Empathy and Compassion for Better Learning

Every year at about this time --- sometime in mid-August  - just as summer is ending  -- I begin to think about some really BIG questions. How do humans learn best?  What are the best conditions for learning new ideas and challenging material?  What are the best teaching methods?

The reason that these important questions start to squeeze their way into my mind – pushing aside the otherwise important debate in our household on whether to make banana bread w/choc chips or blueberry/peach cobbler for desert tonight and my fretting about the condition of the flowers in the raised beds on the patio and the need to do some serious pruning -  is that school is about to start!

All summer, in the back of my mind,  I have been making grand plans – collecting fabulous resource books – and sketching out whole new vistas of lesson plans.  But, now that school is just about to start it is time to get serious and make some final decisions about the improvements and changes I need to make.  Every year is different and every year is a new adventure.

Fortunately, this year I have some expert resources to rely on in planning for this new year of elementary science that I am responsible for….recent advances in neuroscience that are providing some fascinating new ideas about how best to teach children.

In June - just as the flowers and tomatoes were beginning to grow on our patio and my kids were just starting their list of deserts to make during the next two months..... I had the privilege of participating in a short course for K-12 teachers called “Embodied Brain, Social Minds” taught by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, assistant professor of education at the Rossier School of Education and assistant professor of psychology at the Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California.

Here is a link to some background information on her research and some recent publications. 

This is such an exciting time in neuroscience research and this workshop was filled with recent insights into how our brains work as they makes sense of the world.  Mary Helen Immordino-Yang presented a whole array of new research results.  Here is a TED talk that she gave that has some of this information..

http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxManhattanBeach-Mary-Helen-I

 “ … meaningful learning always involves emotion.” 

From the advances in neuroscience research and the studies using imaging technologies to watch which parts of participants brains are active as they are feeling core emotions such as admiration and empathy we now know that we can no longer think of learning as separate from or disrupted by emotion.  Some of this neural activity is going on in surprisingly core areas of our brains that are also important for some very central and basic monitoring of our own bodies and key to our basic survival.  One aspect of the new research results that I found particularly relevant to my teaching was the new understanding of how central empathy, compassion and social functioning are to the development of learning.

If you would like to know more about all of this there is a great resource full of talks and short videos  - it is all gathered together as an online course offered by the Annenberg Foundation

called Neuroscience and the Classroom: Making connections.  

Here are some thoughts from the Neuroscience and the Classroom website which relates to empathy and the social nature of learning….

How does empathy work?
Like all emotions, empathy rides on the neurological platform of the body and the "self"—that sense of a "real me" (my needs, my desires, my beliefs) that is formed from our experiences. We see ourselves in others, and we understand others by simulating their actions and circumstances on the same neurological structures that keep us alive or maintain our sense of social well-being. 

ref

Why is empathy important to learning and teaching?

“Learning in social contexts, like schools, depends on recognizing, understanding, and sharing goals. If people do not recognize that another's actions are goal directed, simulations will not be activated, and the intended learning may not occur. Learners must understand teachers' goals, and teachers will be more effective if they understand their students' goals. Of course, as we have seen, in addition to understanding goals, teachers and learners must share a sense of the emotional relevance of the goals. It's possible to understand others' actions and goals but not to care about them. To foster meaningful learning, the goals must both be understood and matter to teacher and student. Most of us have been in classrooms in which the goals seem either misunderstood or misaligned—or both.” (ref)

If you have a chance be sure to watch some of the videos – all of them are excellent – but for this discussion the videos from Unit 3: Seeing the Self in Other especially the ones titled Music and Emotion and Empathy provide some more specific examples.  

In my next post I will focus on an article from Dr. Immordino-Yang's research and give some specific examples of how that will inform my science instruction for this year - and hopefully give other teachers some ideas for their classrooms as well.