The MOST impactful thing we can do for learning

Learning with Feeling is about prioritising the emotional experience of the learner.

By this I don’t mean social-emotional learning (SEL), though that is an important area worth exploring (if you haven’t already).

What I mean is designing learning experiences in such a way as to facilitate engagement, motivation and a feeling of joy and purpose.

My research into this topic led me to the work of an incredible neuroscientist at USC, Dr Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, EdD , who studies the role emotions play in the learning experience.

A Remarkable Discovery

Dr Immordino-Yang recently worked on a five-year study where they “analysed how young people’s brains are affected by deep thinking and reflection, finding that when teens were exposed to real-life stories and were asked to respond critically to how they made them feel, it had significant positive impacts on identity development and brain structure.”

As Immordino-Yang explains in her own words:

“One of the fundamental misconceptions undergirding our education system is the idea that the purpose of school is to support learning outcomes. And learning outcomes are operationalised mainly around two things, both to do with memory. One is memory for semantic information, for facts, and the other is memory for procedures. But in the human brain, there's a third kind of memory that is absolutely fundamental to our growth and development and well-being, and that is autobiographical memory.

"Autobiographical memory is the stories of who we are and what we stand for and how we want the world to be.”

This is huge for education.

This scientific discovery suggests we should be facilitating learning for students that gets them thinking deeply about their own place in the world, the issues they face and their role in tackling those issues.

It challenges the validity of education solely focused on learning outcomes related to remembering information and procedures.

When I’ve previously talked about making learning emotional, purposeful and meaningful, I haven’t been specific enough with what that actually means.

I know what I mean - from my personal experience as an educator.

But now we can refer to neuroscience to clearly articulate what this type of learning is - and what parts of the brain and memory we need to be stimulating to set young people up for a successful future.

“When we think about the current state of secondary education and we think about what adolescents need, it's fairly obvious that there is a fundamental mismatch. We want kids to start with the small building blocks, to learn the little pieces and start to put those together, but that is not how the human mind grows. The human mind grows and develops by engaging with deep, powerful ideas, and then working backward to inform the meaning that you're making.”

Motivating and Purpose-Generating

This study supports the motivating learning frameworks I advocate for: beginning with a big picture problem or challenge and then the learners working backwards to understand and learn the building blocks that will help them solve and understand the greater challenge.

“What [the] psychosocial and educational research is showing is that supporting young people to respectfully, in a developmentally appropriate way, engage with the complexities of the social and moral lives that they and others are living and that we are co-creating together in our society is what is deeply, deeply motivating and purpose-generating in all people, but especially in young people.”

Again, this is what many people in the education space are suggesting with the potential of AI to support learning.

We should be giving young people a deep, complex issue to explore - or problem to solve - and get them to engage with that idea and consider solutions and considerations themselves.

They can use AI to help them to do this. And if the issue is deep and complex enough (with no easy “answers”) then there will be no danger of them “cheating” using AI as it will be clear that the task is calling upon the student’s deep thoughts, reflections and opinions about the issues.

“Cheating” wouldn’t even be an appealing option.

“When our educational system thinks of the learning process as enabling a young person to think about the kind of world that they live in, but also the kind of world they want to create—that is good education.”

This discovery is a game-changer.

This is scientific evidence that points to exactly how we should be crafting learning experiences for children and young people.

Their brain matter depends on it ??

?What is your takeaway from this scientific discovery?

?How should we be redesigning learning experiences to encourage this deep, complex thinking?

I'm Tom Bolton ?? I write about emotion and story in education. Subscribe to my LinkedIn newsletter for more forays into the Venn diagram of my overactive brain.