How Schools Are Failing Their Quietest Students

New York Magazine:

In 2013, educator and writer Jessica Lahey wrote a convincing piece for The Atlantic in which she argued that her introverted students needed to learn to speak up in class. In it, she defended her decision to keep class participation as a small but significant portion of her students’ grades. The quieter kids in the class simply needed to learn how to speak up in “a world where most people won’t stop talking,” she wrote.

Two years later, she changed her mind.

…

One of their central arguments is that introverts are different from extroverts not just on a behavioral level — their physiology is distinct, too, in a real, measurable way. Research in psychology dating back to the 1960s backs this notion up: In a classic, often-cited study, for example, researchers placed four drops of lemon juice onto the tongues of 100 volunteers. Those who scored higher in introversion had a markedly different reaction to the sour taste, with an increased production of saliva. In his 2013 book, Me, Myself and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-Being, University of Cambridge psychologist Brian Little touches on that in a section on introversion and extroversion.

Read the whole story: New York Magazine