Reflections from Learning and the Brain Conference - Part 2 - Meaning and Purpose

Each year, when I attend the Learning and the Brain conference, I return with a very full brain, and much of what is in it is disconnected.  So, in order to process all of it, I look for themes and write about them.  This year, there will be three.  Last week's was on thinking and learning.  This second one is about meaning and purpose, and the third will be about well-being and happiness.  

If you ask teachers or school leaders to think about what they want for their students, the word purpose is likely to arise.  The GRACE vision statement talks about God's plan for our students' lives.  Look at the surveys of empty nesters or the recently retired, and you will find that they initially struggle because, unless they are intentional about redirecting, they have lost their sense of purpose (having defined it wrongly in the first place).  Professional athletes like Tiger Woods won't retire because they don't know who they are without their sport.  It's the only purpose they feel they have.  This is not true and represents job idolatry, but that's a rant for a different post.

It turns out that research into how we learn also involves a sense of purpose and meaning.  According to the work of Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, the way kids make meaning out of the things they witness enables processes of adaptive change in their brains. It influences the white matter of their cerebral cortex and makes more connections between neurons.  So the psychology of learning has a biological effect, and biology has psychological effects.  Even between people, there is feedback between the emotions of one person and the biology of another.  We've all had the experience of a friend's tears or a supervisor's anger making us feel sick.  When a baby focuses its gaze on us and smiles, there are physical changes in our heart rate.  Petting a dog or cat is thought to lower a person's blood pressure.  Since we aren't carved up pieces, we cannot separate physical neurology from psychological change.

What does this mean for my classroom?  Quite a few things, actually.  It shows us that a teacher's emotional state influences the class' physical atmosphere.  If I remain calm, students are less likely to spiral into a hormonal spin.  If I let them work me up, we create a dangerous cycle.  In past posts, I've called this "feeding the crazy."

It also means that I should carefully approach how to help my students make meaning of their learning.  This doesn't mean I am going to ask them how they feel about Newton's Second Law, but it might mean I should put them in the problem.  If they can get a physical sense of applying a force (even just in their minds), they can make the meaning of it more real.  

In her keynote address, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang showed a poem that her daughter wrote to her baby brother, Teddy.  She told him that she loved him "more than the whole earth-size."  Having just learned they lived on a very large ball of dirt that floated through space and moved around the sun, this second-grader connected her love for her brother, which she couldn't quite wrap her head around to the size and movement of the planet, which she also couldn't quite wrap her head around.  Making these connections is a natural process, but we can leverage it to make better use of it for our lessons.  We can connect the slope of a graph to a slowly or rapidly changing process that is common to students (or ask them to suggest a connection).

Daniel Willingham also discusses how having a student connect content to deeper meaning helps their memory.  He recommends a relatively slow process for using flashcards.  We typically fly through them pretty quickly if we are getting the answer right, but he suggests stopping after each card to ask yourself a why question.  So, you have answered the question "What is the relationship between volume and pressure?" with "Inverse."  Now, ask yourself why is that relationship inverse rather than direct?  Connecting to the meaning creates a more complex story that may involve emotion (e.g. The balloon will pop if the pressure is high enough, which will startle me) and will cause more change in the brain.  

Students have long wanted to understand the purpose of what they are learning.  This is one of the reasons we get asked the question "When am I ever going to use this in real life?"  There are a lot of ways to handle that question, but you don't actually have to convince them that they will use it as an individual.  It can be enough that they know this information is used by someone.  As John Almarode says, "They just need to know that it means something more than the grade in the grade book."  If engineers use it, tell them.  If poets, artists, doctors, CPAs, factory workers, or receptionists use it, your students will benefit from knowing that.  It will help them see purpose and meaning in what they are learning.  

By the way, it is unlikely they will admit it in that moment, so don't get your hopes up for them to say, "Oh, great.  Now, I'm cool with doing the hard thing you have asked me to do."  Just know that your explanation did have a deeper long-term effect on their brain than what you are seeing.