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.

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.

Learning, unlearning, relearning…

“The illiterates of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”

Alvin Toffler

As educators, when we think about what we teach our students, the first thing that comes to mind is knowledge. Nevertheless, their knowledge must not remain inert: students should be able to apply what they learn through skills like critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration.

Students must learn how to learn

They must watch how they learn to become better learners

They must learn to set goals, select strategies, and evaluate their progress. They must internalize a growth mindset, believing effort matters and approaching challenges with excitement. They must build constancy, perseverance and mindfulness during the learning process.

Traditional methods of improving students’ learning strategies often focus on prescribed procedures such as note taking, self-testing, and scheduling. While these tactics may work in the short term (for an exam), they do not actually result in the long term as a deep, lasting change.

Learning is not something that just happens, and it does not happen the same way for all of us at the same time.

Teachers play an important role by modelling appropriate practices, so that students can follow the thought process of an expert, and eventually internalize it for themselves. After that, it is important to move from “awareness” to application. Mapping out a plan to make improvements based on self-awareness can be a challenging. We have to send the message that it is normal for these changes do not happen automatically. They take dedicated thought, practice, and reflection. Students must focus on internalizing skills and competencies rather than achieving a high but short-term level of performance.  

We must teach our students to apply what they have learned to their lives

We have to transfer what we know from one sphere of life to another, to figure out a more optimal way of achieving goals, and to live according to principles.

This not only achievable in our classrooms, it can enhance learning at every life stage.

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.

Losing their Attention…

When kids are restless, when someone is causing trouble, or when we know we are losing their attention, let us give them a break.

1. Let us pick some popular song for 60 seconds and let them dance it. Join in. No talking, no teasing, no mention of it before or after, just 60 seconds of uninterrupted dance action randomly inserted into the lesson when we feel they most need it.

2. One of the main issues in the teacher versus student dynamic is the generational gap, and the sense they have that we really do not understand them. The easiest way to shatter this impression is to familiarise ourselves with the things they love (TV shows, films, music, books). Talk about it in class, reference it in your lessons, draw on examples to illustrate your points, or just as a fun way to add something extra to the lesson.

3. Let us use all that pop culture knowledge to make it as fun as possible. Let us add images from things they will easily recognise and already love.

4. Let us get some funny tickets and a few boxes of chocolates. Throughout the lesson, reward good behaviour and participation with a ticket. At the end of class, anyone with a ticket gets a chocolate. One ticket equals one chocolate.

5. Let us find some stickers of all types and make sure they are cute and funny. Then make it hard to earn one. These require serious effort to earn. Let us make them rewards for unusual effort.

Intrinsic Motivation

“If we start kids by rewarding them with prizes, their Intrinsic Motivation will vanish.”

The link between Motivation and rewards is very subtle in Education and Learning.

Rewarding students for getting their schoolwork done with prizes can have the effect of dismantling a child’s passion to learn. The Intrinsic Motivation that come from exploring interests in depth, and mastering difficult concepts and problems, can be smothered by a reward system that focuses on grades or tests rather than understanding. 

Our cultural inclination to praise and reward kids, often for minimal achievement, contributes to the decline in kids’ Intrinsic Motivation. Students have to be responsible for their own learning process otherwise, they lose Confidence and Motivation. Teachers are mere facilitators to help them become independent young learners.

It is important to praise their effort rather than their results and never forget fun that drives enthusiasm and curiosity for learning.

Educators have the power to affect how students are motivated.