkbeck today was on sleep-dependent learning and academic performance. Dr Francis Knight presented her work and one of the findings was that media-use and caffeine consumption negatively effected quality of sleep and then consequently academic performance. They’re now looking at developing interventions, focus groups and raising awareness amongst teenagers

Nicola: @modkathryn – Interested in those findings – were they definitely causal the way you describe them?

ModKathryn: @Nicola – they did a mediation analysis showing sleep was mediating the relationship but it wasnt causal. She mentioned that shes working on doing some studies involving groups restricting sleep comparing to those sleeping longer etc. which could involve causality, but she said thats very difficult in terms of ethics and getting people to agree!

Nicola: @modkathryn I’m interested because often pitched as causal, but I haven’t seen any papers that show more than association – people who sleep less well drink more coffee and use screens when they can’t sleep

vmarshall: I am interested in whether there is anything in the brain that means adolescents become more interested in gaining the respect and attention of their peers rather than that of the adults around them. With young children they are very keen to please and gain recognition from the adults around them, but with adolescents it seems they find greater reward in the attention from peers. Is there anything behind this?

Lucia: Definitively, there is a lot of work showing that there is social reorientation during adolescence, perhaps related to hormonal changes in puberty, in which peers become particularly relevant and an important motivator for teens

Kinga: @vmarshall you can check out this TED talk about adolescent brain development: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xo6KGWFXHA It’s not so recent but still very relevant

Lucia: @vmarshall an important developmental goal for teens is to gain independence, and learn about and practice with social relationships. This is also related to changes in maturation in regions of the brain that respond to social and exciting/rewarding stimuli

Nicola: Also Theory of Mind – the ability to understand other people’s perspectives and emotions is going through change in adolescence. Here’s a link to an article on this: https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/7/1/53/1638079

ModShane: @lucia @nicola – do we know what is the bigger influence? Is it physical and hormonal changes or social?

Kinga: @ModShane hormonal change happen within a relatively short period. Brain development and cognitive changes take much longer.

vmarshall: @all that’s interesting. I’m wondering if there’s anything teachers can do to replicate/simulate that same feeling in teenagers as the appreciation they gain from their peers. Would certainly help relationships and outcomes between teachers and students if it were possible

Nicola: @vmarshall not sure simulation of being a peer is possible (or desirable!) since partly adolescents are seeking to fit themselves into a peer reference group. But some of the ‘lack of respect’ evident probably stems from social anxiety and difficulty reading people – so more explicit approaches by parents and teachers about how they feel / what they are thinking may go some way

Lucia: @vmarshall there is important work by David Yaeger on how interventions and interactions should acknowledge teens desire to feel respected and be accorded status (instead of “telling them what to do”). Here is the link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318166019_Why_Interventions_to_Influence_Adolescent_Behavior_Often_Fail_but_Could_Succeed

Kinga: @Nicola mentioned theory of mind. There is also the development of metacognitive skills. The ability to see ourselves from “”outside””. It is natural that teen consider their peers to be important reference points

vmarshall: @Lucía That’s great – thank you.

Nicola: One complaint from teenagers is that adults often tell them ‘they have it easy’, or ‘wait ’til you hit the real world’ – in fact the challenges of adolescence are real and often painful. Other teens maybe show increased empathy for these

Rebecca: @vmarshall I agree with @nicola that it may not be possible to simulate peer relationships, but it is the case that although conflict with parents increases during adolescence, adolescents with greater empathic abilities and those who have been taught about empathic skills show less conflict and better conflict resolution with parents, and likely with teachers too

ModShane: @Rebecca Teaching Empathic Skills sounds important. Is it being done? Formally or just for students who struggle badly? Any indications on what works?

vmarshall: @Rebecca That’s interesting. From some of the reading I have been doing on Twitter it seems there is an increasing focus on schools explicitly teaching empathy skills. Not sure if they are Uk or US schools though

Nicola: Emotional Literacy has certainly become more prominent in school classrooms

Rebecca: @vmarshall and @ModShane. I am based in the US and do not know as much about what is happening in the UK. In the U.S. at both the state and federal level there are relatively new education legislation that calls for schools to measure students’ progress with social-emotional skill development, including the development of skills like empathy and perspective-taking.

ModShane: @Rebecca And are there established ways to measure social-emotional skills that are consistent?

Kinga: Maybe it’s an important point to note that perspective taking has a strong component, and for this reason it might be easier to train than empathy.

Nicola: Language is an important element. Teenagers might be helped by labelling their emotions properly

Nicola: The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire is a very well used and tested questionnaire about social and emotion skill. It can be downloaded free here and has norms for girls and boys in many different countries http://www.sdqinfo.org/

Rebecca: @vmarshall there is a study that might be of interest to you about the way teaching teachers an emapthic mindset let to reduction in adolescents’ school suspension and in increase in the amount of respect at-risk students believed their teachers had for them http://www.pnas.org/content/113/19/5221.short

vmarshall: @Rebecca thank you. Our school is currently adopting a new approach to behaviour which is based a lot more on empathy and preventative measures rather than focusing on what sanction to implement when X,Y, Z happens so it would be interesting to read this study

Nicola: What do people think of this — Babies encouraging empathy in primary… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH5mmBEMavI I would be interested to know whether it’s evidence based!

Nicola: Ultimately empathy is very difficult to teach. In fact even social skills training evidence is not as convincing as it could be. Teenagers with autism really struggle with this!

Kinga: @Nicola I’m wondering what the babies learn from this. That could be an interesting study too!

Lucia: @vmarshall what strategies have worked for you in the classroom?

vmarshall: I am SENCo at my school and this is something that we are always trying to develop in our students with Autsim. We are having some success with getting students to select the social situations to discuss rather than us as teachers creating scenarios

Lucia: @vmarshall this sounds like a great example of recognising the teens need for independence, and letting them lead and make decisions

ModShane: @Nicola how do we find ways to improve the teaching of empathy? Knowing it is important, but not knowing the best way to teach it is frustrating.

Nicola: the SMILE program looks promising for improving social skills, but not properly evaluated yet. It breaks social behaviour down into very small chunks and uses video analysis (but not feedback until the end – to illustrate change)

vmarshall: @Lucia The strategies that we are using are mainly with our younger students (11-13 year olds). Emotional literacy sessions to help develop a vocabulary around expressing different feelings. With our older students we are encouraging a lot of reflective pratice – we stsrt each session with a positive and a minus and an interesting about their day. We then discuss why things have gone the way they have and teach the social skills from there

Lucia: @vmarshall Sounds great! Scaffolding their developing ability to reflect (what we sometimes call meta-cognition) sounds like a nice approach

Kinga: @vmarshall can you identify any topics that your autistic students are particularly interested in?

Nicola: @vmarshall – I think starting from scenarios they suggest is a great approach. Not always easy for neurotypical adults to guess what the issues / confusions were

vmasrshall: @Kinga it mainly seems to be conflicts with other students – usually stems from their misunderstanding and then inappropriate reaction from them

Kinga: @vmarshall Do you find that your students enjoy these discussions? Would they discuss these issues outside the classroom as well?

vmarshall: @Kinga It depends on the timing of the discussion – if it is happening close to the event they don’t enjoy them as much asthey get hung up on the ‘incident’ and we often go round in circles. This is why we have scheduled sessions so that we can reflect on the past days when in a more calm and objective frame of mind. They enjoy this more when done this way.

vmarshall: @Kinga our sessions are outside the classroom in the students’ mind because it takes place in a specific intervention. They see it very differently to the classroom environment

Nicola: It may also help to work with them to categorise different social demands. I heard an autistic adult once say: you are allowed to answer yes or no to ‘would you like to have a tea?’ but if someone says ‘would you like to sign in over there’… you have to do it. The same language structure in both. But the situation and the pragmatics are the cues

Nicola: @vmarshall – and that helps them being outside of the classroom to discuss?

Kinga: @vmarshall I’m also curious if you see a change in autistic adolescents as well that they are getting more focussed on their peers?

vmarshall: @Kinga our students with autism are definitely more interested in their peers when the become adolescents but more form the perspective of trying to understand other teenagers! Trying to understand their actions and their mannerisms etc.

vmarshall: @Nicola It does seem to. I mean we work in classrooms but they are set up differently to mainstream classes. Much smaller and quieter environment

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