High Standards, High Support: Transforming Engagement in International Schools (featuring Dom Verwey)

Dom, I wanted to pick your brain just a little bit.

So you're talking about motivation.

You're talking about leading with heart.

Of course, all these things I'm going to guess for our listeners are like, yes, this is where we want to be.

I know that you've done and you mentioned your master's kind of work and things like that along the lines of brain science.

I wanted to make a connection because I don't know as much maybe about it as I should.

And so I wanted to ask you.

So I'm a kid or maybe a parent of a kid who's looking into CAS.

And I'm just sitting there going, OK, well, I'm going to do it because it's a requirement.

Basically, what you were just describing as a potentially not best case scenario.

Tell me why I should do it.

do service? Why should I be involved from a benefit on the neural side of things? How does that connect?

I think every adolescent is going through a lot of developmental changes.

One of the ones that are heightened at this time is the prefrontal cortex, which is right at the front of the brain.

It really takes control of of executive functioning, higher order judgment and even mood and also understanding social dynamics and how to interact in your environment.

And the prefrontal cortex continues to develop all the way through to the sort of mid twenties.

But it's really around the adolescent stage where you're starting to really wire the brain in particular ways based on the environments that you're in.

The brain's gonna wire one way or another.

It's going to create pathways that are habitual and those pathways are gonna get strengthened over time and other pathways are gonna get pruned over time.

And you're going to eventually have these sort of habitual pathways that are your go-to when it comes to the things that the prefrontal cortex takes care of, like I mentioned before, social interaction, higher order functioning, et cetera.

Now, what is really interesting though is, and often not really spoken about, is that the limbic system, which is deeper within the brain, also grows and wires at an even more rapid rate during these adolescent phases than the prefrontal cortex does.

And a bit of a mismatch between the two, actually.

And for those of you that aren't familiar, the limbic system comprises of a few things, but one of them you might know of is the amygdala.

which really is a lot of our basal instincts, a lot of raw emotion, fear, you know, all of those things are seated in that area of the brain.

It's also a much earlier evolved portion of the brain.