Emotions are Skills…

The understanding of the influence of emotions on thinking and learning has undergone a major transformation in recent years.

We all have good and bad days; moments of excitement, engagement, and inspiration and moments of disappointment, disengagement, and frustration; some topics that we find interesting and some that we do not. These differences influence how children learn and how teachers teach. In short, learning is dynamic, social and context dependent because emotions form a critical piece of how, what, when, and why people think, remember, and learn.

The understanding of the influence of emotions on thinking and learning has undergone a major transformation in recent years. Emotions interfere with learning. It is literally impossible to build memories, engage complex thoughts, or make meaningful decisions without emotion. The brain is highly metabolically expensive tissue, and evolution would not support wasting energy and oxygen thinking about things that do not matter to us. We only think about things we care. This insight has important implications for education. It opens questions about how, when, and why students learn meaningfully, how technology, culture, and social relationships shape learning and how teachers can understand and leverage emotions more productively in the classroom.

To have a hope of motivating students, of producing deep understanding, or of transferring into real-world skills, we need to find ways to leverage the emotional aspects of learning in education.

To leverage emotions, it helps to understand what emotions are. Emotions are action programs that have evolved as extensions of survival mechanisms. They have evolved to keep us alive. Human beings have basic emotions, such as fear and disgust; we have social emotions such as love. Thanks to our emotions, we can also develop curiosity to make us explore and discover, admiration to make us emulate the virtue of others, and compassion, indignation, interest.

The feeling of these emotions organizes our sociality and morality. It forms the basis for creativity and invention and for the decisions we make for now and for the future, even in academic contexts. For example, the act of dedicating one’s professional life to teaching is possible only because of our ability to feel these emotions.

Emotions are essential to managing life. An efficient life management means managing not just our physical survival but our social life and intellectual life. Just as poets and artists have suspected for millennia, we feel social relationships and intellectual achievements using the same brain systems that sense and regulate our guts and viscera, adjust our blood chemistry and hormones.

Emotions, such as interest, inspiration, indignation, and compassion, are active mental constructions. They pertain to what we think we know about the world at the current time, interpreted in light of our experiences and our imagined possible futures, using our available skills. They rely on subjective, cognitive interpretations of situations and their accompanying embodied reactions.

Meaningful learning is actually about helping students to connect their skills to abstract, intrinsically emotional, subjective and meaningful experiences. It appears to be essential for the development of truly useful, transferable, intrinsically motivated learning.

In addition, emotions develop with maturity and experience. In this sense, emotions are organized patterns of thoughts and behaviours that we actively construct across our life spans to adaptively accommodate to various kinds of circumstances, including academic demands. The emotions of a pre-schooler are not the same as those of a fifth grader, a teenager, or a young or an older adult. The emotions of a new teacher are not the same as those of a veteran teacher.

Understanding emotions is about the ways in which students and teachers are experiencing or feeling their emotional reactions.

Emotions must be considered Skills.

Thanks to Mary Helen Immordino-Yang.