Hooks to Learning

The following piece comes from my professional writing file.  I’ve decided to post it to my September blog as we begin a new school year because it addresses the basic purpose of education—how students learn.  As you are reading, think about your best and worst learning experiences….

 Hooks to Learning

Anything that captures a student’s attention and engages the mind has the potential to produce learning.  The opposite is also true: without attention and engagement, there is no learning.

The brain is always searching for meaning to what it is experiencing.  As the brain absorbs information, it constantly searches for a pattern that makes sense.  If a message seems meaningless, the brain will delete it.  Experience and emotion are two hooks that help the brain form a pattern for retaining information.  Without retention of information, learning is not taking place.

What does this mean to the learning environment?  It simply means that in order to learn, a student must be able to build upon existing knowledge, or experience.  For example, students placed in math classes above their ability have been set up for failure.  Their brains do not yet have established pathways for the new pieces of mathematical information.  This places a halt on the learning process.

Emotion is another hook in the process of learning.  The brain puts emotions on a ‘fast path’ or a ‘slow path.”  On the fast path, emotions travel quickly through the brain and skip long-term memory.  Painful and hurtful emotions get on the fast path and travel quickly through the brain.  Learning associated with painful emotions will be lost.  Threatening consequences or using sarcasm, for example, simply produce the opposite of learning–forgetting.

Positive emotions, on the other hand, help the brain absorb new information and fast track it to memory.  Simply put, this means learning must involve more than boring lectures and rote memorization.  Hands-on activities, singing, drawing, experiments, discussion, real-life activities are but a few of the examples that engage emotions in the classroom, and more importantly, make learning memorable. 

The best learning environment is a classroom that draws on previous experience and creates positive emotions to help students learn.  As the new school year begins, my hope is that classrooms are filled with teachers who understand this basic concept of education and students who are absorbing information at a phenomenal rate because they love school and learning.