Note: This blog continues the focus on one of the principles on which Sustainable Teaching was founded: Thinking and emotion cannot be separated.

Feeling Our Way

Gary managed to sit in his chair by resting on the lower vertebrae of his long spine, legs thrust well under the seat in front of his. His head rested on the top rung of his chair, and he glared at me. Gary didn’t seem to much like my sophomore English class despite months of trying to cajole him into participating. It was now winter and I asked him to stay after class, to discuss yet another dreadful essay, though, as a young teacher in my fourth year, I had pretty much used up my limited strategies.

“Come on, Gary, you could be a terrific writer if you’d just do some work. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” he mumbled.

And on it went, frustration mounting in both of us, until finally, he looked at me and screamed, “I don’t work because I hate your guts.”

“Good,” I shouted back. “Good, now we are getting somewhere.” Whatever that meant.

But we did. I have no idea how or why, but from that day on, Gary became one of my best students. Perhaps if I were a psychologist, I could explain what happened, but it appeared that he needed some sort of emotional catharsis, needed to tell me how he felt about me, in order to move on.

Like many teachers, I knew that emotion was important to learning. As a theatre and English teacher, I understood that meaningful interpretation of literature combined intellectual and emotional understanding, that you needed to feel the ideas and that some sort of neural reaction occurred between a reader’s life experiences and the events and images within a novel or play or poem. I also knew that fear, failure and humiliation in school make learning difficult to impossible.

But it wasn’t until late in my career when I met Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a neuroscientist and teacher currently doing research at USC, that I began to appreciate the essential role emotion plays in thinking and learning. Not that I yet fully understand that role or how to embody it in classroom lessons and teaching strategies.

After working with Mary Helen for eight years creating workshops to bring together the theories arising from brain research and the realities of the classroom—starting a conversation between researchers and teachers—I have begun to understand the theories enough to play with possible implications for learning and teaching and how we might design schools.

Here’s what I think I understand:

• Emotion and thinking are inseparable. The predominantly male fantasy that emotion is this female thing that clouds our thinking and needs to be banished to the edge of the settlement is not just nonsense but (almost) neurologically impossible. Emotion is the “rudder” that guides our thinking; we think in the service of social/emotional goals.
• Our experiences are subjectively felt, tagged and stored as emotional memories that color our reactions to future similar experiences. This is not only how we come to hate or love math but how we use our intuition, our feelings, as a guide in solving all sorts of problems—we come to feel we are on the right or wrong track.

Here’s what the theory means to me:

• We tend to learn what is emotionally relevant to us. This relevance is personal and is the source of the motivation to learn and the key to remembering what we have learned. It is the reason I have come to believe so strongly in the need to involve the self of the student in the classroom. What goes on in the classroom has to matter to the students, be meaningful to them.
• Students need to have enough successful experiences solving emotionally relevant problems to develop their intuition—for intuition is our emotional guide to problem-solving.

Knowing this stuff does not give me The Answer to the problem of what to do on Monday morning in the classroom. What it does is provide a rudder to steer my small boat and try different tacks until I find a better harbor than the one we have been moored in for much too long. I can design lessons and teaching strategies that I can try out on Monday morning. I can think about and play with the implications and feel my way to a solution.

(To read in more depth about the connection between emotion and learning, see “We Feel, Therefore We Learn” by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio Damasio, published by Mind, Brain, and Education and available in the library of the Sustainable Teaching Forum.)