The Emotional Learner

Understanding Emotions, Learners and Achievement

Marc Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351671279
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Emotional Learner combines practical advice with the latest evidence to offer essential guidance on how to understand positive and negative emotions. Taking its reader on a tour of the most significant research from psychology, neuroscience and educational studies, it reveals that in order to ensure educational success, teachers must have a deeper understanding of how and why emotional states manifest themselves in the classroom.

Written by experienced teacher and psychologist Marc Smith, the book examines the complex relationship between cognition and emotion, clearly and thoughtfully exploring:

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• What we mean by 'emotions' and why they are important to learning

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• Understanding master and performance learning orientations

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• Cognition, emotion, memory and recall

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• Personality and motivation

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• Dealing with boredom in the classroom

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• Activating and deactivating emotional states

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• Navigating the teenage years

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• Understanding the positive and negative impact of anxiety and stress

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• Fear of failure, how it evolves and how to combat it.

The Emotional Learner is a compelling, accessible introduction to understanding that how we feel is intricately linked to how we learn. It will help all those involved in teaching children and young adults to challenge common-sense assumptions about the role of positive and negative emotions, showing its reader how to teach 'with emotions in mind' and ensure positive academic outcomes.

p.1

1	It’s not easy being a Vulcan

May I say that I have not thoroughly enjoyed serving with humans? I find their illogic and foolish emotions a constant irritant?¹

(Spock)

Despite never having considered myself a Trekkie, I have always possessed a certain degree of admiration for the Vulcan race, and Mr Spock specifically. Star Trek has been in my life for as long as I can remember, from the original 1960s show with the wonderfully ham James T. Kirk through its many incarnations on the small screen to the more recent blockbuster movies. I can’t speak Klingon and I’ve never been to one of those conventions where people dress up as Andorians or Ferengi or any other alien species represented in the Star Trek universe, but there was always something about Spock that appealed to me. The appeal was that Spock had the ability to control his emotions to such an extent that he appeared totally devoid of them. Vulcans do experience emotion (and more extremely than humans) but over time they have learned to suppress them in order to live more productive and harmonious lives. Certainly, Spock was right when he claimed that emotions are irritating; they often get in the way, alter our behaviour, force us to act in irrational ways and disturb us, but as for being illogical?

Emotions are far from illogical, even though they may at times be very painful. Dale Carnegie, the grandfather of the self-improvement movement, suggested that humans are ultimately emotional rather than logical creatures, which is perhaps why Spock found them so frustrating. Carnegie certainly had a point. American psychologist Drew Western (author of The Political Brain) has spent most of his academic career studying the voting habits of the US electorate, concluding that people rarely make logical decisions when it comes to choosing their government. On the contrary, voting behaviour is much more likely to be an emotional response rather than a logical one, a phenomenon that appears to have had at least some impact on the 2016 UK referendum on European Union membership. If our voting habits are fuelled by emotions, it’s highly likely that other decisions are too.

p.2

Of course, we would be poorer in spirit if emotions did not reside within us. Without emotions we would never be able to experience joy or lose ourselves in awe at the first sight of our newborn child; we would never be able to engage in fits of laughter that cause our cheeks to ache and tears to flow from our eyes. Conversely, without emotions we could never experience the bitter pain of sorrow, the yearning for someone lost or the sharp pangs of empathy at the sight of another in distress. I would not want to be like Spock, lacking the capacity that not only makes me human but also makes me who I am. The point Spock misses (and yes, I do understand that he is a purely fictional character) is that emotions serve a purpose, they aren’t simply an evolutionary hiccup; on the contrary, they are necessary for human survival. Emotions let us know when there is danger, or when a close friend requires our understanding and support. Indeed, those humans who display a lack of emotion are seen as somehow lacking in basic human function. Emotionless individuals are often viewed as abnormal or suffering from some kind of psychological deficiency because society values emotions and views them as a basic human quality.

Emotions also have their dark side. Anger and rage can be destructive and result in harm to oneself and to others who dare to get in our way. Extreme sadness can lead to some individuals harming themselves or withdrawing from society, neglecting the basic human need to connect with others. According to the mental health charity Young Minds, one in every ten children aged between 5 and 16 years suffers from a clinically diagnosable mental disorder. Let’s put that into context shall we? In every school classroom there are around three children who are struggling due to some kind of mental health problem. For every 12 to 15 children in any classroom, at least one child will have deliberately self-harmed. In fact, over the last ten years figures indicate that there has been a 68 per cent increase in the number of young people admitted to hospital because they have deliberately harmed themselves in some way. I could quote even more harrowing statistics, but I expect you’ve got the message by now.

p.3

These statistics highlight the power of emotional responses to external events. Emotions guide and often determine behaviour, raising us up and then allowing us to crash back down to earth. This book isn’t about adolescent mental health, it’s about the normative and the ordinary rather than the extreme. Nevertheless, it’s worth taking a couple of steps back in order for us to think about the emotional lives of learners and survey our surroundings. If we consider the extreme end of the emotional continuum, three children in a class have some kind of diagnosable mental illness (one that might have gone undiagnosed). How, we might ask, does this impact on their educational progress? Children who are struggling with their own emotions may well be diverting precious cognitive resources to simply surviving from day to day and so are unlikely to be fully engaged in the learning process. It might appear that a particular child isn’t paying attention or seems disengaged, quiet or withdrawn; it might be that problems manifest themselves in disruptive behaviours and defiance. What about the student who constantly worries about passing a test or getting a good mark for their homework, or the child so overcome with anxiety that they fall apart when asked even the simplest of questions in class? Teachers are familiar with the often unusual responses they receive from students; some are fleeting while others seem ingrained and habitual. When I was young I would rarely volunteer answers in class due to anxiety (a condition I have struggled with for most of my life), which inevitably made me a target for some teachers who felt that it was their duty to bring me out of my ‘shell’. The truth was that I liked my shell very much because it made me feel safe. Furthermore, I knew that if I drew attention to myself I would become flustered and turn the most startling shade of crimson. The fear of looking incompetent (or resembling a tomato) caused me to withdraw even further so that by the time I was asked a question in class, I had already become a quivering wreck of nerves and anxiety.

p.4

These anxieties fade but never quite disappear. As someone who displays introvert characteristics (I’ll avoid claiming to be ‘an introvert’ for a number of reasons I describe in Chapter 5), I also know that I approach new places, people and situations very cautiously, over-vigilance being one of the traits associated with introversion. When I became a teacher I almost forgot about how anxious I was as a child and, much to my shame, assumed that my students somehow didn’t suffer from those same anxieties. It took me a few years to really find my feet as a teacher, but eventually I managed to establish some kind of rapport with most of my students (some students will simply hate you regardless and this, in itself, came as somewhat of a shock). I believe that some people are natural teachers while realising that this view isn’t uniformly held. Although I always saw myself as approachable, as time passed it became clear that I was grossly mistaken. It took a 17-year-old student named Emily to make me fully aware of this.

Emily always seemed very able and confident and gave the impression that her positivity knew no bounds. When her grades began to fall and she began to miss lessons I decided we needed a chat. It transpired that Emily had felt she had been struggling for some time but didn’t feel that she could ask me for help. ‘You think I’m so clever but I’m not’, she said, ‘How could I tell you that I was struggling?’ I’m not claiming that this exchange was some kind of revelation, an epiphany that would shape the rest of my career, but it did make me pause and take stock and think about how I labelled pupils in both positive and negative ways. Emily had become a prisoner to her anxieties about her own potential failure and falling from the pedestal I had placed her on. She became preoccupied with not failing and, as we will see in Chapter 10, fear of failure can lead to some very destructive behaviours.

Anxiety is perhaps the most obvious choice of negative emotion here, and there has been substantial research conducted on its impact on learning. Like the younger me, anxious children become more flustered; they forget the material they have been given to learn, misunderstand instructions and constantly fear being asked questions in class. They may even become temporarily mute if challenged to produce an answer. The immediate solution might be to help the student relax or assist them in the nurturing of positive emotions. However, the relationship between positive and negative emotions is a complex one and some areas of research have erroneously linked positive emotions with positive academic outcomes and negative emotions with poor outcomes (Chapter 3). Disentangling this complex relationship constitutes a weighty task and it will no doubt be some time before we have a clearer understanding of how these constructs operate. For now, however, we can attempt to piece together what we currently understand about the ways in which emotions (both positive and negative) impact learning and why being a Vulcan doesn’t necessarily make you more successful.

p.5

Emotions aren’t illogical

Spock was wrong – emotions aren’t illogical. Humans are emotional beings, so how individuals recognise and regulate these emotions can have a major impact on future trajectories. Psychologists use the somewhat awkward term ‘affect’ to describe our experience of emotions and recognise that affect can be both positive and negative. The term ‘affect’ is useful, simply because it sidesteps the tricky question of whether emotions actually exist. This might seem an odd statement (especially when you consider the topic of this book), but the subjective nature of emotions can mean that their very existence can be challenged. You’ll probably find that I use the term affect and emotion interchangeably, just be aware that I am (usually) referring to the same thing but, for convenience, I’ll use both affect and emotion despite their differences. Emotions effect people in different ways, and while some are guided more by their emotions, others might be more logical and pragmatic in their approach. Emotions are also ingrained deeply into language, in that we might be an emotional person or someone who is ‘in touch with their emotions’ or someone who values their ‘gut instincts’ that often defy any logic. Others might be said to allow their emotions to ‘get in the way’ of rational and logical decision-making and there are some occupations where being able to keep emotions in check is preferable to the alternative.

p.6

During the early days of psychology there was a great deal of interest in emotions, but its reliance on introspection resulted in its decline as a serious area of research as psychology fought to claim its place as a serious scientific discipline. For many years, emotions were not seen as a particularly suitable area of research, perhaps in part due to their subjective nature and the fact that they are quite slippery things – they move about, darting from one extreme to another. They are also quite difficult to quantify in any meaningful way because we can never really be sure that the emotion I feel is the same as the one you feel in the same situation. People react differently in different situations and our behaviour can, at times, run counter to social norms, especially in traumatic situations. Despite these problems, research is now returning to the study of emotions as new technologies and research techniques provide more effective ways of understanding their role in people’s lives. Furthermore, a growing number of scientists are now investigating the link between emotion and cognitive function (that is, aspects related to memory, learning and attention), and this new field of investigation is beginning to inform us about how emotions affect the way we think and learn as well as how they arise in the first place. Others are investigating how emotions impact on future success and failure in work, sports and life in general and are asking questions about how factors like emotional regulation influence our future.

Learning is more than cognition

Learning is a complex process and is much more than just the process of storing information in long-term memory for it to be retrieved at a later date – memory doesn’t work like that anyway. To say that learning is just about cognition is like saying that riding a bike is only about pedalling. When we learn to ride a bike, one of the main skills we need to learn is to pedal, but we also need to balance and apply the brakes when necessary to avoid collisions and to bring the bike to a stop. The process of learning certainly requires the engagement of cognitive processes, but without other so-called non-cognitive processes learning simply won’t take place. The process of learning, therefore, involves cognitive, emotional as well as social processes.

p.7

Cognitive processes

This is perhaps the most important. Cognition is all about the thought and regulatory processes involved in the recognition, storage and retrieval of information. Committing information to memory also includes other cognitive processes such as perception and attention. However, basic forms of learning can take place without memory (as has been seen in individuals with severe memory deficits), and memories themselves are often highly inaccurate.

Emotional processes

How we feel during the learning event can enhance or impair the way in which we attend to such events, how we store information received during the event and the ability to retrieve stored information after the event. Specific emotions such as curiosity can enhance while others such as boredom can impair.

Social processes

Learning cannot take place in a vacuum. Relationships can make or break the ability to engage in any learning event. This is particularly important during the early stages of learning when children are developing their social skills and gradually beginning to understand what it is to be part of a group.

p.8

Although this book is specifically about emotional processes in learning, in reality all three components (cognitive, emotional, social) operate together.

Cognitive or non-cognitive?

As the pressure increases on students to achieve in high stakes exams and the wellbeing of our young people decreases (and mental health issues rise), investigating the role of that basic of human qualities seems an obvious road down which to travel. Certainly, the research base already exists in direct and indirect ways, but has so far failed to reap any real rewards in the classroom. Recently, certain skills have been identified as ‘non-cognitive’ in an attempt to distinguish them from those more directly related to aspects of learning such as memory and attention. These non-cognitive skills relate to attributes including resilience, character and grit, and while it can be argued that all personal attributes involve some kind of cognitive regulation and control, the label provides a useful way of distinguishing one group of skills from another. The number of interventions designed to measure and build on the attributes continues to grow, but, unfortunately, many are rarely implemented in a uniform way and definitions are often used differently. For example, a review of resilience programmes in UK ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Emotional Learner
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 It’s Not Easy Being a Vulcan
• 2 Masters and Performers
• 3 Positive and Negative Emotions
• 4 What We Think and What We Feel: The Complex Relationship Between Cognition and Emotion
• 5 Personality, Motivation and Emotion
• 6 Anxiety
• 7 Boredom
• 8 Interest and Curiosity
• 9 The Emotional Teen
• 10 Fear of Failure
• 11 Teaching With Emotions in Mind
• Index