A fresh look at SEL; Bringing the Neuroscience of Learning to Physical Education
"It's neurobiologically impossible to remember things about which you've had no emotion..." Dr. Immordino-Yang
Dr. Helen Immordino-Yang is a professor of Education, Psychology, and Neuroscience at the University of Southern California. I saw her speak last spring at a California Teacher Development Collaborative (CATDC) event called; The Neuroscience of Learning: Why Emotions are Fundamental to Academic Excellence. The workshop focused on social-emotional learning and the role it plays in education. If you are a teacher dedicated to instructional strategies that engage social-emotional learning (SEL), Dr. Immordino-Yang's research is something you need to hear. For me, the session provided clarity on how social emotions actually affect learning and how I might nurture emotional learning in physical education and human development.
It took several months for me to make sense out of the three-hour session. The purpose of this blog is to highlight some of Dr. Immordino-Yang's research and to give physical education (PE) teachers three tools they can use tomorrow to create more optimal social-emotional learning environments.
Tip: Don't let task-oriented activities become the antithesis of meaningful learning experiences.
As PE teachers, it is easy to get caught up in classroom management routines, games, and activities that primarily engage the Executive Control Network of the brain. We create these environments daily for our students; colored-coded stations, task cards, projected videos for students to follow. As PE teachers we pride ourselves on this stuff, we need these skills for large classes, and we rely on them to ensure safety and physical activity. Have we ever stopped to think that these task-oriented environments could be disconnecting our students from creating meaningful learning connections?
Let's look at three major networks of the brain
The Executive Control Network - Facilitates attention. It is essential for ignoring extraneous information or distractions, as well as for regulating emotions, maintaining goals and focus, and controlling impulses.
The Default Mode Network - recruited during all sorts of tasks that involve internally directed, interpretive, and reflective thought. Important for conceptual understanding, creativity, nonlinear and “out-of-the-box” thinking, feelings of inspiration, social emotions, identity development and for “looking in” or thinking about things that aren’t in the physical “here and now.”
The Salience Network weighs emotional relevance and perceived importance and urgency of information to facilitate switching between the Default Mode Network and the Executive Control Network.
The message here is that the Default Mode for students mostly goes to sleep when the Executive Control Network is working. So, feelings of awe, inspiration, creativity can be diminished when students are on sitting still facing forward in your rainbow color-coded team lines, trying to listen to directions.
We need to create more optimal instructional environments that engage all three of the major networks. Our lessons should be designed to develop sustained, flexible, attention, and productivity on tasks (Executive), reflection, memory, and meaning-making (Default) and emotional relevance (Salience). Learning environments that are set up to increase productivity and accountability may be incompatible with how these networks work and interact, and therefore impair student achievement.
I am proposing that PE teachers add three instructional moves to their teaching to engage emotions and elevate student learning.
#1 Reflection Time
"Young people need downtime, reflection time, and strong social relationships to learn optimally. Students need structured educational opportunities to make meaning out of complex information without interruption, to engage in work that feels relevant to their interests and life, and to formulate opinions and deep understanding of the tasks they engage in.” Dr. Immordino-Yang
As PE teachers we plan the last 5-10 minutes of class for reflection, however, when a lesson runs long, it is the first thing removed when we run out of time. For PE teachers with large classrooms, you might experience downtime as a negative part of the lesson that could mean disruptive behaviors. I suggest not leaving reflection time to the end of a lesson. Instead, how integrating into a lesson using this reflection cube? The cube could be a station students travel to or part of a game.
#2 Story Telling
The teens we teach have a long history of experiences from physical education class (not all are positive). These students have already made an emotional connection to who they are in PE, and that emotion directly affects how they will learn and engage in your class. So, why don't we stop to ask them about their previous experiences? Try this lesson I created called, Who am I as a Fitness Student. You could adapt this for your PE program, or a specific unit. For example, Who Am I as a Frisbee Player?
Additionally, I have incorporated Empathy Warm-ups into my teaching. A prompt for the speaker that day could be: What has been your experience with team sports and competitive play? The goal for storytelling is to help students create a new, more positive identity that builds their self-worth and positively affects their learning.
#3 Choice
Optimal learning environments present opportunities or activities that encourage both flexible thinking and mastery of necessary building block skills and knowledge. One way to do this is to give students opportunities to exhibit and explain their reasoning, gain feedback from one another, and revise their work. These processes contribute to deeper learning and help students develop perseverance, resilience, and growth mindset. For years, I have ended my sports units with tournament play. Tournaments, I thought, were an excellent showcase of student learning and skills. I have since thought about additional ways for students to showcase their knowledge. Ideas for this could be student-created videos on throwing and catching or allowing students to create personalized showcases of skills and techniques.
Dr. Immordino-Yang teaches that to learn in a meaningful way, to make connections, and to transfer learning to real life, students have to be emotionally connected to what they are learning. It doesn't mean they need to be happy or excited about it all the time. The goal is to have people feel and experience the emotions that are already infused in the learning.
Please check out these additional resources from Dr. Immordino-Yang’s work.
