Students should feel safe: Caring for emotions in the classroom

Unsafe classrooms are where the teacher:

         uses physical punishment

         uses verbal abuse and degrade students

          bullies students

          calls names to students

          calls students useless

          insults students’ in-front of their peers

Some teachers think that the above strategies can teach the students a good lesson and they can learn better. Some teachers believe that such strategies are effective to maintain classroom discipline. They want to control students by force. They want to show that the students know less and so the teacher has the authority to feed them what they do not know. However research has strongly rejected such claims, proving that any kind of punishment affects the child’s personality. The child loses confidence on him/herself. This has life-time implication for the child. 

There are other and more effective ways of soft discipline strategies through a positive teacher-student relationship that I have talked about here. The strategies mentioned above create an unsafe classroom. These strategies damages the learning capacity of the students. It blocks learning from happening. Such damage leads to failure, inattentiveness in the classroom and eventually many students leave school. That means we, as teachers are the cause for students’ failures.

In this post I will try to explain why a threat is an emotional response that can block learning. How can we manage our students’ behaviour by engaging their working memory instead of using force or control? 

Students feeling safe or unsafe is an emotional feeling in the brain. Emotional data in our brain takes high priority because it is to do with survival (how the brain function is here). An individual responds to a situation in one of the two ways: rationally or emotionally. In situations when emotional and rational response collide, the emotional part of the brain overrides the rational thinking. When you experience anger, fear, or joy, you cannot decide rationally. The emotional part of the brain in the limbic system or amygdala overrides the conscious thoughts. Strong emotions can shut down the conscious thinking and processing.

Emotion is very powerful in attention, retention, learning and memory. How a student feels about the situation determines the amount of attention devoted to the activity. If a student feels angry, threatened and fearful, he/she will not be able to pay attention to your teaching. The strong emotion of fear or anger can block information and the student can easily get distracted. On the other hand if a student feels safe, he/she will be able to pay attention. He/she will respect you and will try not to disappoint you.

Success breeds success 

Success or failure is an emotional state. Success breeds success. Or prior successful experience will lead to more success. That is, if an individual is in a new learning situation but the past experiences signal the sensory register that prior encounter with this information were successful, then the information is passed onto working memory for processing (more about the sensory register and working memory here). The learner now consciously recognizes that there was success with this information and so he/she focuses on it for further processing and can go beyond it.

However failure can also breed failure. That is if past experience produced failure, then the sensory register can block the incoming information. The learner resists being part of the unwanted learning experience and resorts to other activities in the brain to avoid the situation. In effect the learner closes off the receptivity to the new informing. When a concept or topic encounter the emotions and struggles there, then emotions win. The rational system can override it but that usually takes time and efforts.

For example a success in mathematics can boost the learner’s self-concept. The learner feels comfortable and is willing to faces more problems. A student poor in math and a lack of success will lower his/her self-concept. He/she will avoid dealing with math problems whenever possible. It means learners participate in activities that has yielded success for them and avoid those that have led to failure. So it is important that we take small steps of success with individual learners in the class.

Our self-concept is shaped by our past experiences. Some experiences such as passing a difficult test can improve our self-concept while others such as failing to accomplish a task can lowered our self concept. These experiences produce strong emotional reactions in the amygdala. The amygdala encodes and stored the event. These experiences are sometimes so strong that we re-experience the same emotions each time we recall the event. Sometimes your body shivers. Over time new experiences moderate the self-concepts and alter the self-concept in the long term memory. It is called mindset. Mindset affects our cognitive ability to process information. I have explained more on mindset here.

A sense of support

Secondly, the teachers’ presence in the class should be a supportive one. Students must sense that the teacher wants to help them. That the teacher will lead them to be right rather than catch them being wrong. Some teachers try to catch students doing something wrong so they can be ridiculed and the teacher can prove his/her authority. This is not the right approach.

The teachers must note the signs of withdrawal in the classroom. Student with low self-concepts shutdown themselves in the classroom. Some of them are distractive. They cannot pay attention. They start doing other activities or even distract other students. It gives rise to classroom management issues. Which our teachers usually try to control through force. Remember, force creates resistance. The best way to manage withdrawal is engage the leaner with activity that he/she can do – make it a success for the. That is make the concept/topic easy enough for the students to understand. It is about dealing with the learners’ emotion. Convince the leaner to open up the sense registry and pass the information in chunks. It is important to convince the child that the new learning can be a success despite the fact that the previous one was a failure – a growth mind set (here) through feedback (here).

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It is equally important that student learn how to regulate or control their emotions. To be successful learners they must know how to use their emotions intelligently. Things like controlling impulses, delaying gratifications, expressing feelings, managing relationships and reducing stress are main behaviour regulations.

All in all we, as teachers need to change our own mindset. We need to shift from a controlling students learning to a positive relationship for effective learning. We need to give away our authoritative style and be more democratic in our classrooms. We need to believe in students’ abilities and try to engage the working memory and the emotional part of the brain for learning to be pleasant and effective for students.