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The Neuroscience Behind Stress and Learning
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6 thoughts on “The Neuroscience Behind Stress and Learning”
Great article! I especially loved the Krashen shoutout.
We all know that stress and fear are the enemies of learning and the mental health of our students. This makes it all the more frustrating when I hear colleagues bragging to one another about how much homework they give, how much their students fear them, and how many “lazy” or “dumb” students they failed. This is especially bad amongst traditional Latin teachers who view student failure as a badge of honor.
This article reminded me that creating a stress-free classroom is an essential part of our job as educators. It is educational malpractice to let mean-spirited co-workers or administrators bully us into doing otherwise.
…it is educational malpractice to let mean-spirited co-workers or administrators bully us into doing otherwise….
So well said John. And nobody is doing much of anything about that malpractice – it’s business as usual for them. But we are doing something about it. We are not attacking those guilty of the malpractice; rather, we are offering a different way. We are building a better road to travel down. I like the way we are responding to those folks who do it the old way. We are responding in a completely positive way and not attacking them. We are simply taking their legs out from under them by our hard work in our classrooms doing something new and radically different with the way languages are taught. We may not see the results for awhile, but the collective efforts of those doing this new work will one day bear a truly sweet tasting fruit. Keep that in mind when you go back into inservice this month.
I think we should all commit to memory this science-based support of an affective filter:
“When the amygdala is in this state of stress-induced over-activation, new sensory information cannot pass through it to access the memory and association circuits.
“This is the actual neuroimaging visualization of what has been called the affective filter by Stephen Krashen and others. This term describes an emotional state of stress in students during which they are not responsive to learning and storing new information. What is now evident on brain scans during times of stress is objective physical evidence of this affective filter. With such evidence-based research, the affective filter theories cannot be disparaged as “feel-good education” or an “excuse to coddle students” — if students are stressed out, the information cannot get in. This is a matter of science.”
Amen! This is so critical. Thank you for posting. There are so many great articles out there. I like this one because it is concise and extremely science-y (yes…i just made up that word). I will reference this in the workshop I am creating for the fall conference in NH called “Stress Busters in the CI classroom!”
I agree the shout out to Krashen is cool and long overdue!
🙂
Dude.
The part of the article that caught my eye was the following paragraph:
This affective state occurs when students feel alienated from their academic experience and anxious about their lack of understanding. Consider the example of the decodable “books” used in phonics-heavy reading instruction. These are not engaging and motivating. They are usually not relevant to the students’ lives because their goal is to include words that can be decoded based on the lesson. Decodability is often at the expense of authentic meaning to the child. Reading becomes tedious and, for some children, confusing and anxiety-provoking. In this state, there is reduced passage of information through the neural pathways from the amygdala to higher cognitive centers of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex, where information is processed, associated, and stored for later retrieval and executive functioning.
When we force them to read above their level (i.e. “authentic” unscaffolded resources) the kids move into decoding. We Latin teachers know all about decoding as opposed to actually reading. Obviously, they are talking about a different type of decoding here, but it parallels our experience in FL almost perfectly. Our students spend all their mental resources trying to decode each word or sentence and never get to see the movie play in their heads.
I also love the term “authentic meaning” here. That is a use of “authentic” that I can get behind. Books or language are used authentically when the students focus on meaning not form.