it helpful to explore essential questions that lie outside your core curriculum?
5. How can you use Socratic seminars in your classroom to help students use essential and herding questions in ways that advance their learning?
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chapter 2
Connection Through Context and Relevance
In this shift, I detail the importance of context and relevance to engaging students in their own learning. To give you a sense of why context and relevance are important to learning, I offer you an example from my own experience.
Living in Japan has been a tremendously rewarding and incredibly challenging experience for me. My language skills are fine for casual conversation, but I rely heavily on others for deeper conversations. To read and understand typical expressions and sentences in Japan, one must understand hiragana, katakana, and basic kanji.
The hiragana and katakana alphabets each contain 107 characters, which represent the sounds of Japanese and foreign words respectively. Beyond these, there are thousands of kanji, or Chinese characters. The set of kyōiku kanji, which students must learn by grade 6, alone contains 1,006 characters. Each of these can take twenty or more pen strokes to create, and learners must be able to write them with the correct stroke count, order, and direction as well as know their Japanese and Chinese readings. This is not a task most would want to undertake. It’s probably also why none of my friends want to spend an evening with me. However, I am highly motivated and committed to this process, because I find the study fascinating and enlightening. Living in Japan, having non-English-speaking family and friends, and studying traditional arts, music, and Buddhism, all of which happen in Japanese, instill a high degree of relevance and motivate me to continue studying.
In order to learn something, it must stimulate your curiosity—in other words, interest comes before learning does. Connection and relevance occur when we stimulate an emotional response. Learners can be inspired, excited, curious, happy, or outraged as the result of a provocation, which, as the word means, provokes a response. Yes, even negative emotions can inspire decisive action in our learners. As educators, however, it is often our job to take a learner’s negative energy and guide him or her toward turning it into something positive, specifically a positive action he or she can take toward solving a problem of consequence to the world.
In this chapter, I examine how emotion can create the necessary context and relevance in students, prompting engagement and interest in their own learning. I begin by thoroughly examining the scientific basis that connects emotion to learning engagement and then offer a series of microshifts of practice you can use in your classroom to connect students to their learning.
How Emotional Connections Establish Context and Relevance
Often, educators see relevance as something important for them to impart to learners. We may think limiting processed food and sugar is relevant to a teenager, but it is only our perception. If he or she does not perceive the relevance, then there is none. As educators, it is critical that we find a way to foster this connection. Students learn when they become emotionally engaged in conversations, ideas, and activities that have personal relevance to them (Immordino-Yang, 2015). The resulting emotional connection from personal relevance is what differentiates superficial, topical assimilation of material from a transformative education experience filled with mastery and deep learning, which is to say that students can apply their learning in different ways and under variable circumstances (Briggs, 2015).
Do not underestimate the connection emotion has to learning or interpret it as a trend, fad, or indulgence, which is a very human thing to do when confronted with a challenging concept or task. Creating this emotional connection might seem difficult, but research demonstrates that the investment in doing so is well worth it, resulting in significant increases in learning and academic performance (Lahey, 2014).
In “To Help Students Learn, Engage the Emotions” (Lahey, 2016), Mary Helen Immordino-Yang (2015) discusses her use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which reveals brain function in real time: “When students are emotionally engaged, we see activations all around the cortex, in regions involved in cognition, memory and meaning-making, and even all the way down into the brain stem.”
Emotion is where learning begins or, as is often the case, where it ends. In Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience, Immordino-Yang (2015) further states, “Even in academic subjects that are traditionally considered unemotional, such as physics, engineering or math, deep understanding depends on making emotional connections between concepts” (p. 18). Her most striking statement for me, though it seems like common sense, is something educators often overlook in their rush to deliver content: “It is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don’t care about” (Lahey, 2016).
Simply stated, if there is no emotional connection, learning doesn’t happen. In my experience, compassion creates one of the strongest connections. When we see someone helpless, in distress from war or natural disaster, or in pain, our ego (our self) stills. In Japanese Buddhism, there is a word for this experience, sesshin
Finding this gateway with your students is actually pretty simple. For example, in October 2016 at Melrose High School in Canberra, my colleagues and I held the first-ever Solution Fluency Thinkfest. Five elementary schools sent grades 4 and 5 students to work with a high school student who acted as the facilitator. We tasked them with using solution fluency (Crockett & Churches, 2017) to research and develop a solution to the question, What is the most urgent problem in the world? (Note that I write much more about solution fluency in chapter 6 [page 77, Solution Fluency].)
Given the elementary students’ young ages, I naively expected to hear concerns that they aren’t allowed to play video games when they want or that they have too much homework. Figures 2.1 through 2.4 (pages 23–25) briefly list what is on the minds of these learners.
Figure 2.1: An elementary student lists vital issues facing Australia.
Figure 2.2: An elementary student lists vital issues facing the world.
Figure 2.3: An elementary student uses cloud bubbles to visualize
