Thinking Practice: Tools for Bubba’s teen apprenticeship
Favorite question of teachers and parents of Bubba/Bubbette the teenager:
What WAS he/she thinking?
Answer:
He/she doesn’t know how to think.
Recent research explains teen brain development, specifically underscoring the teen’s underdeveloped prefrontal lobe as the culprit. Alison Gopnik’s WSJ column makes the research meaningful for teachers by sharing ideas about what the research means for policy makers, teachers, even parents. How do we help Bubba/Bubbette become better thinkers? Practice, practice, practice. Fortunately, smartphones and the web make to easy to put the practice in our teen’s hands. With a few nudges toward a favorite gadget and some real world prompts, we just might be able to shape that brain a little sooner.
You get to be a good planner by making plans, implementing them and seeing the results again and again….
Need a way for Bubba/Bubbette to practice this? Try Strike, reviewed here.
The experience of trying to achieve a real goal in real time in the real world [today] is increasingly delayed, and the growth of the control system depends on just those experiences.
Need a way for Bubba/Bubbette to practice this? Try Accompl.sh, reviewed here.
[The prefrontal lobe] is the system that inhibits impulses and guides decision-making
Need a way for Bubba/Bubbette to practice good decision-making? Try Decico, reviewed here.
As Ms. Go
pnik points out, the key to learning — the key to creating patterns in our dynamic brains –is apprenticeship of repeated, hands-on experience. I wonder whether repeated clicked-on experience can help. It’s certainly worth a try the next time Bubba is clocked going 85 in a 35 mph zone:
Bubba, make a list of the things you will do to pay off that ticket and get your license back.
Now there’s a long term goal to practice with.
