Understanding Youth Adolescent Development for Educators by Nakkula

This whole article was very meaningful, but what really caught my attention was the meeting of the minds.”  If educators want to make a bigger impact on their students and their thinking then educators must share how they think and make sense of content, so students can get the fundamental tools to share in the thinking process.  According to Nakkula, the key is that the educators’ thinking be made as transparent as possible in order for students to connect with them.  Basically if Ms. Peterson was upfront about her expectations of Antwon he might be more open to talk with her about his fears of failing.  Then again it could be reversed; if Antwon were able to openly talk about his fears of failing then Ms. Peterson might respond to him positively.

 I think another big key to this is for the educator to understand their students’ way of thinking and how they think.  Nakkula made a great point with the statement, “without a concerted effort to learn how our students think, it is virtually impossible to optimally share our thinking with them.” What I think this means is that each person learns from knowledge that other people have and are influenced by that knowledge this process can also be known as scaffolding.  I really enjoyed the example about how if a teacher constructs a safe place their notion of “safe” can be very different than a student’s version of what “safe” is, looks, and feels like.  In order for educators to construct a safe place with their students the teacher must be upfront about what she/he already knows a safe place to be like.  Then educators must pick the brain of their students to find out what they think the meaning of “safe” means.  After basic knowledge is made both the teacher and student can co-construct ways of interacting with one another in a safe place.  This process scaffolds their new learning and ways of interacting on the content and knowledge they already possess.

     Both teachers and students need to work as a team to learn from each other.  Just because a teacher has that title that does not mean they have attained all the knowledge that they need.  It is only natural that a teacher would gain new knowledge from their students after learning how their students think and process information. This also goes for students in the sense that they might think that they know everything now, but once scaffolding takes place and the teacher is upfront with them about what he/she expects then they will be more open and willing to learn.

Here are some great scaffolding strategies to use in any educational environment: Click Here