What works better to convey the meaning of “homecoming”: a dictionary entry, or this?
When I think back to my school years, from kindergarden pretty much through to the last lessons of grad school, I must admit that I can remember precious few individual classes or lessons; and – dare I say it – even fewer individual teachers. Those who stand out from the hazy recollection of those clock-watching days are those who were able to inject a sense of importance, of excitement – of passion, for the best of them – into their teaching. We remember these teachers not only because they were most probably more colorful characters than their greyer colleagues, but also because of a significant quality that the brain responds to better than any other in a learning context: emotion. These teachers moved us in some way – with a joke, an anecdote, a private word of encouragement or a particularly creative or vividly conducted lesson – and we learned from them as a result of it.
Emotion has often been called the gatekeeper to learning. Its immense powers over what and how we learn are rooted in ancient survival mechanisms which directly linked the Paleolithic brain to emotion-driven reactions. We progressed as a species because our brains back then recognized emotions as mainly triggered by survival or procreation-type situations, and were biologically wired to switch all synapses to the “on” position in order to retain those behaviors that resulted in successful outcomes in these situations.
The wiring has stayed with us to this day, which is why we learn to like new foods (and which new chat-up lines seem to work) a lot faster than we learn how to fill out that new “simplified” income tax form. And the way our brains work vis-a-vis emotion has clear and even fundamental relevance to what and how we teach, and specifically what and how we teach to learners of different ages. Teens, for example, are in a state of mental development in which emotions subliminally instruct the brain as to whether something is important or not. The emotions, if present, trigger the brain to open up the synapses to create the physiological conditions for a learning episode to occur. If emotion is not present, the teenage brain does not consider the input worthy of consideration. (Put another way: if your teen learners grunt a lot, it’s basically because their brains are more caveman-like than fully matured adult brains… the only way to get through to them and turn them into proper examples of Homo Sapiens is to use emotion.)
In his book The Emotional Brain, Joseph LeDoux (1996) argued that emotions activate chemicals such as epinephrine that stimulate the brain and help stamp memories with extra vividness. For this reason, we need to find ways of making our lessons memorable by engaging emotions as they increase retention (Wolfe, 2000). This has become more important than ever in the past decade, during which on-demand video, music, social networking and videogaming experiences have become the norm for digital natives, significantly raising the bar for teachers who can no longer get much traction from assigning a few exercises from a workbook. Fortunately, those very same digital technologies can be marshaled to create emotion-laden educational experiences, as long as the emotion-inducing input and the instruction that it is paired with are working in synch (admittedly the impact is rather diluted when a teacher is attempting an in-lesson installation of Flash on her battered laptop in front of an eye-rolling, smirking audience of teens).
So, assuming we can get the technology working in a reliable fashion (and this is often easier to do with services that focus on home use rather than use in the classroom), we are better equipped than ever to unlock learning via emotional triggers. The key is to start with the senses: sight and sound (in a word, multimedia) and why not play around with smell and touch as well (“This is a can of Lynx deodorant. Does it smell as good as the television ads would lead you to believe?”). For teens, guaranteed emotion-sparkers include video clips about romance (yes, including the young vampire kind), sex (tricky terrain, but it can be danced around using technically tame suggestiveness, for example of the kind to be found in some advertisements: this also provides a good segue discussion on media literacy/exploitation); rebellion; humor (they can’t get enough of the stuff); and danger (teens like nothing better than a moderately scary slasher movie).
You may not be able to use all of these in a teaching context, but here is a list of support materials and teaching approaches which are guaranteed not to result in emotion-facilitated learning among teen and young adult learners:
- Flashcards
- Most EFL / ESL textbooks, no matter how hard the authors and editors try
- “Virtual lessons” which replicate the thrill of the classroom environment in a sterile setting like Second Life.
- Most “e-learning” platforms, often cumbersome to use, which end up incorporating all the disadvantages of the textbook without the advantages of having a teacher to provide support and encouragement
- Those “straight to webcam” language lessons you find by the bucketload on YouTube. No offense to the valiant teachers who create these, but give me skateboarding Jack Russells any day.
In conclusion, there is a very good reason why we keep forgetting the room number of the classroom where we are scheduled to teach tomorrow, but can remember every word and even every guitar solo note of a song that stirred us decades ago. Our brains are programmed to retain experiences that make us sit up and take notice – teens particularly so – and this retention is what leads to learning. We miss academic opportunities when we overuse strategies that neglect our emotional and cognitive constitution. So hunt those video clips, gather those music videos, and inject some heart-thumping pizzazz into your lessons and homework assignments. Tell yourself you’re doing it for your learners, but you’ll soon find that it’s you who will benefit most of all. We all want to be remembered, don’t we?
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