How Sports and Coaching Influence Social Emotional Learning in Young People

Hans Hermann: Welcome to Critical Window, a podcast from the Alliance for Excellent Education that explores the rapid changes happening in the body and the brain during adolescence and what these changes mean for educators, policymakers, and communities. This week on Critical Window we’re learning how sports and coaching influence the social, emotional, and academic development of students, and what educators and coaches can learn from one another. Our guest today is Jennifer Brown Lerner. She’s the deputy director for Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program where she’s responsible for strategy, management, and community work.

Previously she was the assistant director for policy and partnership for the National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development where she managed the policy subcommittee and the Partners Collaborative. Prior to Aspen Jennifer served as the deputy director of the American Youth Policy Forum. She also worked as a classroom teacher, a coach, and a communications officer. Jennifer received her bachelor’s from the University of Pennsylvania and her master’s from Teachers College, Columbia University. Welcome to the show, Jennifer.

J. Brown Lerner: Thanks, Hans. Glad to be here.

Hans Hermann: So let’s start by talking about your work at Aspen’s National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development. Throughout this conversation, for those listening, we’ll be referring to the National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development as SEAD, or the Commission for short. So for those not familiar, could you provide an overview of Aspen’s history and programs as well as the work, the research base, and the participants in the SEAD Commission?

J. Brown Lerner: So the Commission was a policy initiative of the Aspen Institute, which is a well-recognized convening organization driven by values-based leadership. The Commission was comprised of 25 prominent voices across education, business, philanthropy, military, and the government, and it had six advisory bodies which were critical to developing its final recommendations, and those six advisory bodies included research scientists, educators, young people, parents, our partners, and our funders.

And so to understand the Commission’s work I think it’s really important to start where the Commission started, and the first thing that they did was spend a lot of time with each of their advisory bodies, and the one that became the foundation for where the recommendations stand and how they move forward were the research scientists. So to understand the research scientists advising the Commission, you need to understand that they tapped voices not just from traditional education research but from neuroscience, from psychology, from biology, from sociology, from history, a real range of academicians and researchers who grounded the Commission in a couple of foundational learnings which were essential for how the Commission shaped and framed its final recommendation and its communication to the broader field.

The first and the point that I think stands in front of all of the other things that we heard was we need to get away from this confusing terminology that exists in the space around social-emotional learning or social-emotional and academic development, and really understand a couple of pretty simple things about learning. First, learning is social and emotional and cognitive, and what that means is that there are three categories of foundational skills which are essential to learning, whether it be academic learning, whether it be on-the-job learning, whether it be learning at home. These are the elements that are just foundational to learning, and I’m just going to take a minute to go through those ’cause I think they’re critical to this conversation.

So the first is around cognitive skills and competencies, and these are the underlying ability to pay attention, to stay focused, to plan, to organize, to goal set, and to solve problems. The second is social interpersonal skills. This is about your relationships with people. This is about how you read social cues, navigate social situations, how you negotiate conflict, and how you work on a team. And the final category around emotional skills and competencies is not only how you regulate and manage your own emotions, but how you cope with frustration, how you deal with stress, and how you demonstrate respect and empathy for others and have the ability to take their perspective as well.

So if these are our foundational skills, there’s a couple of other things that are also really critical to understand. One, these skills develop over time and can be taught and learned. This idea of that they are caught and taught is really important. We need to think about that. Learning happens in relationships, and this is a really critical point, that all of these skills happen based upon a young person’s relationship with their environment, with their educators, or with their peers. And then finally we have some research to demonstrate that social, emotional, and cognitive development, or an emphasis on social, emotional, cognitive development, can offset some of the impacts of trauma.

Hans Hermann: So then what did the SEAD Commission tell us about the impact of social-emotional learning on the development of youth and their academic performance?

J. Brown Lerner: Yeah, so I think the Commission put forth a really important theory of change that focuses on how learning settings impact a student’s experience and then move us towards a broader set of desired student outcomes. When we think about learning settings we, one, we have to think about all of the places and spaces that young people grow and develop, and I’m looking forward to talking about all those places with you later on. We need to think about in those places in which young people learn and relationship, do they feel safe, supported, and feel like they belong? Are they being explicitly taught the core skills which we know are foundational to learning, in addition to the critical academic content that we want them to master? And do they have opportunities to practice those skills or demonstrate mastery of those skills, both their social-emotional-cognitive and academic skills.

When we create learning settings that are, address these three elements, we see a different type of student experience, one in which young people are able to take more leadership roles, where they’re able to take more ownership in their learning, and obviously also see more engagement in their own learning. And finally because they are more engaged, more willing, more ready to learn, we’re seeing improvement in outcomes across four domains. We’re seeing improvement in academic outcomes both in K-12 as well as in higher education in terms of increased number of students prepared to be successful in higher education. We are seeing easier ability for young people to transition into careers because they have more of those core workforce ready or employer desired skills.

And then finally, and most critical at this point in time, we are seeing young people that are more willing, more engaged, and more desire to participate in both community life and civic life, and that makes me hopeful for our country moving forward.

Hans Hermann: Thank you. So you mentioned earlier that the Commission had a youth advisory group.

J. Brown Lerner: Yep.

Hans Hermann: What did that youth advisory group convey about their social-emotional development?

J. Brown Lerner: We were really lucky in that we had a group of about 20 young people that served as advisors to the commissioners, and they were very generous with their time and their personal stories. And what they did in the process of the Commission is articulate what they called a call to action, what they needed from their learning environments in order to be successful. And I’m just gonna read their four critical points ’cause I think they’re well said, and in the voices of the young people that were involved with the Commission.

We need schools to be safe with a strong sense of community. We need to learn and be evaluated as whole students and whole people. We need our teachers and educators to know us and understand us. We need our families and communities to be embraced as partners in our learning. I think those four statements are really simple, but I think really reflect what young people want out of their learning experience and are really guideposts for how we can shape youth centered, youth driven learning experiences.

Hans Hermann: Yeah, simple but powerful. Really –

J. Brown Lerner: Absolutely.

Hans Hermann: – gets to the point about what they want, and I think it’s a message for all the adults in the room to listen more to the young people and hear what they would like out of their learning experience.

J. Brown Lerner: Yeah.

Hans Hermann: So as you know, at All4Ed we focus on the developmental period of adolescence. Were there some findings that the SEAD Commission had regarding adolescent aged students that were different compared to other age groups?

J. Brown Lerner: I’m not the expert on in any way, shape, or form, but am really thrilled that our set of advising research scientists began some of this really hard work, and so as part of the effort of the Commission they did articulate a developmental progression of the skills and the social, emotional, and cognitive categories, and they demonstrated what they look like or what are the most critical skills to be developed in different age bands. And so one thing that you can notice in the progression towards adolescence is the critical role that identity plays in the development of these skills, and so both a young person’s own sense of self and the identity that one believes others perceive you to have.

I think the interplay of this idea of how you view yourself and how you think the world is viewing you is really critical to how young people think about their own set of skills at, particularly in this phase of adolescence.

Hans Hermann: And that bears out in what we’ve put together, too, in our work, that identity, as you said, is this critical domain for adolescent – and not that identity development isn’t happening throughout the lifespan, but it is really happening in that period for a variety of reasons. I don’t know if you wanted to add something to that.

J. Brown Lerner: No, I think that’s right. I mean obviously at all points of time you sort of do have a sense of self, but I think what we’re seeing is at this point in adolescence is that this acute awareness of sense of self that is both internal and external, how you view yourself and how you perceive to be viewed by the world, really shapes how you interact with the environment that you’re in, and that environment involves not only your peers but adults in a variety of different roles within your family, within your community, and how that impacts your overall ability for learning is really critical. And we mentioned trauma earlier, and where do those – where is the interplay of trauma and identity in this adolescent phase of life that we probably, that we know we haven’t fully explored yet, I think is a really interesting area for future research.

Hans Hermann: Absolutely. Here we have a report coming out of the Alliance that talks a lot about this issue of identity development in adolescence, so if you’re interested you can go to our site and learn more about that when that comes out, and you also can go obviously to the Commission, their resources, to learn more about this issue. So the SEAD Commission has ended, so you’re no longer there and you’re now working with Aspen Sports & Society Program. Could you just explain what the Sports & Society Program does, what they focus on, and what about their work intrigued you and led you to join their team following the end of the SEAD Commission?

J. Brown Lerner: The Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program is about a five-year-old program at the Aspen Institute. It launched with focus and emphasis on reimagining youth sports, particularly the experience of young people age 12 and under in this country. Our founding executive director really felt like we had lost the ability for true play in young people and that our sports culture had become obsessed with winning, and so the program launched with an effort to listen to communities across the country and find out what they felt like were the critical actions that can be taken to ensure that all young people have access to high-quality sports opportunities as a mechanism to build thriving communities.

And so the program launched an initiative called Project Play, which is eight plays for eight sectors, which are eight really big ideas focused on eight very different sectors that have impact over youth sports. And our job as the Sports & Society Program is really to compel others to action, to think about what are these really big ideas and how do we build tools and resources and provide the information and tell the great stories of what’s going on so that we can truly increase opportunities for access to high-quality sports.

Why did I want to do this? Well, first and foremost I’m a mom of two active boys who are embracing one of our really big ideas around sports sampling, and both of my kids are multi-sport athletes which is exhausting as a parent but super exciting to see. Each of my kids now in, as fourth and fifth graders, are on separate teams which of course makes for a lot more carpool, but really has given them this unbelievable opportunity for them to grow and develop, to interact with young people in our neighborhood as well as across the whole city, and I really see sports as a place that my own children have been given an opportunity to be successful, but also to fail effectively.

And so when I think about social, emotional, and academic development, I really think about sports as this critical space in which they get to both see modeled and practice this core set of competencies across the social, emotional, and cognitive domains in a way in which they actually are in charge. Yeah, the coach is telling them what to do, but as they’re entering the upper elementary years and really sort of into early adolescence they have a unique opportunity for voice and choice on the sports field that they don’t have in the classroom that is really allowing them to come into their own.

But I would be remiss if I didn’t take this time to plug the joint project that the Commission and the Sports & Society Program did. We together worked on a project that dove deep into the research around the role that coaches play in developing social-emotional skills, and we produced a great publication called Calls for Coaches which lists seven calls for coaches along with very specific practices that coaches can adopt to create the culture and environment for the development of social-emotional skills.

Hans Hermann: Sounds like a great resource.

J. Brown Lerner: It’s a fabulous resource and I encourage you all to download it from the Aspen Institute website. And the best part of the resource is, is the back page is a tear-off for coaches to put on their clipboard or keep in their practice bag of all of the practices, and so it’s a real how-to guide of small things that you can do at the beginning of each practice, at the beginning of each game, or at the end of the season, just at different points across the lifespan of a sports team to really be more intentional about the development of social-emotional skills.

Hans Hermann: You were talking about this idea of sports being this other place for this development of social, emotional, cognitive skills. I find oftentimes when I’m talking to folks about students’ learning development that the conversation is really limited to what’s happening in the schoolhouse. So how does your work in the Sports & Society Program push us to reconsider how other spaces outside of the schoolhouse influence youth development?

J. Brown Lerner: Yeah. So that’s a really great question, and so the first thing I would say is that I’m really lucky in that one of the cornerstones of the Commission was really expanding this idea of where and when learning happens. And so the Commission heard early on from all of its advisory groups that if we were narrow minded and thinking that learning only happens in classrooms in schools that we were missing this incredible opportunity for alignment around the critical skills that are essential to how learning happens. And so the Commission came out with a fabulous graphic which puts young people and their families at the center, because we have to think about families as the first learning experience and first educators for every young person, but also named all the places and spaces that learning happens, those formal spaces within schools and those informal spaces within schools, but then how those informal spaces within schools bleed into all of these extracurricular and supplemental and other places in which young people grow and develop.

And so while sports might be a unique arena, it’s part of a broad array of places in which young people learn, grow, and develop, and it has its own language and culture that is unique, but I think in this sense of the foundational skills for how learning happens that we’re going to see over time more alignment between all of those places. And so I mean I think the other thing to think about is the dynamic between sports and education in classrooms as well. You could view sports as the ultimate performance assessment. Every game, every practice is really an opportunity for young people to put on display a core set of physical skills, physical as well as social-emotional skills that they’re learning, and there’s instantaneous feedback right there, a win or a loss.

But I also think it’s a really important opportunity in which young people can get, create a continuous feedback loop with their coaches, with other athletes, to really think about how do we in the process begin to make adjustments to what we’re doing, which is what we’re hoping they’d also in the classroom. And so I think there’s unbelievable opportunity to think about sports as a place in which young people can take ownership of their own learning, but also what can we learn from the practices of coaches to inform what educators do, a topic I hope we’ll talk about in a little bit.

Hans Hermann: Which we will. And so then why are sports an appropriate place to be talking about social-emotional learning and development?

J. Brown Lerner: Yeah, so, Hans, this is my favorite question to throw back at you, and I shared what I think my own children are getting out of sports, but I’m going to make an assumption that perhaps at one point in time that you were part of a team.

Hans Hermann: I did, yeah. And so you’re asking me why I think it’s important.

J. Brown Lerner: Yeah, so I mean talk, think about back to your own sports experience and share a little bit about that and share what you got out of it, and then maybe we can –

Hans Hermann: Yeah, I mean absolutely. I think a lot of people who have played sports probably can relate to this, but it’s, especially when you get older and you’re in your middle school, high school years, it’s a place where you find a lot of close friends. Then you also find adult mentors. So one in particular I think of, I had a soccer coach when I was in middle school named Jim Shrote who just was one of these, just these people I looked up to. Like the way he carried himself, the way he interacted with us. He treated us like adults and he created this environment where we respected one another and we worked hard for one another and we were willing to kind of put the time and effort in to be the best version of ourselves.

So it was – and he just was an excellent role model and he continued to be somebody throughout my life and into college and beyond that I look to as like somebody who really was able to just be a leader of people, and also just to kind of be the type of person I would want to be when I’m working with other folks, whether they’re younger or older. So certainly that, and then there are other coaches I had throughout, whether it was in track and field, in cross country later on, but certainly I can – in everything that you’re talking about, yeah, I can relate to in different ways, and I’ve thought back to my own experiences. So definitely something that it seems appropriate to be talking about this topic there because it’s a space where you are learning how to just work with people and how to be successful in that regard.

J. Brown Lerner: Yeah, and I mean I think this is why we’ve separated all these places and spaces that kids, young people learn, grow, and develop is silly. You gained so much from your own experience on the soccer field, and you mentioned other teams that you were part of. We really need to blend and sort of bleed into the ideas and the culture that was created in all of these places in which young people, as you just articulated, feel supported, encouraged, and can continue to experiment with their leadership and their sense of self. This dichotomy of sports versus school seems like the antithesis to this idea of social, emotional and academic development as the foundation for how we learn.

Hans Hermann: So then let’s talk a little bit about what we’ve – throughout the conversation has been brought up about adult role models. We know adolescence is a period – talking again about this focus that we have at the Alliance in adolescence – it’s a period of changing social dynamics and there’s an increased prevalence of peer relationships. What is the importance then of having adult role models like coaches in an adolescent’s life?

J. Brown Lerner: I think, Hans, you did an incredible job of articulating that before when you described one of your, the coaches that had the most impact on your life. I mean this was a person who modeled behavior that you too wanted to carry through in your life, not only as a young athlete but as a student, as a future employee. And so I think that there’s a different dynamic with the coach-athlete relationship than there is with a student-teacher relationship. John Urschel, who is a former NFL player who is now a PhD student in mathematics, he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on May 11th, said math teachers should be more like football coaches. I mean really talked about how he had a dream of earning a scholarship to a Big Ten school to play football, even though he was a scrawny 220 pounds and played on the offensive line.

He said that his football coaches were the ones that really encouraged and supported him. They spent the extra hours making videos with him or watching video with him or filling out applications. And he did, for those of you that don’t know his story, he did get a scholarship to Penn State. He majored in mathematics. He played for the Ravens for about three seasons, and subsequently has gone back and is a PhD candidate. But what he’s saying is that he never had a math teacher in high school that encouraged him to explore math or to see math as the, his pathway to greatness the way that his football coaches did.

And so what does that say about the dynamic between educators and their students? That they are, they don’t feel compelled to encourage young people to follow their dreams. And I don’t say this in any way to be derogatory towards educators ’cause I think they are facing unbelievable demands and pressure to get students to perform, but if we truly believe that learning happens in relationships I think that we need to give all educators in the classroom, on the sports field, the time, the tools, and the opportunity to cultivate the fire and passion within each student, which only happens when you have the opportunity to build a relationship.

Hans Hermann: Do historically underserved students, and for those listening when I’m talking about historically underserved students I’m talking about low-income students or students of color, do they have the same opportunities as their peers to be involved in sports and have access to good coaching?

J. Brown Lerner: Yeah, so this is a great question and I think it’s tied up in a couple of issues that I hope we have a little bit of time to discuss but maybe are a whole other podcast. So first in terms of this access issue, we don’t have great data in terms of the sports facilities that are available nationally. We’ve got some really great and interesting data around participation rates, and one thing or one troubling trend that we are seeing right now is that for girls in rural and urban areas, which often can be considered under resources, we’re seeing a decline in participation. And this is not the same for suburban girls, which we can make some assumptions about the access that they have to facilities, but I think the decline in participation in sports is linked overall to we’re seeing a decrease in support for, overall for supplemental activities, whether it be decrease in investment in after school, in arts, in STEM opportunities. I think that’s a trend that we have.

I also think that there’s two other points that I want to put out there that are related in terms of access in underserved communities that are worth exploring, and perhaps not today but just food for thought for listeners. First, sports are often seen as a ticket to higher education for young people, particularly young people from low-income families, that this is their only – low, I would say low and middle-income families – that this is their only opportunity to access higher education. And so I think that there’s, particularly in this moment, and we’re seeing massive admission scandals and concerns about impacts on student athletes, we need to have a serious conversation about whether or not sports is the only access to true financial aid in higher education.

The second issue is around availability of sports. I think that there’s a set of sports which are often referred to as elite sports which are not available at every school, and what does this mean for young people from low resource communities? Does this make sense? Is this the right way to go? Or should we be thinking about equal access to all sports for all kids, and what should the parameters be around what are all sports? Is it every sport that’s in the Olympics? Is it the national sport of any country or any community? I think these are the things that we have to think about and struggle with when we think about increasing access to high-quality sports.

Hans Hermann: And could you clarify for a moment, when you said elite sports earlier, what do you mean? Can you give a couple of examples?

J. Brown Lerner: Yeah, so I think people often refer to swimming as an elite sport because the access to a pool or a pool that you can train in isn’t available to everyone. But then you could also think about sports which are unique to certain climates or certain areas, for example bobsled. You know, ironically there are a significant number of bobsledders from the state of Florida, but that is because they often recruit track and field athletes to join bobsled training teams. So I think particularly space intensive sports are often viewed as elite sports because it’s hard to get access to those spaces. You know, a single field that can have multi use for baseball, for soccer, for football, for track and field means that there are more sports available, but courts or pools or equipment-heavy sports like bobsled are examples of can often be viewed as elite sports.

Hans Hermann: So you mentioned in a previous conversation that we had that effective teaching and coaching are grounded in the same science, and you started talking about that just now and throughout this conversation. You mentioned as we were talking that there’s a disconnect, though, in the language that coaches and educators use to talk about their work. Could you elaborate on what you mean by this disconnect and this idea of using the same science, and then how you and your team at Aspen are working to bridge this communication gap between coaches and educators?

J. Brown Lerner: Yeah, so this is a great question, and it really goes back to the piece that the Commission jointly wrote with the Sports & Society Program, and when we put this framework out here which focused on the social, emotional and cognitive skills as foundational to learning, that made a ton of sense to me coming from the K-12 education space. We got a lot of blank stares when we shared it with coaches. Yeah, they really appreciated the practices, but this framework that we built around these foundational skills, they sort of, their eyes just glazed over. I mean I think they – you know, I think we often time feel siloed in K-12 education or education more generally around the terminology we use.

You often see a disconnect between the language that educators use when they communicate with parents and that they aren’t a hundred percent sure what they’re talking about. No different here in sports and education. Interestingly, our framework made a ton of sense to school-based coaches, but for community-based coaches the idea of social, emotional and cognitive skills sort of was like well beyond anything that they had known. They said, “Oh, I went to this training and they said I have to develop character.” Or, “Oh, I have to develop purpose-driven athletes.” And in reality is, is we’re all talking about the same thing. We just cannot have any consensus around naming what these specific skills are, but at its core we’re really trying to give young people the skills, knowledge, and ability that they need to interact with others, regulate their own emotions, and pay attention and set goals.

And so I think we’re, when we get into more specific skills we see more alignment between coaches and educators, but a lot of our wonky terminology that is unique to the K-12 space doesn’t resonate in other spaces.

Hans Hermann: So you’ve talked about it throughout the conversation, but let’s wrap a bow on this idea of what teachers can learn from coaches, and then what coaches can learn from teachers about building strong social, emotional, and academic skills in their players and students.

J. Brown Lerner: Yeah, so I think I’m gonna hark back on this point that I’ve said throughout the conversation. I think at the core of learning is the relationship, and one thing that great coaches do is really focus in on that individual relationship with each player, and they also create a space and environment and a culture that honors the relationship that others have with – other players have with each other. I don’t think that teachers have the ability, the time, the space to focus in on that in their classrooms because they have so many different demands, but I would argue that that is the most critical piece that they need to do.

In the Commission we were lucky enough to visit tons of classrooms across the country, and one of the things that still strikes me is that we were sitting down with an educator from Boston, I think, who said to us, “My job is to teach students math. I have no way in which I can teach them math if I don’t spend the first two weeks building a relationship and building the culture that I want in my classroom. I never once open a textbook. I never ask them to do a worksheet. I spend two weeks just on that.” All of his students had gone on to be very successful, many of them taking AP courses, and great scores on standardized tests. I think what we need to take away from the sports space is how critical that relationship is to success, but similarly I think that educators do an incredible job of naming the skills that they want students to develop and that’s not a strength of coaches.

And so I think there’s a real opportunity to build a bridge between what educators do really well in terms of planning and articulating for young people, and how coaches create relationships and environments which are truly young people centered, and then we can just see an explosion of growth of these core skills across all the places and spaces young people learn.

Hans Hermann: So then what is the role of school leaders, superintendents and principals, in this work that you’re doing? Do they have a role in providing these type of sports experience to students or creating this collaboration? What should they be doing?

J. Brown Lerner: Yeah, so that’s a great question, and first and foremost I think everybody has a role. Right? Like we all have a role no matter who we are in creating places that – or creating all of the places and spaces which young people grow and develop. But principals and district leaders in particular I think have a couple of critical roles. One, they are decision makers at the district and school level in terms of where resources are spent and they can’t assume that exclusively pouring resources into the classroom at the expense of all the supplemental opportunities, sports included, is a great idea. So they have to be brave in continuing to allow for resources. It doesn’t necessarily have to be dollars. They could think about partnership that move folks in that direction.

But I also think that as school leaders and district leaders, that they truly are the leaders of the culture and so they too have to articulate this prioritization of all of the places and spaces in which young people learn. I mean I think about as an athlete myself how – particularly a high school athlete, how cool I thought it was when the principal showed up at any one of my games, and I think it’s small things like that. Or classrooms teachers showing up. I mean this is supporting young people in all the places that they grow and develop.

Hans Hermann: So then what do you see – and this will be our last question today. What do you see as the next steps for implementing large-scale policies and practices that bolster students’ access to effective sports programs and continue to integrate these programs into the schoolhouse?

J. Brown Lerner: Yeah, so this is a really great question and I think that there’s a lot of real interesting opportunities that are happening. For example, the Department of Health and Human Services is currently leading the development of the National Youth Sports Strategy, and so this is the strategy at the federal level that really will articulate what the federal government can do to ensure more access to high-quality opportunities for sport. And they’ve had their first listening session, and they will have a draft out sometime this summer. So for any of your listeners that are in – that care about this, encourage you to comment on the forthcoming draft.

In addition, Tom Farrey, the executive director of the Aspen Sports & Society Program, published a piece in the New York Times about two weeks ago that described Norway’s Children’s Right to Sport, which is a commitment that that country has made around increasing access to sports opportunities. It’s both a financial commitment and a human capital commitment, which has been now aligned with Norway’s unbelievable sweep of medals at the Winter Olympics. But is there a role for the federal government or state and local governments to make a commitment to young people that they will have access to high-quality sports opportunities, and what does that commitment look like, is a really interesting discussion for us to be having as a country right now.

Hans Hermann: Thank you so much for our conversation today. I really enjoyed it. Our guest is Jennifer Brown Lerner. She is the deputy director for the Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program where she’s responsible for the strategy, management, and community work. Thank you so much.

J. Brown Lerner: Thank you.

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Announcer: Thank you for listening to Critical Window, the Alliance for Excellent Education’s podcast on how the research from the science of adolescent learning can inform middle and high school design and the work of school leaders. Tell your colleagues, friends, and families about Critical Window, and please subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher to make sure you catch future episodes. This podcast was produced by Aharon Charnov, Hans Hermann, and Robin Harper. To learn more about the science of adolescent learning visit all4ed.org/sal.

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