Editor's Note: Dr. Mel Levine is a professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina Medical School and the director of the university’s Clinical Center for the Study of Development and Learning. As if this doesn’t keep him busy enough, Levine is also the co-founder of All Kinds of Minds, a nonprofit institute for the study of differences in learning, and co-chairs the institute’s board of directors. Over the years, Levine has also written numerous books that focus on ways parents and educators can better understand why students struggle in school — and how to develop individualized programs that play to students’ strengths and, thus, lead to greater success in school. Following on the publication of his latest book, Ready or Not, Here Life Comes, we caught up with Dr. Levine to talk about his foundation, learning, and his vision of the ideal school.
Independent School:
There are other authors writing on brain research and learning, and many more writing on learning differences. But you may be the only author who has also established a nonprofit institute — All Kinds of Minds — to work with schools on becoming more attuned to the needs of individual students. What encouraged you to take this step?
Levine:
It’s a lot of work, but it really satisfied my rescue fantasy. I can write and lecture and do research on different aspects of learning, but the question is: How do you have a real impact nationally? To do that, you really have to develop programs — particularly training programs — that are excellent. Then you have to market those programs and control their quality. And the best way to do this is to combine really good academic minds with really good business minds. We started All Kinds of Minds to be able to go to scale with our programs with the goal of supporting diverse learners in the classroom and in life.
Independent School:
You’ve put together an interesting team.
Source: www.nais.org. © 2005, National Association of Independent Schools.Levine: All Kinds of Minds has some incredible people. My co-chair, Charles Schwabb, has phenomenal expertise in getting a product going so it has a significant impact. That doesn’t ordinarily occur in the academic world. For us, it’s an attempt to see if we can merge academia and business and stay nonprofit. This way, we get to have the best of both worlds — great research and phenomenal input from the business world. We’re also good at raising money. All Kinds of Minds, which started nine years ago, has raised more than $60 million. It’s been an amazing marriage of business and academics, and I feel incredibly lucky.
Independent School: Where does the money go?
Levine: It goes to building the programs. It goes to providing programs to people who can’t afford them. And it goes to administering the Schools Attuned program and other programs, and to maintaining the quality.
Independent School: What sort of reception are you receiving from schools?
Levine: The reception has been mixed. One of the things that we’ve been trying to make clear is that it’s not a program about learning disabilities. In fact, we don’t use any labels at all. We mainly deal with learning and how the learning process works. Once teachers understand this, they are usually receptive. We’re offering more knowledge about how memory works, how concepts get formed, how to develop really good problem-solving skills and brainstorming ability. And we talk about how certain kids are lacking in one or more of these capacities, but how we can build those capacities in all kids. Although it has a lot of implications for kids who are struggling in school, we think of it as a very mainstream program with implications for every kid in school. One of our challenges is getting schools to see this.
Independent School: One of your goals is to individualize instruction as much as possible. Can you describe the future school that does this well?
Levine: The more we’re learning about different kinds of minds, the more a school has to be pluralistic. We have to get away from a one-size-fits-all approach to education. So, first of all, the school of the future would be a school for all kinds of minds. It would be a school that really embraces neurodevelopmental pluralism. It would be a school in which teachers understand the learning process very well. They’ll have lots of training so that they are lead experts in the age groups they teach.
Second, it would be a school where kids are learning about learning while they’re learning. All the different brain processes that teachers know about, the kids would also know about. We want kids to be very aware of the way their minds function. It would be a school in which children’s strengths are identified. It would be a school in which kids are expected to pick a topic in second grade — one they are passionate about — and stick with it for five years, at which point they’ll pick another topic and stick with it for five more years. This focus is important. One of the things we’re not doing well in school is teaching kids expertise, encouraging real scholarship.
Third, it would be a school that looks at the different functions needed to succeed in the adult world and consciously targets those functions. I’d like the head of school to say to the faculty, “Here are the tools we want kids to have when they’re 17 years old. Who’s going to address very explicitly problem-solving skills? Who’s going to take on creativity? Who’s going to deal with nonverbal concept formation? And so on.
It will also be a school that teaches kids how to write business plans, proposals, progress reports, job estimates, budgets, etc. That stuff we desperately need. It would also be a school where kids read a lot of biographies. They’ll learn a tremendous amount about how others have lived.
Independent School: The last point connects with your new book, Ready or Not, Here Life Comes.
Levine: Yes. It’s about people in their 20s who are struggling with the transition from school to work. What we’re finding is that schools are just not preparing kids for a career. In this regard, the school of the future would be one that dismisses the notion of college prep — that denies it’s a college prep school. Parenthetically, I can tell you that I can’t think of anything in life that takes less preparation than college. “College prep” is really a euphemism for “college admission prep.” The problem with the myopic focus on college is that we’re making kids think that college is the ultimate destination in life. We tell them that all they’ve got to do is get into a good college. Once you’re in, you’re free and clear. But this is setting them up for trouble. Once they finish with college, what comes next is inevitably anticlimactic. Many recent graduates are finding they don’t know what to do with themselves. Not to mention that a lot of them end up wasting their college years. They’re so relieved to be in college and not have that shadow of expectation and anxiety over them any more, but they’re not sure why they are there or what lies ahead.
Independent School: What replaces college prep?
Levine: I think we should substitute the term “life prep.” The ideal school should be one that is really preparing kids for life, not for college. I think it’s very sad that some absolutely marvelous schools are subservient to colleges. There’s too much focus on the SATs. In some schools, you find that heads are being judged by how many kids get into Ivy League colleges. It’s horrible. If you want to talk about what schools should look like in the near future, I’d say that independent schools should launch a campaign to liberate themselves from colleges.
Independent School: In All Kinds of Minds, you’re critical of the notion of well-roundedness, too.
Levine: Yes. The ideal school is one that doesn’t particularly value well-roundedness. In fact, it encourages kids to pursue their strengths and, if anything, to celebrate their weaknesses. If I were the head of an independent high school, I would tell kids they could pick two courses each year in which they will only receive pass/fail ratings. But then they’re going to get graded very hard in the courses that play to their strengths. The idea is that they have to get better and better at the things they’re good at. You need to be exposed to things you’re not good at, of course, but you don’t have to be evaluated brutally at things your brain is not wired for. And colleges ought to understand and support this, too.
Independent School: This does sound idealistic, given the current state of things.
Levine: This is all very idealistic, but it also happens to be correct. And I think we’re not going to make progress until we say what’s correct, not just what’s feasible.
Independent School: When you work with schools, how do you help them move in this direction?
Levine: By educating the teachers and administrators about what we know about human development and learning. Everything I’m saying fits with what we’re learning about learning. For example, during adolescence, the frontal lobes of the brain are developing rapidly. One of the characteristics of the frontal lobes is that, as they develop, they enable you to do things more slowly so you don’t make impulsive decisions, snap judgments, gut reactions. In other words, the frontal lobes help you put the brakes on so you can become a really good decision maker. That’s one of the major events of the adolescent brain. Once you know this, you realize it has clear implications for education. It means, for instance, that an ideal school would give no timed tests whatsoever.
Independent School: As I think you say in your book, there were no time limits when Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel.
Levine: Schools should have space limits, but not time limits. In writing an essay, for instance, you should tell students they can take all the time they want, but that they can only write two pages. That kind of exercise is a perfect replication of the adult world. If, as the editor, you ask someone to submit a 1,500-word article, do you care how long he or she takes to write it? If I submit a grant proposal, I might be told that the narrative can only be six pages, but I won’t be told I can only spend two hours on it.
Independent School: Certainly it’s clear that we’re learning a great deal about the brain and how it functions...
Levine: Right, and that will have an impact on high schools. Another good example: One of the things that has just been discovered is that, between the ages of 11 and 20, the surface of the brain converts from being predominantly gray matter to becoming predominantly white matter. And that means that, as you get older, more and more nerve cells get covered with myelin, which is like insulation wrapped around a wire. It turns out that not all nerve cells get wrapped in myelin. Only the pathways you use a lot get myelinated. At the same time, there is something called pruning going on. That is, nerve connections that aren’t being used get pruned away so things become more efficient.
Independent School: I assume it’s best if we pave those pathways that play to our strengths.
Levine: We want to make sure those are getting paved because what counts in the adult world are your strengths. But there may be some generic highways, too, that we need to focus on for all children: problem-solving skills, social skills, critical thinking skills, and conflict-resolution skills. I would love the head of school to have a list of highways he or she wants to make sure are getting paved. The Schools Attuned program (see article on page 50) represents steps in this direction. It’s not everything I’m talking about, but it’s an important beginning. It helps get schools to think about what students are learning, about brain function and learning, about the implications for all this.
Independent School: Do you feel you’ve made inroads in schools?
Levine: Yes. In fact, we’ve been doing research on the Schools Attuned program and we’re seeing all kinds of positive comments from teachers. In one study, for example, teachers who had been trained in Schools Attuned reported that they are much more likely to remain in the teaching profession because of the program. It has made teachers’ jobs much more interesting. And we also have outcome data on the kids, showing that they feel more comfortable, safer, more willing to take risks in the classroom because their teachers are more tolerant of differences. So we’re definitely seeing an impact. And as we look to the future, I think it’s important that independent schools take the lead here. Public schools are difficult places to initiate change of this nature. I think independent schools are in a terrific position to lead the world into a new form of education.