When
Helen Immordino-Yang
Professor of Education, Psychology & Neuroscience
Brain & Creativity Institute; Rossier School of Education University of Southern California
Transcendence!: Supporting youths’ coordinated neural development of abstract thinking, social emotion, and self-awareness
Abstract: The proclivity to think and feel deeply about complex issues and ideas is a hallmark human achievement—a foundation of global society as well as of personal growth. This achievement rests on capacities for transcendent thinking, that is, on one’s abilities and dispositions to consider the broader personal, ethical and systems-level implications that transcend situations and pertain to bigger concepts, values and identities. In this talk I will discuss our transdisciplinary, longitudinal studies of transcendent thinking in adolescents, demonstrating its underlying neural dynamics, its power to predict future brain and psychosocial development, and its role in neural resilience. The findings reveal a novel predictor of mid-adolescents’ neural development, and underscore the active role adolescents play in their own brain development through the meaning they make of the social world.
Next, I will share some of our new brain, interview, and classroom observation data from urban public secondary teachers as they teach, grade students’ work, provide student feedback, and the like. The findings shed light on the neural correlates of social skill in a highly trained domain-- that of secondary teaching. For those interested in educational innovation, they also present new ways to think about the emotional and social work involved in skilled teaching, with implications for teacher professional development.