To learn well you have to care. What you're learning has to matter to you in order for you to be willing to take risks, to dig deep. In the words of playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett, you have to be willing to "try again; fail again; fail better."
When I was in school, I learned how to take notes. I learned how to hand the teacher his or her own thinking, sometimes better articulated, sometimes not. I learned how to begin to say something in response to a teacher's question and then pause just long enough for someone else to jump in and finish what I had started. Throughout, what mattered to me was to go unnoticed unless I was to be praised. I did not want to be questioned or pushed. Mostly, I was afraid to fail, and, most of all, I was afraid to have anyone know I was afraid.
Sometimes, however, a teacher made the learning matter enough to me that I was willing to be noticed for exactly who I was.
The few teachers who made it matter were unconventional, connecting with me, building my confidence, or creating contexts that resonated with me and my particular inclinations. A Latin teacher, in the days of Watergate, read the front page of The New York Times and e. e. cummings, rather than Virgil. An English teacher offered an independent course on manuscript publication; when I stopped by to ask him what it was for, he said, "You." A math teacher allowed me to weep my way through trigonometry extra-help sessions in the common room of his dorm.
The journals I kept throughout are filled with thoughts, ideas, and feelings about what mattered to me, and usually had nothing to do with the lectures I attended or the papers I wrote. They serve as a testament to most of what I learned in those school years - and are the mechanism with which, I now see, I learned to think for myself and to become exactly who I am.
When I first became a teacher, the only approach to teaching that seemed to me to be authentic and even achievable has evolved into what can now be called affective education. This pedagogical theory runs through my teaching and leads my students to say such things as, "This course is a course for how to live my life"; "I love coming to this class every day. It feels like coming home"; and, "When you say think for yourself, Mrs. Moore, you really mean it!"
I wanted to give my students what my best teachers had given me: to be present and completely at attention in my classroom, to recognize in my students what they might not yet recognize in themselves, and to suspend my own ideas in service to fostering theirs. Like learning, teaching is as much an intuitive journey as an intellectual art. Good teachers, like good learners, follow their gut.
WHAT THE RESEARCH TELLS US
A year and a half ago, I found myself following my gut as I read an article in the April 2013 issue of The Sun called "Out of Our Heads: Philip Shepherd on the Brain in Our Belly." In the article, Amnon Buchbinder interviews Shepherd about his book New Self, New World and the notion that we have two brains.
Further exploration of Shepherd's ideas led me to an article by Adam Hadhazy in the February 2010 issue of Scientific American, "Think Twice: How the Gut's 'Second Brain' Influences Mood and Well-Being," and an article by Dan Hurley in the November 2011 issue of Psychology Today, "Your Backup Brain," in which I read about the enteric nervous system, which comprises more neurons than the spinal cord and which operates independently of the cranial brain. Current study of this second brain has widespread applications to mental, emotional, and physical health, and it is also gaining traction in a promising and growing field called neurogastrolenterology, with profound implications for education.
Why did my own belly brain tingle as I pursued Shepherd's ideas? Because they resonated with the ideas of University of Southern California affective neuroscientist and human development psychologist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang's research in affective education. This is research I have studied in several workshops for teachers interested in exploring the implications of brain research for schools - workshops Immordino-Yang and educator Alden S. Blodget created and conducted in the early 2000s. Coupled with the research, this notion of the belly brain being as important as the cranial brain is inspiring and affirming - and difficult to ignore.
Winner of the 2008 Transforming Education through Neuroscience Award, Immordino-Yang has explored the connection between emotion and learning and found that the two are inextricably intertwined, that we are hardwired to process information emotionally before we process it cognitively, and that if we skip that first step, we compromise learning. Immordino-Yang argues that we think in service to social and emotional goals, stating that the emotions we have about others affect how we feel about ourselves, and those feelings have a direct impact on how, and whether, we learn.
In her workshops, Immordino-Yang often tells the very sad story of the woman who, at the funeral for her toddler son, was so bereaved she could no longer walk. Her brain refused to remember how. She could only crawl. She crawled until she relearned walking under the far more challenging circumstances of her life without her child.
Immordino-Yang's extreme example illustrates how each new piece of information, each new skill, each new set of cognitive demands, if it attaches to what we already know, will be incorporated, internalized, and "learned." If what we already know is no longer true, or no longer feels true, we sometimes have to start over. The bonding agent that forges attachment is emotion, first felt in the belly brain at our most fundamental notions of self.
Her research suggests that teachers need to create safe classrooms that foster positive feelings, a suggestion which echoes the new research on the belly brain as a second center of thought, where the enteric nervous system processes both the nutrients that sustain us and the intuitive responses that guide us.
TEACHING AND LEARNING WITH BOTH BRAINS
For the past 20 years at Lawrence Academy (Massachusetts), our pedagogical approach has been cognitive skills-based, giving students the tools they need in order for them to be able to do what the teachers already know how to do. Recently, our Senior English Seminar (SES) teaching team has come to see the noncognitive skills as equally necessary to durable and enduring learning because we want our students to not only do what we do, but also to feel what we feel when we read and write, speak and listen, and reflect on timeless themes captured in great literature across the centuries. Some of the resources that have guided and affirmed our approach have been Carol Dweck's Mindset; Tovani's two books about literacy, I Read It, But I Don't Get It and Do I Really Have to Teach Reading?; Paul Tough's How Children Succeed; and Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein's They Say, I Say.
Context, confidence, and connection are the mainstays of our teaching. We create a context in which confidence and connection - emotional and intellectual - can be constructed so that learning can take place. And by "learning," we mean "thinking." And by "thinking" we mean practicing the building, unbuilding, and rebuilding of skills until those skills become automatic, flexible, and transferable. Central to all this is the belief that, in order for the students to think, we have to allow them to feel.
In SES, we intentionally teach students to recruit their own passion, integrity, curiosity, and empathy. We teach them to recognize that the characteristics of a good learner are the foundation from which good learning arises, and that these characteristics are acquirable, adaptable, governable, and within reach. To engage them in the process and attach the new learning to what they already know, the SES teachers connect the material the students are studying to personal experience by presenting them with texts that resonate. To encourage students to develop critical and creative thinking skills in their oral and written responses to those texts, we ask them to write about what matters to them.
Resonant texts allow for the progression-regression-progression trajectory necessary to all good learning and build a tolerance for failure as well as a willingness to take risks. They predispose students to engage, invest, internalize, and own their learning, even as the context becomes increasingly complex and nuanced. Writing about what matters to them in their own words ensures authenticity as well as the possibility of increased depth of critical and creative thought, confidence, and connection.
We also require them to formally reflect on their own learning in metacognitive exercises. At the beginning of the year, we ask the students to record their cognitive and noncognitive skills histories. With each assessment, not only do we connect student performance in the cognitive skills to the application of noncognitive skills, but we also ask students to draft resolutions for improvement on their next assignment and to review those resolutions when that next assignment arrives.
As the final term begins, we ask the students to reflect on their learning, taking into account their histories, their resolutions, and our assessments. And for the remainder of that term, we ask them to use what they know about themselves as learners to design independent projects. These projects allow them to practice all their skills as they explore a resonant passion of their own choosing and take responsibility for their own learning.
Because we work with teaching teammates with whom we share strategies, tools, and techniques, we are prepared to improvise at a moment's notice, tailoring the approach to the individual. At the same time, we respond to the external contexts students carry through the door each day - for the students never arrive without the trials and tribulations of the rest of their lives. In our classrooms, all those feelings that could block learning are allowed expression. They not only influence the day's lesson, they also can provide an explicit way to link learning to feeling. Indeed, in this day and age, many of those trials and tribulations continue to buzz in or pop up on their cell phones and their laptop screens throughout class. We have not banned devices; instead, we allow students to develop self-management techniques. To reinforce a safe context, the room itself invites connection and confidence - tables and chairs in a circle; thought-provoking decor; couches, pillows, and bookcases full of books, paper, and art supplies.
Asking students to record and reflect on their experience provides connection. Asking them to risk thinking for themselves using the highly personal material on which they are authorities provides confidence. Treating their effort and both its progression and regression with respect, reverence, and the understanding that the way they feel about themselves and their ability to learn is the key to improvement inspires their trust in the context, which in turn allows them more confidence to risk connecting more deeply. Finally, offering them the opportunity to be in charge of their own learning affords them an academic entrepreneurship that informs and instills durable and enduring learning.
AFFECTIVE EDUCATION IS EFFECTIVE EDUCATION
How do teachers pull off this individualized, skills-based, affective approach day in and day out? Unlike the students, we have to leave our trials and tribulations in the hallway and be completely present in our classrooms. Like the students, we have to use both our cranial and our belly brains, welcoming whoever arrives and paying attention to each student's condition, even as we implement and improvise the lesson. We have to respect each student's effort in his or her attempt at the work at hand - even the failures and half-measures, as those take courage, too - operating under the good faith assumption that this is as much as he or she can muster on the given day. And we have to have fun, remembering that the first way to learning is play and the most effective way to recover from failure is forgiveness. Above all, what the students learn has to matter to them for the learning to be durable and enduring.
How do they know if the learning matters?
They feel it.
How do we know if this way of teaching matters?
The past 20 years have taught us that the next 10 will be full of more change than we have ever seen. The context in which we live is neither stable nor predictable, and on top of that, our students' brains are changing in ways we don't even understand, synapses formed by the scattering of their attention at the demand of new technologies that promise complete connection and deliver fragments of themselves and of their relationships, technologies that require immediate response and threaten to derail us if we ignore them. As a result, we are seeing more and more students with learning profiles and digestive issues, with anxiety and depression - the feelings that block learning.
What is more, employers are begging high schools and colleges to graduate students armed with flexible skills and the attributes necessary for success. They want passionate, empathetic, persevering communicators, collaborators, and creative and critical thinkers. If this is what the new world demands, we can't keep teaching the way we have been teaching. We can't expect students to learn in the ways we learned. Nor can we even assume that today's innovations will serve tomorrow.
Perform a gut check and you find the context, confidence, and connections we create in our classrooms are fundamental not only to affective education, but also to effective education. We have to respond to what is before us, intellectually and intuitively, with both our brains, and help our students see exactly who they are so they can keep learning how to become exactly who they are capable of becoming.