Lessons in Adolescence Podcast

This episode features a conversation with Dr. Christine Bae of Virginia Commonwealth University, Tracyee Hogans Foster of Richmond Public Schools, and Michael Stange of Chesterfield County Public Schools. The three are engaged in a 5-year-long initiative funded by the National Science Foundation to examine student engagement in science instruction in the middle grades through a method called "authentic science discourse."

Christine, Tracyee, Mike and Jason talk about the research base around student motivation in learning, why science is a particularly good subject in which to study student motivation, what educators are experiencing this year in terms of student motivation in general after a year of long-term remote learning, and the practice of science discourse as a way to inspire and compel students to engage more with the content. They also talk about what science discourse looks like in virtual and in-person learning settings, how the practice can be sustained over time, and the value of research-practice partnerships - like the one they are participating in - to educators and to the field as a whole.

Additional Readings and Resources

• Discourse and Learning Lab
• National Science Foundation
  • Building on diverse students' funds of knowledge to promote scientific discourse and strengthen connections to science learning in urban classrooms
  • Faculty Early Career Development Program
• Virginia Commonwealth University
• Richmond Public Schools
• Chesterfield County Public Schools
• Flipgrid

This episode features a conversation with Lynsey Wood Jeffries and Nyasha Rusununguko from Higher Achievement. Lynsey is CEO and Nyasha Director of Program Operations for the 45-year-old, Washington DC-based nonprofit serving middle-school age youth in the out-of-school-time space with a blend of academic enrichment, mentoring, and community-building, culminating in high school and ultimately college preparation. Higher Achievement serves students in communities in and around Washington, DC, Baltimore and Richmond.

Lynsey, Nyasha and Jason talk about the history and program model of Higher Achievement, emphasizing literacy, social and emotional learning, and high school readiness. They look at the results the organization is seeing in terms of student academic and other outcomes. They delve into the ways Higher Achievement staff and mentors deliver a meaningful student experience, the changes they had to make during virtual programming amid the pandemic, and which of those they will keep. And they discuss what the pandemic showed about the essential role out-of-school-time programs have in education going forward.

Additional Readings and Resources

• Higher Achievement
  • Staying On Track: Testing Higher Achievement’s Long-Term Impact on Academic Outcomes and High School Choice
  • Aiming Higher: Assessing Higher Achievement’s Out-of-School Expansion Efforts, MDRC, 2000
• Achieve 3000 Literacy
• Social and Emotional Learning
• William T. Grant Foundation

We're excited to announce that production on the second season of the "Lessons in Adolescence" podcast is officially underway! Our first episode will be available for listening on your preferred podcast platform Wednesday October 20th. Season two will be packed with new guests, more lessons, and fresh showcases of research, practice and advocacy all focused on young adolescent learning and development. 

Before we dive into season two, host Jason Cascarino shares some highlights from season one, including episodes that deal with issues of developing positive relationships, delivering effective youth programming during the pandemic, and helping young people navigate systemic racism and engage in racial justice. Highlighted conversations feature:

• Dr. Lisa Harrison, Associate Professor of teacher education at Ohio University
• Dr. Kent Pekel, former CEO of Search Institute
• Dr. Elizabeth Santiago, former Chief Program Officer of MENTOR
• Dr. Joanna Lee Williams, Associate Professor of school psychology, Rutgers University
• Breakthrough Collaborative CEO, Elissa Vanaver, Birmingham Executive Director, Mariohn Michele, and San Juan Capistrano Executive Director, Alex Serna
• Aim High CEO, Alec Lee and Vice President of Programs, Terrence Riley

This episode features a conversation with Kiana Dixon and Janikaa Jackson. Kiana and Janikaa are students at Brooklyn College in Brooklyn, New York and are alumni of the Peer Group Connection (PGC) program offered by the Center for Supportive Schools (CSS). PGC positions upper classmen and women in high school to mentor incoming 9^th graders transitioning into high school from middle school. They are both now consultants with CSS, helping develop new programming and curriculum, and providing professional learning for educators on practices that incorporate authentic student voice.

Kiana, Janikaa and Jason talk about their own middle school years and their experience being bullied, their transition into high school and finding their own path, and details of their work as upper class women mentoring incoming freshmen and women and the impact having a mentor has on young adolescents transitioning from middle school. They also touch upon their experience as consultants with CSS, developing a youth advisory board to amplify youth voice, developing accessible programming during the pandemic, providing professional development to teachers and helping them make adjustments to their curriculum to align with student needs, and what they think works best to keep students engaged; plus, Kiana and Janikaa reveal what they see for their own futures.

Additional Readings and Resources

• Center for Supportive Schools
  • Peer Group Connection - High School and Middle School
  • CSS Youth Advisory Board
• Socratic Seminars
• Brooklyn College
• Urban Assembly School of Music and Art

This episode features a conversation with three leaders of one of the largest and longest standing summer learning programs geared toward middle-school aged youth: Breakthrough Collaborative. Elissa Vanaver is Breakthrough’s CEO, who has led the organization through a new strategy that looks to codify its programming and solidify its large network of local affiliates across the country serving more than 10,000 students annually. Mariohn Michel and Alex Serna are two of Breakthrough’s local executive directors. Mariohn heads Breakthrough Birmingham in Birmingham, Alabama and Alex heads Breakthrough San Juan Capistrano in Southern California.

Elissa, Mariohn, Alex and Jason talk about Breakthrough’s programming for middle schoolers and how that national model takes shape in various local contexts with individual needs, Breakthrough’s human capital strategy to bring talented college students in various fields into education and what effect they have on young adolescents, and vice versa, and Breakthrough’s approach to remote programming, including which elements might stick post-pandemic.

Additional Readings and Resources

• Breakthrough Collaborative
  • Breakthrough Teaching Fellows
  • “Inspiring Students, Developing Teachers: How A Corps Of College Students Closes Opportunity Gaps & Diversifies The Teacher Pipeline,” March 2021
  • “Breaking Through The Distance: How Relationships Foster Online Learning,” October 2020
• Breakthrough Birmingham
• Breakthrough San Juan Capistrano
• “Whites Only: School Segregation is Back, from Birmingham to San Francisco,” by Alexander Nazaryan, Newsweek, May 2, 2017.

This episode features a conversation with Jennifer McCombs and Nancy Deutsch. Jennifer is a Senior Policy Researcher and Director of the Behavioral and Policy Sciences Department for the RAND Corporation, one of the world’s leading research institutes. She has been one of the main authors of several works building the knowledge base on summer learning, including a series funded by the Wallace Foundation. Nancy is a professor of education at the University of Virginia and Director of UVA’s Youth-Nex Center to Promote Effective Youth Development, a founding partner in the Remaking Middle School Initiative. Nancy’s research expertise is around adolescent development, particularly in out-of-school-time spaces.

Jennifer, Nancy and Jason talk about the reasons to study summer learning and what we want to learn from the research, specifically for young adolescents and their identity development; understanding the elements of structural inequities in summer learning and how that effects young adolescents; the best practices from research around the practical issues of implementing summer programs effectively; the reframing of summer learning from a time to make up gaps in learning to instead best capture the combination of academics and enrichment in a way that motivates and engages young adolescents, and the research interests for this upcoming summer and the next few summers to understand the potential of summertime to support the whole child, academically, socially and emotionally, psychologically, and otherwise.

Additional Readings and Resources

• Shaping Summertime Experiences: Opportunities to Promote Healthy Development and Well-Being for Children and Youth, National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, 2019
• “Getting to Work on Summer Learning: Recommended Practices for Success, 2nd Ed.,” by Heather L. Schwartz, Jennifer Sloan McCombs, Catherine H. Augustine, and Jennifer T. Leschitz, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018
• Wallace Foundation Knowledge Center
• National Summer Learning Knowledge Center
• Youth-Nex: UVA’s Center to Promote Effective Youth Development
• RAND Corporation
• Aim High

This episode features a conversation with Alec Lee and Terrence Riley. Alec is co-founder and CEO of the 35-year-old Aim High summer learning program for middle school youth. Terrence is an alumnus of the program, and now Vice President of Programs for the organization. Aim High offers a mix of academic classes and interest-driven enrichment activities for middle school students during the summers leading into, during and transitioning out of the middle grades. Like other summer learning programs in the summer of 2020, Aim High needed to pivot from its traditional in-person model to a virtual one, called Aim High at Home, which had some advantages that the program intends to keep going forward even as they steadily transition back to in-person programming.

Alec, Terrence and Jason talk about the genesis of the Aim High program, the specific components of the experience, the types of students who participate, how the organization recruits and trains its staff, which includes local teachers-in-training and also alumni of the program, and the outcomes they are seeing across academic, social and emotional domains as well as the students’ transition into high school and even longer term. They then go into the pivot that Aim High had to make to deliver programming during the pandemic, creating Aim High at Home, how they shifted the levels of emphasis on different aspects of the programming to build belonging and community, and how they ramped up training for summer educators. They also address what they anticipate this upcoming summer will look like and its outsized importance given Covid recovery efforts, and what the future of summer learning looks like longer term.

Additional Readings and Resources

• Aim High
  
  • Aim High At Home
  • Aim High teacher programs
• “The Dynamic Effects of a Summer Learning Program on Behavioral Engagement in School,” Jaymes Pyne, Erica Messner and Thomas S. Dee., Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis, CEPA Working Paper No. 20-10, September 2020.
• “Aiming High for the Summer,” by Andrew Bauld, Harvard Graduate School of Education Centennial, 2020.
• Horizons-Upward Bound

This episode features a conversation with Aaron Dworkin, CEO of the National Summer Learning Association, the nation’s leading champion, connector and supporter of summer learning programming. Aaron has a long history in youth service and has brought a new energy and ambition to the work of NSLA. This comes at a unique moment for the field of summer learning, as the global pandemic and worries about learning loss and mental health give heightened purpose to learning opportunities this particular summer. While that is true, it is also the case that summer learning plays a big role in the learning and development for youth in any circumstance, including creating valuable spaces and relationships specific to young adolescents in middle school.

Aaron and Jason talk about the genesis and work of NSLA, where summer learning fits within the broader ecosystem of education and youth, and more about the unique features of summer learning for young adolescents in middle school. They also address the future of summer learning - in the near-term, what summer learning is shaping up to be this year as our country looks to rebuild from the pandemic and address concerns of learning loss and mental health; in the long term, how summer learning can be better leveraged as a full partner in learning and what educators at the school and districts levels can do to forge those partnerships.

Additional Readings and Resources

• National Summer Learning Association
  • Summer Starts in September guide
  • New Vision for Summer School
• Coro New York Leadership Center
• Gil Noam, Director, Institute for the Study of Resilience in Youth, McLean Hospital; Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
• Values of the Game, Bill Bradley, Artisan Press, 1998.
• “Lasting Consequences of the Summer Learning Gap” by Karl L. Alexander, Doris R. Entwisle, and Linda Steffel, Olson American Psychological Review, Volume: 72 issue: 2, page(s): 167-180, April 1, 2007.
• Afterschool All-Stars
• Breakthrough Collaborative
• Generation Teach
• National Camp Association
• Boston Afterschool & Beyond
• Outward Bound Thompson Island
• Urban Libraries Council
• The 50 State Afterschool Network
• Teachers in the Parks

This episode features a conversation with Rachel Graham, Director of Programs at the Lefkofsky Family Foundation in Chicago, founded by Liz and Eric Lefkofsky. The Foundation has made middle grades a singular focus for its education funding, important in a city where young adolescents have the opportunity to apply to enroll in one of many selective and specialty high schools outside their neighborhood. The Foundation’s Success Bound program helps Chicago K-8 elementary schools use developmental science to better prepare their middle grades students to be thoughtful and planful of their futures as they make consequential decisions in their choice of high school.

Jason and Rachel talk about why the Foundation chose to focus on middle grades, how the Success Bound program came to be, how the Foundation works with educators in communities of practice to integrate the programming schoolwide, what the Foundation is learning about changes in practices, behaviors and student outcomes tied to young adolescent development and the transition into high school, and how middle school can become more central to the national education agenda, and why philanthropy should see young adolescents in middle schools as an opportunity for investment.

Note for transparency, the Lefkofksy Family Foundation is a funder of Remaking Middle School.

Additional Readings and Resources

• Success Bound
• Lefkofsky Family Foundation
• Science of Learning and Development Alliance
• A Nation At Hope: Recommendations from the National Commission on Social, Emotional and Academic Development, The Aspen Institute
• Chicago Public Schools high school open enrollment
• The On-Track Indicator as a Predictor of High School Graduation, University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research
• Gallup Student Poll
• The Opportunity Myth: What Students Can Show Us About How School Is Letting Them Down—and How to Fix It, TNTP, 2018.

This episode features a conversation with Lisa Harrison, associate professor of middle childhood education at the Patton School of Education at Ohio University. Lisa is a teacher of teachers, preparing professionals for middle school classrooms. She is also a researcher, with a core area of focus on young adolescent black girls, a somewhat under-addressed topic in the research literature. She has examined the influences of social context on their identity development, including common negative images of black girls compared to their white young adolescent girl peers, as well as the experiences they have in school, often affected by adult perceptions of them that are embedded in some fundamental inequities.

Lisa and Jason talk about her research that extends into the inequitable experiences young adolescent black girls have with school discipline policies; how the national dialog around race over the past several months has impacted the way she thinks about preparing her teachers-in-training, including the importance for them to engage young adolescents in racial dialog more routinely, rather than just around big moments; the latest update of the position paper from the Association for Middle Level Education, or AMLE, called the Successful Middle School, which Lisa co-authored, that outlines core attributes and characteristics for middle schools; and how educators, as well as parents and families and other caring adults in the community can use the book to improve the learning and development experience for young adolescents.

Additional Readings and Resources

• The Successful Middle School: This We Believe, Penny A. Bishop and Lisa M. Harrison, Association for Middle Level Education, 2020.
• “Redefining Intersectionality Theory through the Lens of African American Young Adolescent Girls' Racialized Experiences,” by Lisa Harrison in Youth & Society, Volume 49, Number 8, Pages 1023-1039, November 2017.
• “Call Me Worthy: Utilizing Storytelling to Reclaim Narratives about Black Middle School Girls Experiencing Inequitable School Discipline,” by ThedaMarie D. Gibbs Grey & Lisa M. Harrison in Equity & Excellence in Education, Volume 53, Number 3, Pages 325-341, 2020.
• “Synthesizing Middle Grades Research on Cultural Responsiveness: The Importance of a Shared Conceptual Framework,” by Brianna L. Kennedy, Kathleen Brinegar, Ellis Hurd and Lisa Harrison in Middle Grades Review, Volume 2, Number 3, Article 2, December 2016.
• Push Out: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, by Monique W. Morris, The New Press, 2018.
• Association for Middle Level Education
• Patton School of Education at Ohio University

This episode features a conversation with Jodi Grant, Executive Director of the Afterschool Alliance, the nation’s preeminent advocacy organization for afterschool programming. A veteran of public policy, Jodi has led the group for the last 15 years. In that time, the Afterschool Alliance has produced multiple updates of its “America After 3 PM” Report, the most comprehensive examination of the afterschool field, including a recent look at some of the specific challenges and opportunities of afterschool programs for middle school aged youth.

Jodi and Jason talk about how the demand for afterschool programming, which has never been higher, is not being met with adequate funding - especially for middle and high school aged youth - the inequities in afterschool that have been perpetuated by the COVID pandemic, how afterschool plays an essential supportive role as young adolescents explore opportunities for their futures as well as navigate the complexities of the current world, and an exciting new funding opportunity specifically for middle school afterschool programs being awarded in partnership between the Afterschool Alliance and the New York Life Foundation.

Additional Readings and Resources

•   Afterschool Alliance
  
  •    America After 3PM
  •    America After 3 for Middle School Youth
  •    Lights On Afterschool
•   New York Life Foundation
  
  •    Aim High grant program: Supporting Middle School Afterschool Programs Serving Middle School Youth 
•   21^st Century Community Learning Centers
•   The Missing Middle –  Federal Funding by Grade Span, Fiscal Year (FY) 2019, Alliance for Excellent Education, April 2019.

This episode features a conversation with Elizabeth Santiago, Chief Program Officer of MENTOR National, the Boston-based nonprofit that champions and advances the field of mentoring for youth. Liz’s personal experience as a young adolescent in middle school, and as a child of an under-resourced family who migrated from Puerto Rico to Boston, is a key driver in her professional work and showcases the potential that mentoring relationships can have in supporting young people who, like she once did, feel disconnected and disengaged and stop showing up.

Liz and Jason talk about the need young people have for representation of voices like their own, the gaps in mentoring opportunities for youth and ways MENTOR is addressing them, how the organization works with school systems and companies to set up and expand mentoring programs, and how to support mentors and mentees who hail from different backgrounds and communities from each other to engage in challenging conversations about our world, like racial inequity and political strife.

Additional Readings and Resources

• MENTOR National
  • “The Mentoring Effect: Young People’s Perspectives on the Outcomes and Availability of Mentoring,” a report for MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership by Civic Enterprises in association with Hart Research Associates, Mary Bruce and John Bridgeland, January 2014
  • “Social and Emotional Development in Early Adolescence: Tapping into the Power of Relationships and Mentoring Success Mentors,” Delia Hagan, Bernadette Sánchez, Jason Cascarino, Kilian White, 2019
  • Mentoring Amplifies: A New Campaign for the Mentoring Movement
  • National Mentoring Month
  • National Mentoring Summit
  • My Brother’s Keeper Success Mentors Initiative
  • Elements of Effective Mentoring
  • Black Youth Town Hall, a youth-led community dialogue aimed at supporting young people as they process recent events and the state of race relations, hosted by MENTOR and Youth Mentoring Action Network
• Reimagining Youth Work podcast, hosted by Dr. Torie Weiston-Serdan, Executive Director, Youth Mentoring Action Network
• Everyday Mentoring, The Mentoring Partnership of Southwestern PA
• National Mentoring Resource Center

This episode features a conversation with Kent Pekel, CEO of Search Institute, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit research organization focused on studying the factors that drive youth success. Under Kent’s leadership, Search Institute has engaged in a singular focus on relationships, which he and the organization see as the foundational ingredient in the learning and development of young people.

Kent and Jason talk about how Search Institute conducts its research, working in partnership with youth organizations in schools and communities to learn while also making an impact, the five core elements of relationship-building derived from this research that structures Search Institute’s Developmental Relationships framework, and the types of approaches and practical activities that educators, youth workers and parents and families can use to intentionally develop and foster positive relationships.

Additional Readings and Resources

• Search Institute
• Search Institute’s Developmental Relationships Framework
  • “Relationships First: Creating Connections that Help Young People Thrive,” Search Institute, 2017.
  • The 4 S’s Interview
  • “The Intersection of Developmental Relationships, Equitable Environments, and SEL” [Insights & Evidence Series], Search Institute, 2020.
• Developmental Assets Framework
  • “Developmental Assets among U.S. Youth: 2018 Update,” Search Institute, 2018.
• Keep Connected, a Family Engagement Program by Search Institute

This episode features a conversation with Ashley Leonard and Jen Ciok from the University of Chicago. Ashley is the associate director of the To&Through Project Middle Grades Network, an initiative within the University’s Urban Education Institute. Jen is a school coach, working with Ashley to offer middle grades educators in a cohort of Chicago public schools support in solving problems of practice specific to the middle grades, using the University’s extensive data and research resources.

Ashley, Jen and Jason talk about some of the specific research and tools the University of Chicago has produced around young adolescent learning and development that they are able to offer their partner schools, how they selected schools to participate in the project and what they are doing to set up educators to work within and across schools on problems of practice specific to middle grades, the challenges and opportunities their school partners are wrestling with, and what they are learning that could be helpful to the broader field.

Additional Readings and Resources

• University of Chicago To&Through Project
  • To&Through Data Tool
  • Middle Grades Network Pilot Cohort webpage
  • Middle Grades Network Op-ed 
• University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research
  • On-Track Indicator
  • Teaching Adolescents to Become Learners, Camille A. Farrington, Melissa Roderick, Elaine Allensworth, Jenny Nagaoka, Tasha Seneca Keyes, David W. Johnson, and Nicole O. Beechum, June 2012
  • Looking Forward to High School and College: Middle Grade Indicators of Readiness in Chicago Public Schools, Elaine M. Allensworth, Julia A. Gwynne, Paul Moore, and Marisa de la Torre, November 2014.
  • Foundations for Young Adult Success: A Developmental Framework, Jenny Nagaoka, Camille A. Farrington, Stacy B. Ehrlich, and Ryan D. Heath with David W. Johnson, Sarah Dickson, Ashley Cureton Turner, Ashley Mayo, and Kathleen Hayes, June 2015.
  • Hidden Risk: Changes in GPA across the Transition to High School, Alex Seeskin, Jenny Nagaoka, and Shelby Mahaffie, October 2018.
  • Network for College Success

This episode features a conversation with Chris Balme, Founder of Argonaut, a new live online community that offers young adolescents opportunities for hands-on experiences to develop wisdom, kindness and real-world skill. Chris has founded a handful of successful organizations, all centered on the learning and development of young adolescents, including the Spark Program and Millennium School. His drive to build new and different opportunities for middle schoolers comes in part from his own unhappy experience in those years, and a frustration he has with the low expectations commonly ascribed to middle school.

Chris and Jason talk about Chris's strong feeling that the middle school experience needs to be more relevant for young adolescents and cater to what young adolescents are “here to do,” the advantages of creating a laboratory school in the middle grades with freedom to experiment and then share things of use to the field, his approach to translating the science of learning and development into specific educational practices, and what fuels his unsatiated entrepreneurial proclivities.

Additional Readings and Resources

• chrisbalme.com and Chris's blog
• Argonaut advisory program for middle school, built around the Essential Experiences curriculum
• Millennium School and Millennium Forum
• "Talking in Circles: An In-School, Relationship-Centered Approach," a case study on Millennium Forum in Social and Emotional Learning in Early Adolescence: Tapping Into the Power of Relationships and Mentoring, MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership, 2019: pp. 24-28.
• A. P. Giannini Middle School, San Francisco Unified School District
• Spark Program
• Chris's Reading List
  • Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence, by Laurence Steinberg, 2015
  • Permission to Feel, by Marc Brackett, PhD, 2019
  • How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, by Lisa Feldman Barrett

This episode features a conversation with Rob Jagers, Vice President for Research at CASEL: The Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning, the leading resource for the knowledge, practice and policy around SEL. From the start of his career to his current position, Rob has had a particular interest in the role SEL plays in the learning and development of young people of color, and how it can best be seen as used as a resource to promote racial equity.

Rob and Jason talk about how young people receive SEL in different ways, and which ways are more constructive and effective than others, how focusing on SEL for adults is just as important as for youth, why the field of education as a whole needs a new paradigm for research, and why CASEL formulated guidance for schools reopening in fall 2020 - after being shut down or remote since the spring - on the foundation of relationships.

Note that Rob and Jason talked just before the start of the 2020-2021 school year, but the guidance on meaningfully using SEL is salient now and for the foreseeable future.

Additional Readings and Resources

• Reunite, Renew, Thrive: Social and Emotional Roadmap (SEL) for Reopening School from CASEL
• A Nation At Hope: Recommendations from the National Commission on Social, Emotional and Academic Development
• National Commission on Social, Emotional and Academic Development: A Research Agenda for the Next Generation by Stephanie Jones, Camille A. Farrington, Robert Jagers, and Marc Brackett, with Jennifer Kahn
• The Impact of Enhancing Students' Social and Emotional Learning: A Meta-Analysis of School-Based Universal Interventions by Joseph A. Dulak, Roger P. Weissberg, Allison B. Dymnicki, Rebecca D. Taylor, and Kriston B. Schellinger
• Transformative Social and Emotional Learning (SEL): Toward SEL in Service of Educational Equity and Excellence, by Robert J. Jagers, Deborah Rivas-Drake, & Brittney Williams 

This episode features a conversation with Laura Ross, a school counselor for Five Forks Middle School in the Gwinnett County Public School District in Georgia and the 2020 School Counselor of the Year. Laura has been touted for her work at Five Forks, particularly in the areas of discipline and restorative justice, and for creating what she calls a “connectedness culture.”

Laura and Jason talk about how her early experiences working with incarcerated adults motivated her to work with young people, how she and her colleagues have managed to engage their middle school students in a time of pandemic, remote learning and racial dialog, and how people’s unclear perceptions of the role of school counselors may be driving the current lack of investment in counseling as a whole, despite it being an essential support for youth in the early adolescent years.

Additional Readings and Resources

• Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain by Zaretta Hammond
• National School Counselor Association and the National School Counselor of the Year Award 
• ADL's No place for Hate
• Beyond Differences' No one eats alone
• Gwinnett County Public Schools

This episode features a conversation with Joanna Lee Williams, associate professor at the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers University. 

Joanna and Jason cover how young adolescents are impacted by bias-motivated violence, why media surrounding events like Charlottesville amplify this type of violence, and how these events have a cumulative effect on young people, especially young people of color, in their formative years. 

Professor Williams recently served on the academic committee to develop the Promise of Adolescence, a report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Math. She also recently released some of her own research on the reaction of young adolescents to the 2017 Unite the Right white supremacy rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and what it may tell us about engaging middle schoolers in conversations about race. 

Additional Readings and Resources

“From Apathy To Vigilance: Middle School Students' Reactions To The 2017 Unite The Right Rally,” a presentation by Joanna Lee Williams, Ph.D., with co-authors Haley Johnson, Lauren Mims, Kimalee Dickerson, Andrea Negrete, & Miray Seward for the Center for Race and Public Education in the South, March 5, 2019.

The Promise of Adolescence: Realizing Opportunity for All Students, National Academies of Science, Engineering and Math, 2019.