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.

Educating to silence, in silence…

Silence is often seen as a negative in the typical classroom; however, use of silence is a neglected aspect of teaching. It can be a powerful tool in the teaching and learning process.

According to a study, silence in the classroom produces:

Dramatic impact

Relaxation

Focus, discipline and control

Inner reflection

Creative space for thoughts and dreams

Feeling of Freedom

Comfort and security

Education: The importance of training the heart as well as the mind.

“A school curriculum that incorporates happiness and wellbeing will prevent depression, increase life satisfaction, encourage social responsibility, promote creativity, foster learning and even enhance academic achievement.”

The combination of traditional education with happiness and wellbeing is key for an efficient learning process. It emphasises the importance of training the heart as well as the mind.

Education has always focused on academics and fostering positive character strength development. Any efforts to endorse character strengths come from religious, cultural, or political bias.

At a communication level, strength-based interventions also focus on the relationship between teachers and students. Teachers are a big influence on student and the simple attention to wording of positive reinforcement makes a difference.  When a teacher gives a feedback, it should be a specific feedback about the strength the student demonstrated.

Intelligence and academic competencies are not enough for students to succeed in school. Grit, resilience, and other character traits should be emphasized.

Happier students pay better attention, are more creative, and have greater levels of community involvement. They are more optimistic, resilient, hopeful, curious, highly motivated and they develop love for learning.

Emotional Intelligence: The Equalizer…

Some call it the other kind of smart or EQ (Emotional Quotient), and it is our ability to manage and regulate our emotions and apply them to different circumstances and tasks.

We refer to IQ Test to describe how smart we are, and as a result how capable we will be to get the job done. However, another factor is much more important in determining how well we manage our life: Emotional Intelligence.

Our EI or EQ does not only measure the ability to assess, motivate, or interact with other people, but it is also the capacity to examine one’s own potential for doing these things. Daniel Goleman says this is a “way of thinking about the ingredients of life success.” 

Today, business world pays attention to EI when considering new candidates and training their employees.

Research now point to Emotional Intelligence as the critical factor that sets star performers apart from the rest of the pack. This is because EI affects how we relate to others, and how we navigate the complex web of social encounters that surrounds us. When we can identify certain emotions, know where they are coming from, and how we can better manage them, it becomes easier to deal with external circumstances.   

Our EI helps us to how well we tend to manage stressful situations and negative emotions by having a clear and multi-dynamic sense of the element that is causing us to feel a certain way.

Emotions and logic are contradictories. Nevertheless, they are necessary in high-stress level and constantly changing entrepreneurial environments. 

Emotional Intelligence is intangible. It is a flexible set of skills that can be acquired and improved with practice. Although some people are naturally more emotionally intelligent than others are, we can develop high emotional intelligence even if we are not born with it.

Once a negative mood takes over, we lose sight and suddenly our optimism about the future goes down. Emotional Intelligence keeps us mindful so that our emotions push us forward, instead of holding us back.

Reducing negative personalization, the fear of rejection, managing stress, and being assertive when expressing difficult emotions could help us to improve our EI.

It does not matter how many degrees or other on-paper qualifications a person has, if he does not have certain emotional qualities, he is unlikely to succeed.

As the way we work continues to evolve, these qualities may become increasingly important. This leads us to the other reason why Emotional Intelligence is even more important today than it has ever been in the past.

A high EQ will determine who succeeds in adapting to the changes that are to come and the challenges that we will have to face.

Brain works only with Focused Attention…

Our brain prioritizes survival above learning and emotion

Because our circuitry for survival is so strong, he pays attention to everything that feels threatening, unsafe, and unfamiliar. For students, testing, complicated topics, personal struggles, and challenging relationships could create a stress response state in their brains.

In a fight-flight-freeze response, his ability to think clearly, stay focused, and problem solve shuts down. Research repeatedly shows that quieting our minds ignites our parasympathetic nervous system, reducing heart rate and blood pressure while enhancing strategies to handle effectively the day-to-day challenges.

Several teachers in all grades have found these quieting practices very helpful. These practices, like any new skill, take much persistence and patience.

1. Breath

Sitting up nice and tall with both feet flat on the floor, take three slow, deep breaths down to the belly, breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth. Count to four on each inhale and five on each exhale, with a slight pause between the inhale and exhale. Following the three deep breaths, we then slowly turn our heads to the right on the inhale and left on the exhale. This movement is slow and deliberate. After two times each to the left and right, we then inhale while lifting our chins to the ceiling and exhale as our heads slowly move downward, touching our chins to our chests. We can repeat these movements or add our arms, the opening or closing of our hands, or any gesture that could move with the breath.

2. Touch

Students close their eyes and choose a small object out of a junk box or bag. This could be a paper clip, pencil, apple core, stick, leaf, an eraser, a pair of glasses, sock, a string or anything. For one minute or less, students keep their eyes closed and focus on the object through their other senses. Even though they might recognize the object, they should concentrate on the feel, texture, shape, angles, smell, or any aspect they notice. Following that minute of focus, the students can share the details, verbally describing what they noticed, or writing down their findings. Teachers could also throw the descriptions into a basket, and at the end of class or the day, students could select a description, guessing what the object is based on the written words.

3. Visualization

The brain responds to what we imagine as if it is an actual event. Feeling safe, peaceful, and connected with others are states of mind that can generate positive emotion and ease in critical thinking and problem solving. In our focused attention practices, we quiet the brain with safe place visualizations. The students sit quietly, closing their eyes as we verbally walk them into their favorite imaginative place. We then direct them to envision the sights, sounds, colors, and feel of their own safe place.

4. Sound

For two minutes, students close their eyes and listen for all the sounds around them. Once they have identified a sound, they capture it in their own way, such as envisioning a box around it. Students then share and compare the sounds that they heard and captured.

Maria Montessori, the first Neuroeducator…

Maria Montessori (1870 - 1952)

Maria Montessori was the first to propose an educational program focused on the child.

Maria Montessori was the first to propose an educational program focused on the child, who does not receive directives from adults and from the outside but from the inside, developing and applying them, without never underestimate the important role of parents in his growth path.

Some quotes:

A child learns from his surroundings.

If you criticize a child, he will learn to judge others.

If you congratulate a child, he will learn to appreciate what others do.

If you are arrogant with a child, he will be quarrelsome.

If you are honest with a child, he will be honest in his life.

If you mock a child, he will become shy and insecure.

If you make a child feel safe, he will learn to trust others.

If you despise a child, he will grow up with a sense of guilt.

If you encourage a child to expose his thoughts and respect what he says, he will increase his confidence.

If you are compliant with a child, he will learn to be patient.

If you support a child in what he thinks, will strengthen his self-esteem.

If you grow up a child in a pleasant atmosphere where he feels himself useful and capable, he will learn to recognize love.

Never disparage a child, nor in his presence or in his absence.

If you focus on good around a child, then evil will have no place.

Always listen to a child when he approaches.

Respect a child even when he makes a mistake: he will learn the lesson.

Always help a child when he needs it, and step aside when he does not.

Make a child understand soon how things work around him.

Show a child always the right way to do anything.

Show a child always how to give the best he can.

Effort or Result?

Talent is natural or it can be developed?

To develop high performer students, praising effort achieves way more than praising results. If we do it the right way, praise can be incredibly motivating, encouraging, inspiring. However, if we take the wrong approach praising can actually have the opposite effect.

The difference lies in whether we assume student’s skills as an innate ability or the result of hard work and effort.

Here we arrive to the one million dollar question.

Talent is natural or it can be developed?

According to researches, there are two approaches to talent:

1.      The belief that intelligence, ability, and skills are inborn and relatively fixed (we "have" what we were born with).

2.      The belief that intelligence, ability, and skills can be developed through effort (we "are" what we work to become).

The difference lies on how we praise our students.

When we praise students for their achievements or when we criticize them, we face the first approach. Students come to see every mistake as a failure. No immediate results means failure. They can lose motivation and even stop trying.

When we praise students for their effort and application, we face the second approach. We help to create an environment where students feel anything is possible, as long as they keep working to improve.

Let us replace "You are really smart” for "I have faith in you” or “You are a hard worker”, “I have never seen you give up”, “I know you will get this".

The best way to improve students’ performance is to create and foster a growth mindset. They will also be more willing to take more risks.

When they understand that failure is just a step on the road to eventual achievement, risks are no longer something to avoid.

Risks and failures will be expected steps on the way to learn.

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…