Immaturity in adolescence
Some of the manifestations of immaturity are the following:
Apparent hypocrisy: Disconnection between ideas and actions.
Singularity and invulnerability: “Personal fable”, adolescents think each of them is special. They also believe that their experiences are unique. Besides, Egocentrism arises. Teens also think they can do things which can be highly dangerous for them because they believe they do not have to respect social laws as most of citizens.
My dearest colleagues, now it is your turn!
As you could have seen, our adolescences suffer many changes during their teens, and we as teachers must be totally conscious of them if we really want to help our pupils to achieve the necessary maturity to live in society. In order you could start developing knowledge about this, you will do the following activity.
Activity!
Now we will give you some common problems that teachers have to face working with teens. The main idea is that you could post what you could do if you had to face these situations in your classroom.
Situation 1
You as teacher choose one of your students to come to the whiteboard to do an exercise. The rest of the class starts laughing at the student you chose saying that she does not know how to do the activity. Your students do not stop discussing with you.
Having in mind the process in which adolescences are involved what would you do to solve this situation?
Situation 2
Being in classes, some of your students are not paying attention to the lesson. Out of the blue, you realize that some of them are having drugs inside the classroom.
What would you do to face this situation?
Please write your answers in the post-space. We will be happily waiting for your comments!
Emotional Development in Adolescence
As we obviously observe as teachers, to be an adolescent is to be in a transition process where, as it is mentioned before, their thinking process becomes more complex and their emotions are stronger. This may cause some difficulties in teenagers to focus their attention on studying, for example. We as teachers need to be aware of these changes that these students are having because if we ignore them we can cause them a tremendous damage.
This is the moment where teenagers are recognizing themselves as individuals who have a special identity. This identity they are building is extremely fragile since they are particularly sensitive to every single reaction people have toward them. They are creating their self-consciousness about their growing process. Teenagers are changing in every aspect of their lives: physically, mentally, and obviously they are aware and concerned about how people and society accept them or not.
Since teenagers are in a transition process we, as teachers who are concerned about how to deal with those emotional unbalanced state of mind, have to be aware of some important details that we are going to present you now:
Self-esteem & Self-image: Teenagers are extremely concerned about how do they look to other people. It is tremendously important to them to be accepted by their closest group of people and to the society in general. That means that we as teachers cannot hurt them in terms of self-esteem, we need to encourage them to be themselves not to be what other people want them to become.
Ego: Students need to have a proper level of ego. They need to feel that they can actually do whatever they set themselves as a goal. The big issue here is that we have to help them to set themselves realistic goals in order to not let them fell frustrated if they by any reason cannot achieve those goals.
Embarrassment: We, teachers, must avoid, by all means, every single kind of embarrassment to our teenagers. This action could really damage and harm them in their self-esteem which is, as I mentioned before, extremely fragile.
As a conclusion what we teachers have to do is to give positive feedback to students that supports their beliefs about that they can do well in everything that they want to do. We have to be careful though, about those high goals maybe not so realistic because they can be frustrated if they are not able to achieve them, so the thing that we must do well is guide them and help them sincerely and give them the enough support that they need.
Cognitive development in adolescences
As a consequence of this important change experienced by teenagers we need to take into consideration potential reactions and attitudes when we are teaching them. During adolescence (between 12 and 18 years of age), the developing teenager acquires the ability to think systematically about all logical relationships within a problem. However, when emotional issues arise, they often interfere with an adolescent's ability to think in more complex ways. The ability to consider possibilities, as well as facts, may influence decision making, in either positive or negative ways. For example, which groups are better to be included in is a usual category where teenagers are exposed to take certain decisions which influence his/her attitude in front of others. Actually, some students represent their power in front of their classmates through violence, disruptive behavior and a common attitude nowadays is express as bullying.
We think that is extremely important as teachers and guides of our students take into consideration the relevance of students´ cognitive development as a useful tool in order to avoid for example, violence within schools and students behavior because if we are aware of how this cognitive process works, it will be easier take some positives advantages of it by the moment we have to face or handle some teenagers issues.
- Include adolescents in discussions about a variety of topics, issues, and current events.
- Encourage adolescents to share ideas and thoughts with you.
- Encourage adolescents to think independently and develop their own ideas.
- Assist adolescents in setting their own goals.
- Stimulate adolescents to think about possibilities of the future.
- Compliment and praise adolescents for well thought out decisions.
- Assist adolescents in re-evaluating poorly made decisions for themselves.
