Teachers, like parents, have always understood that children’s learning and growth do not occur in a vacuum, but instead at the messy intersection of academic, social, and emotional development. And they know that students’ learning is helped (or hindered) by the quality of students’ relationships and the contexts in which they live and learn. Working to weave those threads, skilled teachers often have yearned for schools—and policy approaches—that understand this complex reality.
Such approaches will get a major boost from a sweeping review of scholarship contained in a pair of new studies on the science of learning and development released earlier this year. The researchers—Turnaround for Children’s Pamela Cantor and Lily Steyer; American Institutes for Research’s David Osher and Juliette Berg; and Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Todd Rose—offer reason for enormous optimism about what’s possible for all children, and especially those who have faced adversity and trauma.
In public appearances, Pamela Cantor has distilled these consequential findings to four specific insights:
• Malleability: Genes are not destiny. Our developing brains are largely shaped by our environments and relationships—a process that continues into adulthood.
• Context: Family, relationships, and lived experiences shape the physiological structure of our brains over time. Healthy amounts of challenge and adversity promote growth, but toxic stress takes a toll on the connections between the hemispheres of our brain.
• Continuum: While we’ve become familiar with the exponential development of the brain for young children, it continues throughout life. The explosion of brain growth into adolescence and early adulthood, in particular, requires putting serious work into much more intentional approaches to supporting that development than is common today.
• Integration: Over time, different parts of the brain should develop more complex interconnections supporting the development of the whole person—and positive and negative emotional experiences can greatly influence that process. Yet, adverse effects of negative experiences and stress can be buffered and reversed by trusting human relationships. Children who have faced adversity, and whose brains lag in development, can recover—if schools recognize these challenges and take timely action.
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