ATKINSON SERIES
Aligning teacher and student goals
November 5, 2009
Alanna Mitchell
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
GROTON, MASS.–The mysterious case of the Grade 8 art student who destroyed his own masterpiece may hold a key to using brain science to change education.
There are 30 of us living in a prep-school dorm trying to understand neuroeducation and how to apply its principles in the classroom. We are also trying to understand what upset the Grade 8 student.
The art teacher at his school worried that he was depressed. He wore a hoodie and rarely showed his face. The class treated him as an interesting outsider.
All year, the teacher tried to get through to him and failed. Until the end of the year, that is, when he produced a gorgeous and intricately detailed Art Nouveau-style portrait from a live model. The art teacher made a fuss about it in front of the class. The following week, he defaced the picture, making sure it could never be displayed.
What happened?
Joanna Christodoulou and Zachary Stein, the PhD candidates at Harvard University's graduate school of education teaching the course, explain that the answer lies in the brain, specifically, in the biological necessity of emotion.
Emotion is so fundamental to human activity that most other neurological functions, including learning, are layered on top of it. In fact, the more intelligent you are, the more emotional you can be. And vice-versa: the more emotional, the more intelligent.
Why do humans have emotions? It's about biological survival, pure and simple. Every single action we take starts with our emotions.
"We tend to think that emotions are over here and cognition is over there and if we can get rid of emotion, then we could really learn," Stein tells the group, all teachers but me.
In fact, he says, they are not separate, but "radically interconnected." Emotional thought is the platform for learning, memory, decision-making and creativity, neuroscientists have discovered.
One study showed that if a brain's emotional centre is injured, the person suffers severe intellectual disability, unable to make even the smallest decisions.
This means emotion can be a barrier, or a conduit, to learning. If a child is anxious about her parents' screaming match at breakfast, she's not likely to learn today's phonics lesson, for example. Or if a high school student is distracted because the pregnancy test she took last night came back positive, her brain is not laying down the neural networks it needs to grasp trigonometry.
On the other hand, if a child is emotionally connected to what he's learning, the neural networks will form fast and furious. Have you ever seen a teenager figure out how to play guitar just for the love of the music? What about the astounding percentage of adults who can describe in excruciating detail where they were when they heard that John Lennon had been killed? Emotional relevance makes learning happen.
And emotion is not necessarily conscious. Nor just human. Ants and frogs have emotions. A snarling dog is showing emotion. Any threat to physical survival will always elicit emotion.
But modern humans have developed a sophisticated understanding of survival. For us, it means surviving socially as well as physically. So if we feel at risk socially, we react as if our life were in danger.
Looked at through the lens of neuroscience, the Grade 8 art student might well have felt subconsciously that his social survival as a respected outcast was at risk. His social goals in the art class were to remain unknown and unreachable. Initially, he had nailed those goals.
His teacher's goals were to help him express himself artistically. The two sets of goals were at odds. And the student dodged the teacher until the very end, possibly moved by the teacher's valiant attempts to reach him.
But when she let others know that he had breached his own aloofness, he panicked. His emotions kicked in and he had to save his social identity by destroying evidence that he had responded to the teacher.
This means that dealing with relationships, including parents, teachers and friends, triggers the same biological defence reactions in the body as when the body itself is threatened.
"Every kid comes into the classroom with an emotional goal – and it's not necessarily academic," Stein says.
Of course, it's not just the students who have these emotions. Teachers do, too.
"When you teach, you take on responsibility for understanding your own emotions as well as understanding the emotions of the students and the class," Christodoulou says.
The issue is how to align the goals of the student and the teacher. That means making the student feel the goal is emotionally relevant. Sometimes, teachers can help shape the way the students see their goals and figure out what will happen if they meet them. So can parents.
Christodoulou asks the group: "How often have you thought about a student's emotional goals?"
Some of the teachers are nodding. In fact, the reason they have come to this three-day class is that they're frustrated when a student doesn't follow instructions.
Stephen Peisch, a music teacher at the Lawrence Academy in Groton, finds some students in his class don't want to learn: "I've told them what my goals are for the class and I assume that they buy in."
Stein nods, too. Peisch has hit on a critical point. Stein calls it the student's "so what factor," as in, "Why are we learning this?"
Somehow, to build strong neural networks – learning, in other words – schooling has to be relevant to the life and identity (and therefore the emotions) of the student. You don't remember things you don't care about. The nervous system is built to remember things you do care about, as in: "That's a frickin' tiger shadow!" Stein explains.
So, back to the art student and his blighted drawing. How could the teacher have handled the issues differently? As with so much in neuroeducation, there's no recipe, just informed experimentation.
But because the central issue seems to be that the student had different goals from the teacher, one solution would be for her to understand his motivation: He's not trying to get a good mark or make a good painting. He's trying to forge his social identity. His brain will perceive anything that interferes with that as a threat – perhaps on the scale of a hungry tiger lurking in the jungle – and he will react ferociously.
In fact, destroying a much-praised masterpiece might even enhance his social standing in the class. Viewed from that perspective, his actions make good sense.
Her goal was to encourage him to do a lovely portrait from the live model and help him improve his impressive talents. Had she realized lavish, public praise would ruin that, she could have praised him in private, or with a quiet smile.
With luck and neuroscientific insight, she might eventually have been able to talk to him about his social goals and how they could align with her scholastic goals.
Says Christodoulou: "The science of how people learn can only make it more effective."
alanna_mitchell@mac.com
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