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Rituals
Engaging Emotions
Reflection
Play and Humor
The Flow
When Emotions Get Out of Hand
The sections on Brain Function and Creating a Learning-Centered Emotional Environment showed how emotions play both a positive and negative role in the brain's work of processing information from sensory input to long-term storage. In Creating a Safe Emotional Environment, we suggested several ways to avoid the negative effects of emotion in our learning places. This section was suggest some ways to use emotions to actually enhance learning.
Recent brain research emphasizes that emotions are essential for learning to take place. Jensen cites Antonio Damasio, a noted researcher who wrote Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, who says, "...uncontrolled or misdirected emotion can be a major source of irrational behavior...[but] a reduction in emotion may constitute an equally important source of irrational behavior. Certain aspects of the process of emotion and feeling are indispensable for rationality. ... Emotions are not separate, but rather enmeshed in the neural networks of reason." (p. 185)
Noted researchers Rosenthal and Jacobsen (1968) report that the single greatest influence on learners is the classroom climate; and there is a biological explanation for this. In a classroom climate typified by positive challenge and joy, the body releases endorphins--the peptide molecules that elevate our feelings and cause us to feel good. Research by C. Levinthal (1988) and Robert Sylvester (1995) suggest that a "positive learning climate" promotes better problem-solvers and higher quality learning. In short, when we feel good, we learn better! (Jensen, 2000a, pp. 108-109)
As teachers, we need to understand that emotions are a double-edged sword. We recognize that students must feel physically and emotionally safe before they can focus on academic content. However, we may assume that just because our classrooms feel non-threatening to us that they are indeed so. So in this section we'll explore how we can use emotions to enhance learning, to create an enriched emotional classroom environment.
First, let's reconsider the notion of stress. We have seen that stress, the on-going perception of threat, impacts both the body and brain negatively. High levels of stress cause downshifting. But low to moderate levels of stress can improve cognition. Jensen says, "Key to thriving under stress and making stressors work for, rather than against, you is an intense feeling of self-confidence to cope with the task at hand, combined with a healthy dose of self-esteem. When these keys are in place, positive pressure can enhance decision-making, information processing, and new learning applications." (Jensen & Dabney, 2000, p. 128) When the brain perceives a challenging, but non-threatening task, cognitive-enhancing neurotransmitters are released and adrenaline and cortisol are maintained at reasonable levels. Another way to describe this type of low to moderate stress is challenge. The Caines (1997a) point out in their eleventh principle, challenge is necessary for learning to take place. According to Pat Wolfe and Ron Brandt (1998), the brain's primary focus is survival, but that doesn't just mean avoiding danger. Survival also involves curiosity--seeking out and trying to understand new experiences in light of past experiences.
In the section on Creating an Enriched Physical Environment, we learned that our brains can continue to grow new brain cells throughout our lives. In addition to a rich physical environment that offers plenty of opportunity for experimenting and discovery, new brain growth requires novel, but meaningful experiences centered around emotions. Again, we must ensure that stress does not becomes distress.
Only a few short years ago, neuroscientists believed that the brain was fixed at birth, that humans could not grow new brain cells, and that the physical shape of the brain was predetermined. These beliefs have since been disproved. And what we've discovered in the process has staggering implications for learning....But what specifically drives change in the brain? First, cortical changes are restricted to novel input. Doing something that you already know how to do will not add complexity or mass to the brain. But a price is paid for excess novelty: more cortisol and noradrenaline. The brain's response to constant or incoherent novelty is distress. Thus, novelty must be balanced with predictability in the environment, as well. (Jensen & Dabney, 2000, pp. 170-171)
An enriched learning environment that engages the emotions productively will increase learning. Following are several suggestions for ways to enrich the emotional environment of our classrooms.
Rituals
One
way to ensure that emotions don't get out of hand is to make use of rituals.
Rituals can include things like announcements, review activities that are repeated,
relaxation exercises and group processes. One ritual I use in my classes is
placing a cognitive map of the content and activities of the class session on
the blackboard before students enter the room. The map also includes important
reminders about upcoming due dates on assignments or announcements about events
on campus. After we do our opening stretch, I quickly review the map so that
students know exactly where we're going during the class. I don't like to take
a lot of time for this because I understand how important the first twenty minutes
of my class time are for presenting new information. (See Creating
a Safe Physical Environment) By opening my class with a stretching/cognitive
map ritual, my students are able to ease into the class in a positive emotional
state. Other rituals can include methods for passing out or collecting papers.
To minimize time spent on this task, I use an accordion-style file with each
section labeled with students names. I place each student's graded papers in
his or her section. When the students come in to class, they retrieve their
graded papers and put new assignments in their sections. In this way, no time
is spent at all passing out or collecting papers, nor reminding students to
hand in papers. It becomes a ritual for the students to get their papers this
way very quickly. I use another ritual to determine the order of oral presentations.
I have a small decorative box with slips of paper numbered for as many students
as there are in the class. As students come in, they draw a number, which determines
when they will give their presentation. Students may trade numbers if they wish.
Any late comers must also draw a number. If they happen to draw the next number,
they must speak right away. So coming in late is not a way to be the last speaker.
Inevitably, one student always seems to draw number 1. As a result, there is
a lot of humor around this ritual, which helps relieve some of the anxiety about
speaking in front of the class. Of course, we applaud at the end of each presentation.
While these rituals may not be appropriate for your classes, it usually doesn't
take too much work to find activities that are frequently repeated and can be
ritualized.
Engaging
Emotions to Enhance Learning
As we have seen in the section on Brain
Function, emotions and past experiences play a significant role in determining
what is meaningful to the learner. By linking content to emotions, we
give students first of all, a way in to the content. The Caines (1997a) call
the interrelationship between emotion and meaning "felt meaning."
The section on Constructing
Individual Meaning will have more to say on this topic.
Genuine understanding always has an emotional component. Genuine understanding is much more than intellectual understanding. It includes what Gendlin (1962) calls a "felt sense" or "felt meaning" (Caine & Caine 1991, Chapter 8). Felt meaning is an almost visceral sense of relationship, an unarticulated sense of connectedness that ultimately culminates in insight. An insight, an "aha!" is a gestalt. It is the coming together of thoughts and ideas and senses and impressions and emotions, something like a chemical reaction. ...
A growing body of evidence supports the emotional component of real meaning. Indeed, emotions of some type are intrinsic to rationality itself. ...
The point is that any in-depth understanding of any subject, skill, or domain requires some integration of thought and feeling. (p. 109)
Because education has valued objectivity and rationality for so long, emotions have not been utilized productively in our educational settings. Even if we recognize that emotions are crucial to learning, most of us are not sure where to begin. The Caines (1994, 1997a) have suggested three teaching elements that derive naturally from their twelve principles: relaxed alertness, orchestrated immersion in complex experience, and active processing. It is helpful to understand what they mean by orchestrated immersion. This is how they describe it in Education on the Edge of Possibility (1997a):
The brain principles (see Chapter 5) show that people function in a multiplicity of different ways at any one time. In "complex experiences," different sensory modalities, including sight, sound, and touch, need to be combined intelligently for the purpose of learning. Because learning engages the entire physiology, the whole body needs to participate to some extent. Emotions need to be engaged. The local memory system--the system that registers autobiographical experiences and is motivated by novelty--needs to be involved in intelligent ways. Stimuli from the peripheral environment need to support specific content. Timing needs to alternate so that in addition to dealing with a situation or problem consciously here and now, the brain is also primed to continue functioning at an unconscious level afterward. These things are impossible to do one at a time with a checklist. Immersion in rich, natural experiences that automatically engage as much of the learner's capacity as appropriate or necessary is what we are after. Orchestration is the design of experiences in a sufficiently rich way for all the different elements to be naturally engaged. (pp. 166-167)
There are many ways to involve the whole body, including emotions, in learning. Field trips and hands-on activities such as science experiments or projects are some of the more obvious ways. Multi-sensory presentations can be effective. Visualization activities, especially when accompanied by music, are excellent for touching the emotional parts of our students. Other ways to arouse emotions related to meaning include newspaper clippings, cartoons, charts and graphs, short dramatic readings, poems or songs, games, role plays, jokes and anecdotes, simulations , puzzles, visualizations, special speakers, excursions, or artwork related to the content.
For example, about a week before I begin my module on economics in my ESOL classes, I put a large poster from Newsweek on the wall about poverty in America. (This is called priming. See Creating a Safe Physical Environment.) I love watching my students get engaged with it. Without my prompting, they are soon comparing what they know about hunger in their countries with the data on hunger in American on the poster. Other questions quickly begin to come out: why is there so much hunger in the United States, the richest country in the world? How can the government can help? Should the US focus its efforts on dealing with hunger world-wide or just in the US? When I begin the module on economics, I have the students do the following simulation:
Place ten chairs in the front of the room and ask for ten students to come and sit in the chairs. Explain the the people represent the population of the world and the chairs represent the world's resources. If the resources are evenly distributed, there is enough for everyone. The chairs and people match up. But, unfortunately, that's not the way it is. Now have two people sit on the floor. They represent the poorest 20 per cent of the people who earn 2 percent of the world's income. Now have six people share three chairs. They represent the middle class, about 3.5 billion people, with enough to get by. They earn 33 percent of the world's income. The remaining 2 people are encouraged to really spread out on the remaining seven chairs. They represent the richest 20 percent of people, earning 65 percent of the world's income.
Although this activity takes but five minutes, it helps students feel at a deeper level the impact of world poverty.
We can't always involve our students in authentic, real-life experiences, but we have found that movie clips work very well to engage the emotions. In my unit on economics, I like to show a short segment from the movie Salaam Bombay, which was filmed using actual homeless children in Bombay and portrays their life situation very poignantly. Most of us have no real understanding of world poverty. A movie clip like this one at least can give us images and sounds, if not tastes and smells. There are many excellent movies available, which provide an excellent introduction into content areas while engaging the emotions.
From the Caines (2000, Teaching for Intelligence Conference) we learned the following strategy for using movie clips to help students attach personal meaning to content. The Caines used as an example a unit on the Civil War.
The Caines point out the many features of this approach that are brain-friendly:
The content is related directly to personal emotions
Emotions are the basis for inquiry
Students choose research projects based on their own interests
The learning involves active processing by the students, not simply passive listening and note-taking
- All of the important data gets covered about the Civil War, although this is done in a non-linear fashion.
I like to use a metaphor to help myself remember the value of engaging emotions in my classes: emotions are like salt. Food tastes so much better with salt, and content is so much more appealing when the emotions are engaged.
Reflection
Another
productive way to engage emotions and enrich the emotional environment is through
reflection and sharing of personal experiences. Robin Fogarty
(1997) defines reflection by saying, "The reflection is the pause in the
act of learning that deepens understanding and gives meaning to the learning."
(p. 183) She goes on to say
The mind is like a mirror that reflects images of the learning for a somewhat silent and prolonged look. The reflection sometimes gives the mind quite an accurate image and other time the reflection is distorted by emotional baggage or other forms of interference. Yet, without the benefit of reflection, much of the initial learning could be lost. The reflection gives students time to scrutinize, observe, and question. In the reflective phase of learning, the mind sorts and synthesizes, rearranges and reconnects. (p. 184)
Jensen cites research by Frydenberg and Lewis (1999) that suggests that "constructive reflection is important in that it allows the brain's frontal lobe region a chance to filter information and draw associations with prior learning, while aiding memory, planning, and decision-making." (Jensen & Dabney, 2000, p. 7) The Caines (1994) also stress the importance of reflection by saying, "Reflection is a critical aspect of all sophisticated and higher-order thinking and learning. ...As we become more aware of the experiential nature of learning, it will become more important for students to reflect on their experiences to adequately grasp the implications. " (pp. 158-159)
I do a reflection activity in my class before I begin the unit on economics. Before we do the activities mentioned above I ask the students to do a reflection on hunger. I ask them to remember a time when they were hungry, so very hungry that it hurt. Then I ask them to visualize that it has been days since they have eaten and to reflect on how it feels. Since there is usually at least one student in the class who has experienced extreme hunger at some time in his or her life, I ask that person to share the experience if he or she is willing. Other students in the class are always keenly interested in learning about such experiences from their classmates. Because they have gotten in touch with their own emotions related to hunger, they listen emphatically, often asking many questions. Finally, we move to reflection about this picture. I ask students to imagine what it is like to be this young boy. Where does he live? Why doesn't he have any food? Who is taking care of him? Where does he sleep? Does he go to school? What is his life like? Now, the class is ready to look at bigger issues relating the the global economy. Their attention and interest have been aroused and they are open to new learning.
Play
and Humor
Both
play and humor take advantage of positive emotions and can enhance learning.
Robert Sylvester (2000b) suggests that play has an important role in learning.
Good games simulate problems and arouse emotions; consequently, much informal childhood motor, language, and social learning develops easily and without much adult instruction through play, games and contests that can spark emotional arousal, which in turn activates our behavioral-response and problem-solving systems. We continue to use play and game throughout life to maintain the robustness of our emotional arousal system. ... Play and games are thus important emotion/attention machines that can enhance the quality of a sheltered child's extended learning. Only in school do we refer to learning as work. In an era obsessed with assessment and standards, educators must rediscover the power that play has to activate and enhance learning. (Curricular Challenges, ¶ 5-7)
Perhaps
because I teach ESOL where the primary learning I want to happen is the development
of language skills, I have always been comfortable using games in my classes.
Pronunciation Bingo is a popular game, but we also play grammar and vocabulary
games. They help take away the tedium of working on these skills, which simply
require a lot of practice. Even if actual games are not practical in other classes,
teachers can make use of contests and competitions to create a playful atmosphere.
At the How the Brain Works Conference, Jensen used games effectively to review
content. For example, he would say, "You have two minutes, see how many
parts of the brain you and your team can list on a piece of paper." He
would then ask how many groups were able to list what he thought was a reasonably
achievable number, such as seven. When the time was up, he asked how many groups
were able to list seven things. Since that was an achievable number, all the
groups were successful and were rewarded with a quick round of applause. The
spirit of competition got everyone actively involved, it was fun, but most of
all, we were all given the satisfaction of knowing we had done well.
Research by Shammin and Stuss (as cited by Jensen and Dabney, 2000) has shown that humor promotes attention and recall and creates a positive learning atmosphere. The pre-frontal lobes of the brain, which are involved in intellectual activities, and the amygdala, which is the brain's center for emotional responses, are both activated by humor. Scientists have long known that a good laugh releases the "feel good" endorphins into the bloodstream, causing relaxation and improving cognition. Because memories involved with positive emotions are recalled more easily, humor actually improves memory. A sense of humor can be a valuable asset in creating a good emotional environment in the classroom and foster relaxed alertness. Dee Dickinson (2002) suggests several ways to incorporate humor into the classroom in her article "Humor and the Multiple Intelligences." For example, jokes, verbal puns and funny stories are well suited for linguistic intelligence. Cartoons, humorous posters and pictures appeal to the visual-spatial intelligence, using exaggerated gestures to emphasize stories speak to the bodily kinesthetic intelligence. Even if we're not Ms. Comedy, we can try to maintain a light-hearted atmosphere in our classrooms. I can't remember jokes to save my soul, but if there isn't laughter in my classes every time we meet, I feel disappointed. I can always laugh at myself and my mistakes. I think it also helps my students to lighten up and not get too hung-up on mistakes.
The
Flow
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990), pronounced "chicks send me high,"
the author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, has spent
considerable time studying experiences that are characterized by our getting
totally caught in an activity so that we become unaware of time or our surroundings.
He terms this emotional state as "flow." Martha Kaufeldt
(1999) describes flow like this: "During a flow experience, the mind and
body are in complete harmony. Self-consciousness, negative feelings, worries,
and anxiety disappear. The activity takes on personal meaning, is intrinsically
motivating, and results in total satisfaction." (p. 10) Sounds wonderful,
doesn't it? Csikszentmihalyi (1996) has this to say about flow and education:
The claim is that if educators invested a fraction of the energy on stimulating the student's enjoyment of learning that they now spend in trying to transmit information we could achieve much better results. Literacy, numeracy, or indeed any other subject matter will be mastered more readily and more thoroughly when the student becomes able to derive intrinsic rewards from learning. ...
When people enjoy whatever they are doing, they report some characteristic experiential states that distinguish the enjoyable moment from the rest of life. ...the phenomenology of enjoyment seems to be a panhuman constant. When all the characteristics are present, we call this state of consciousness a flow experience, because many of the respondents reported that when what they were doing was especially enjoyable it felt like being carried away by a current, like being in a flow.
A teacher who understands the conditions that make people want to learn -- want to read, to write, and do sums -- is in a position to turn these activities into flow experiences. When the experience becomes intrinsically rewarding, students' motivation is engaged, and they are on their way to a lifetime of self-propelled acquisition of knowledge. (¶ 4-7)
The path to "flow" as Csikszentmihalyi describes it is as follows:
- Make it a game. Look at your task as a game. Establish rules, objectives, challenges to be overcome and rewards.
- Powerful goal. As you play the game, remind yourself frequently of the overriding spiritual, social, or intellectual purpose that drive your efforts.
- Focus. Release your mind from all distractions, from within or without. Focus your entire attention on the game.
- Surrender to the Process. Let go. Don't strive or strain to achieve your objective. Just enjoy the process of work.
- Ecstasy. This is the natural result of the preceding four steps. It will hit you suddenly, by surprise. But there will be not mistaking it.
- Peak Productivity. Your ecstatic state opens vast reservoirs of resourcefulness, creativity, and energy. Your productivity and quality of work shoot through the roof. (Csikszentmihalyi, n. d., The Path to Flow)
Csikszentmihalyi (n. d.) also says, "Contrary to expectation, "flow" usually happens not during relaxing moments of leisure and entertainment, but rather when we are actively involved in a difficult enterprise, in a task that stretches our mental and physical abilities." (Info and Quotes, ¶ 1) In order to experience "flow," then, challenge and skills need to be matched and gently pushed to higher levels. The activity is so meaningful to the learner that he or she can get lost in it. And finally, the learner has a clear goal, a clear idea of how the activity needs to be done and what it will look like when its finished. When the activity is completed, there is a clear sense of achievement. As teachers we may experience this flow on those rare occasions when our students are so engaged in a discussion or project that they have a hard time breaking away from the activity at the end of the class. Wouldn't it be great to experience it more often? We believe that we can.
We need to admit that we try to use emotions in our classes, the possibility does exist that that emotions might get out of hand. We may need to get training in conflict resolution. Here is a simple strategy that can help if emotions seem to be taking over a class. Take a few moments to allow every student to reflect on his/her own emotions silently. Then have each student express with an "I" statement what is being felt, perhaps to just one other student at first. Then publicly have each person in the class explain his or her feelings while every one else is asked to be a good listener. As we begin to understand where each person is coming from, what appear to be irrational emotions become contextualized. Understanding and respecting one another is absolutely critical in diffusing highly charged emotional situations. As a teacher, it is essential to be aware of our own feelings and emotions too. Students can sense when we're stressed, frustrated or angry. As we model our own struggle to deal constructively with our emotions, our students will be encouraged to do the same. The next section, Creating a Safe Social Environment, will suggest some strategies that will help in such emotionally charged situations.
Go to the next section, Creating a Learning-Centered SOCIAL Environment
Learning-Centered Environment links:
Creating A Learning-Centered EMOTIONAL Environment
Creating A Learning-Centered SOCIAL Environment
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