No emotions, no learning (and no teaching)…

Our brain is an extraordinary learning machine.

We could define learning as the addition of new information to the existing one; it happens by activating the construction of new neural networks that functionally link up with those already existing.

Our brain constantly make thousands of postulations trough thousands of connections with other neurons. When the postulations are overturned, new postulations replace the former ones. This constant repetition inside our brains is called Neuroplasticity.

Our brain is an extraordinary learning machine.

Memory permits to store information and then recalled it as needed. The more we activate connections, the more often they will be strengthened, constituting long-term memory, while those that are not will be weakened.

Teachers teach better and students learn better, when they both know how their brains work: they need to know they have the ability to restructure their brains to become superior teachers and learners at any point in time. For these purposes, emotions are key.

In schools all over the world, we have millions of teachers and students with their emotions faded. Their brain is overwhelmed by anxiety, fear, anger, boredom, tiredness. Teachers have to support their students’ social and emotional needs before dwelling upon academic learning. Nevertheless, before of that, educators have to be trained and provided with adequate tools that create emotional adjustments and empathy for themselves and their students.

1. Focus

The truth is that humans are not good at multi-tasking. Experiments have depicted that it is very difficult for our brains to pay attention to more than an item at a time. Attention and focus are the filtering mechanisms that allow us to select information and to adjust processing.

2. Active Engagement

Research has proven that our brains do not learn passively. We learn by doing, therefore we should practice Active Listening (Teachers) and Active Learning (Students).

3. Immediate Feedback

Our brain is continuously making predictions and adjusting projections, depending on the feedback it receives. Feedback is therefore necessary for brain to process and readjust to learning, depending on the positive or negative feedback received. Trial and error are essential for learning and there should be no stress linked to making mistakes as this inhibits learning.

4. Associations

When we learn something new, our prefrontal cortex put together our entire asset to achieve this learning. When we duplicate this task repeatedly, the learning progressively becomes faster, more efficient, frees up gaps for new learning.

5. Sleep

Sleep is extremely crucial. During sleep, the algorithms of our brains reiterate everything learnt during the day, encoding new hypotheses for the next day that boost our life-long journey of teaching and learning.

Fail to Learn: We need to expose ourselves to failure to succeed

We live in a no-mistake culture:  making mistakes is bad, is wrong, something to avoid anyway, something to punish. Standard Education is one of the big supporter.

Trial and error is the best (I would say the only) way for our brain to learn efficiently. During the learning path, it must be able to make mistakes as often as necessary to understand and learn in a natural way, without guilt or shame feelings.

Mistakes mean action toward progress. It means we are making brain connections and we are identifying areas of weakness to improve. If our brain can identify the mistake and find the solution (self-correction), it will be more likely to commit that information to its long-term memory. 

We must embrace that perfection does not exist, so when our brain stops pursuing perfection, it will be less frustrated and more pleased with small victories and steady progress over time.

As Educators, we must battle the no-mistake culture. We can encourage and leverage mistakes to make them a regular part of the learning process. We must give learners the opportunity to correct their own mistakes and never let them be embarrassed or intimidated by saying the wrong thing.

Mistake strengthens confidence.

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.

Multitasking exhausts our brain…

The multiple activities crammed into our day and the constant switching between them make us very tired.

Our morning routine consists of checking emails, browsing Facebook, reading Twitter, watching Instagram, drinking coffee, Googling, checking notifications, more coffee, and so on.

The multiple activities crammed into our day and the constant switching between them make us very tired.

This switching is exhausting. It uses up oxygenated glucose in the brain, running down the same fuel that has needed to focus on a task.

That switching comes with a biological cost that ends up making us feel tired much more quickly than if we sustain attention on one thing. We tend to eat more and drink more coffee. Often what we really need in that moment is just a break.

Studies have found that people who take 15-minutes breaks every couple of hours end up being more productive. These breaks must allow for mind wandering, whether you are walking, staring out the window, listening to music or reading. Everyone gets there in a different way.

There is some differences: If we are doing something on autopilot, such as the laundry, then it makes perfect sense to read a book at the same time. Attempting to do two challenging tasks at once will lead to a drain in productivity. We cannot do two demanding, even simple tasks, in parallel.

The solution is to give up on multitasking and set aside dedicated chunks of time for each separate activity.

Let us try to check our email in the morning and again at midday and set aside 10 minutes per afternoon for social networks.

Let me know what happens…