Presenters at two Conference sessions discussed what neurologists and psychologists say about optimal conditions for learning.
According to Robert Sylwester of the University of Oregon, advances in the study of human emotion have validated two principles that teachers have always believed—namely, that instruction with an emotional component yields more powerful learning, and that stress in the classroom is counter-productive. While educators give lip service to the importance of the affective domain, "the tendency has not been to focus on the whole student," Sylwester said. To engage students' emotions in their learning, teachers can use simulations, role playing, art, and music, he recommended.
Renate Nummela Caine and Geoffrey Caine, authors of ASCD's Making Connections: Teaching and the Human Brain, also argued that emotions are critical to the patterns of learning that occur in the brain. "We think with our feelings; we feel with our thoughts," they said. The brain is not divided into an emotional part and a learning part; it remembers facts best when they are embedded in experience, and it makes meaning best when it feels the meaning.
If students are under stress, however, their memories are likely to be "maladaptive," Sylwester warned. Under stress, the organs in the brain that select and classify memories are stimulated into overactivity. "You don't know what's important to remember, so you store it all," he said. This phenomenon explains why people remember every detail of what they were doing when they learned President Kennedy had been shot.
According to the Caines, when people feel threatened, the brain "downshifts" to a lower order of processing—often to a primitive "fight or flight" response that precludes creativity and higher-order thinking skills. Threats to learning are literally threats to brain functioning—and these threats can include the physical dangers of poverty, violence, and ill health or the psychic dangers of anxiety or abuse.
The Caines also discussed classroom conditions that lead to downshifting. These include an emphasis on grades, indifference to student experiences, motivation by rewards and punishments, use of time schedules to govern learning tasks, and lack of group participation.
In closing, the Caines suggested reorganizing schools into learning communities that encourage brain-based learning.