Everyday you might work hard preparing the lesson to give a right information to students, to draw attention of them, to make a theme fun and to make your explanation excellent. All things you care about is important for effective learning in class. However you missed one of the most important factor for your class. When planning teaching for learning, our task as teachers, is to focus on the mood of learners. How do you feel today? The answer will differ; sad, happy, delightful, excited, or etc. The day depends on your mood. For example, if you fought with your spouse at this morning and you became too angry to assume that you are normal, you could not do your tasks and treat others well. Not only your feeling has an effect on the day, but students' mood has a great effects on the class. Then, are you noticing your students' feelings? You could catch the mood of the class like depressed, cool, noisy, or calm. The effect of learning depends on the mood of students. It will be better to know the students feeling because it affects your lesson. Emotion is important in education because it drives attention, which in turn drives learning and memory. There have been a lot of researches on the mood and learning and most teachers can capture the mood of students well. Then, how can we, teachers, can use them appropriately in the class? The topic of this essay is that 'How students' various emotions affect the lesson and how teachers lead the best feeling for effective learning?' . And the reason why I decided the topic like this is that although there are lots of studies about feeling and learning as I mentioned before, there is not enough information or instructions about how to use them properly in class.
Among your body parts which one do you think is a king of the whole parts? To me, it is a brain because brain do so many things for our body; it controls our muscles(legs and hands) and all of our marvel thoughts come from our brain. Among the functions of the brain, I guess, the emotion is the most marvelous ability; maybe it is not ability because emotion has a great role in our lives and control us as if they were king. Given this, it is only fair to do such claim. Christian Gerlach who works in Learning Lab Denmark said; when the 'cognitive revolution' began three decades ago, emotions were not given much attention, however in the last ten to fifteen years this picture has clearly changed and we now witness and increasing number of studies examining the role of emotions on nearly all aspects of everyday cognition, especially I want to tell about the role of emotion in education. In fact, Robert Sylwester said that new developments in cognitive science are unraveling the mysteries of emotions; the findings have much to teach us about how students do—or do not—learn.
Before we think about how emotion is related to education, let's think about the history of learning and psychology which help us to understand it. Learning has changed from the perspective of psychology. (#Brian Butterworth) Think about B. F. Skinner's behaviorism, in the beginning of the last century behaviorism came to the fore of scientific investigations. The first behaviorists considered the brain an uninteresting black box, from which the only interesting output was the behavior; where, in the final analysis, subjective experience can be described simply as patterns of provided proper reward and punishment is administered.(Skineer, 1938; Thorndike, 1911). From this viewpoint, there has been a lot of educational reinforcement; incentives to make students study hard. However, to a large extent behaviorists are misguided to think that conditioning can describe all learning processes in the human brain. In fact, much learning started to depend on internal motivation and emotion rather than external reward. It's time to change such old-fashioned educational approach.
Cognitive neuroscience has demonstrated the relationship between emotion and learning. (Christian Gerlach)
1. Emotions play a regulatory role in memory consolidation. In fact, the atmosphere in which students get knowledge is important for knowledge acquisition. For example, negative emotions and stress can disrupt optimal learning. However, some experts(Reinhard Pekrun) argue that the idea that positive emotions are always have positive effects and negative emotions always have negative effects is not correct. Certain negative emotions such as anxiety, shame, and anger can enhance performance in specific cases. Although these good point, I suggest that their average affects across students are negative. Quite some students have negative attitude toward learning especially when they have experienced fail in learning. These children are likely to develop a phobia and prevalence of anxiety of depression that lead to late development.
2. Emotion bias our cognitive information processing style. Such biases can differ in important respects. For example, selective encoding of threat cues at early stages of processing appears to be more characteristic of vulnerability to anxiety, whereas depression is associated with selective attention to mood-consistent stimuli when presentation conditions are helpful to strategic processing.
3. Emotion constitutes a vital part of decision making, even when it is based on rational cost-benefit analysis. The unique social information conveyed by each discrete emotion. In decision making, individuals use interdependent others' emotional expressions to make sense of ambiguous and uncertain social situations, and the cooperative or competitive nature of the social situation fundamentally influences the interpersonal effects of emotions.
According to the evidence 1 and 2 (not 3 because I judged evidence 3 doesn't have to do with learning fundamentally), positive emotions are better at leading to effective learning than negative emotions in terms of memory consolidation and information processing style. Therefore, as a teacher, we should try to create a better atmosphere to produce students' positive emotions.
These following factors that are under the control of educators likely are important for the development of students' emotions. (Reinhard Pekrun; Zeidner)
First, improve students' perceived control. Lack of structure, clarity, and excessive task demands are factors that enhance students' anxiety. Therefore, you should structure instructions well and explain clearly. By implication, adaptive student emotions likely can be fostered, and maladaptive emotions reduced, by raising the cognitive quality of instruction.
Second, support autonomy and self-regulated learning. Learning environments supporting students' self-regulated learning can be assumed to increase their sense of control and related positive emotions. In addition, such environments can foster positive emotions by meeting students' need for autonomy. However, these beneficial effects probably depend on the match between students' competence and individual need for academic autonomy. In case of a mismatch, loss of control and negative emotions can result. In short, teachers should attend to matching demands for autonomy to students' competencies and needs.
Third, set goal structures and achievement expectations carefully. Goal structures and grading practices determine students' opportunities for experiencing success and perceiving control, thus influencing their emotions. Specifically, competitive goal structures imply that some students experience success, whereas others have to experience failure, thus increasing levels of anxiety and hopelessness. Therefore, educators should adapt expectancy to students' competencies and should refrain from using goal structures which induce individual competition between students.
Finally, give feedback and consequences of achievement. Research suggests that cumulative failure feedback is a major factor underlying students' test anxiety (Zeidner, 1998). Success experiences likely strengthen perceived control and related positive emotions, whereas repeated failure can undermine subjective control and, therefore, instigate negative emotions. In addition, the perceived consequences of success and failure are important. Positive future-related student emotions can be increased if academic success is seen to produce beneficial long-term outcomes (such as future occupational chances). Negative outcomes of academic failure, by contrast, can increase students' achievement-related anxiety and hopelessness. By implication, providing success experiences, defining mistakes as opportunities for learning rather than as personal failure, and linking attainment to beneficial outcomes also is important for helping students to develop adaptive emotions.
Given these facts, we could know that students' various emotions affect the lesson and teachers can lead the proper feeling for learning.
It is certain that there will be a few opponents of my opinion although it is not popular because the power of emotion has been proved for many other aspects. However, some people would wonder that can we really control our emotions and can teachers lead the emotions of students. Many people would say not; we cannot control our emotion. This is because they think of emotion as arising out of the blue, unbidden, with a life of its own. How could one will oneself to feel love, happy, or any other emotion? It would seem that emotions are just not the kinds of things that can be willed into existence.
It becomes concern only when we try to imagine a single person regulating his or her own emotions.(James Gross) In this case, we should consider interaction between brain systems and we should distinguish the subject which controls the emotion from the subject which is controlled emotion. However, if something is being regulated, it isn't much of a mystery because the subjects are explicit. Given this example, teacher calms an out-of-control child in the classroom. Teachers can change the atmosphere of the class from disturbance to calmness, and it affects the mood of children. Although all of the children's feeling were not changed, emotional contagion( the tendency for two individuals to emotionally converge) can occur. The other way to change students' feeling that can be explained by using emotional contagion and observational learning is that teachers' own enthusiasm can facilitate students' adoption of positive emotions. Emotional contagion occurs not only between students but also between teacher and student. According to the research on emotional contagion in the classroom(Timothy P. Motet, Steven A. Bebe), students' emotional responses are positvely related to the perceived emotional responses of their instructor. To sum up, we can control the emotions; the emotions can be also controlled by others and teachers can lead proper feelings for effective learning by manipulating atmosphere and intending to emotional contagion.
Students learn and teachers should help students to learn in the most effective way. That's what teachers should do. In the past, teachers used to give some incentives to students to enhance their motives and performance. However, many experiments have proved that students learning is not related to external reward, but it is related to internal reward. In addition, it is a recent trend that scientists are paying attention to the power of emotion and it is time for teachers to change. Consider this; why same student do work well some day while he or she performs poorly some day? The degree of study of a student is not always same because learning depends on emotion. Emotions play a regulatory role in memory consolidation and information processing style. And of course it has an effect on concentration and motivation as we basically know. Emotion, the basic facts of human, is a feeling such as happiness, love, fear, anger, or hatred, which can be caused by the situation that you are in or the people you are with. What does it mean? People(included you) can intend to change someone's emotion. You might be embarrassed when the students don't concentrate on their work and your lesson. Use those instructions in your class and you don't have to worry anymore. Try to catch students' emotions and follow the instructions, it is the best way to help children to save time otherwise they spend uselessly, growing effectiveness of learning. How easy it is to become a great teacher!
