Our Best Teachers Engage Both Emotionally and Cognitively 

On January 17, 2019 David Brooks wrote a column titled Students Learn from People They Love for the New York Times. Here is that column, in its entirety with my comments in [blue].

A few years ago, when I was teaching at Yale, I made an announcement to my class. I said that I was going to have to cancel office hours that day because I was dealing with some personal issues and a friend was coming up to help me sort through them.

I was no more specific than that, but that evening 10 or 15 students emailed me to say they were thinking of me or praying for me. For the rest of the term the tenor of that seminar was different. We were closer. That one tiny whiff of vulnerability meant that I wasn’t aloof Professor Brooks, I was just another schmo trying to get through life.

[Granted this is just an introductory hook, and my own experience as a teacher predisposes me to think this observation is worth thinking about, it is important to point out that a non-educator’s ‘n-of-one’ experience dabbling in a classroom is too often the foundation for some ill-informed screed about lazy teachers or the need to run schools more like businesses. That being said, go on….]

That unplanned moment illustrated for me the connection between emotional relationships and learning. We used to have this top-down notion that reason was on a teeter-totter with emotion. If you wanted to be rational and think well, you had to suppress those primitive gremlins, the emotions. Teaching consisted of dispassionately downloading knowledge into students’ brains.

[Again, he frames a complicated endeavor around two overlapping binaries, when both either/or frames are generally deployed by those with little to no experience in the classroom, often to attack those who do. While perhaps at one time this was a useful analytical distinction, few in the real world (now or in recent memory) chose to either focus on reason in the classroom or abandon teaching for a life of prayer.

It is now, and has been for as long as I can remember an ongoing balancing act. Some balance with more or less tilt toward one, but few beyond 2D Hollywood stereotypes are all or nothing. We can all fondly remember favorite faculty who lived the ‘discovery’ touted in the next paragraph—that emotion is essential to reasoning. Further, the consumption model of education (what he calls ‘downloading knowledge into student’s brains’) is a label usually used to disparage so-called ‘sage on the stage’ lecturing and has never been in an either/or relationship with engaged and interactive learning. That said, go on….]

Then work by cognitive scientists like Antonio Damasio showed us that emotion is not the opposite of reason; it’s essential to reason. Emotions assign value to things. If you don’t know what you want, you can’t make good decisions.

[Here Brooks is mobilizing the binary he claims to reject. He is assigning emotions to the values sphere and reason to the decision-making rational sphere, replicating the fact-value distinction he claimed to ‘discover’ in his one teaching experience to be inconsistent with what works in the classroom.]

Furthermore, emotions tell you what to pay attention to, care about and remember. It’s hard to work through difficulty if your emotions aren’t engaged. Information is plentiful, but motivation is scarce.

That early neuroscience breakthrough reminded us that a key job of a school is to give students new things to love — an exciting field of study, new friends. It reminded us that what teachers really teach is themselves — their contagious passion for their subjects and students. It reminded us that children learn from people they love, and that love in this context means willing the good of another, and offering active care for the whole person.

[Despite Brook’s faulty framing this strikes me as consistent with my own experience and my understanding of the research in the field. Good teaching requires us to engage with our students as individuals, to meet them where they are, to interact with them rather than simply act upon them. One of the most effective ways to this in a way that captures their attention is to enact our own passion for our subject, our love for an active and curious and open-hearted life of the mind.]

Over the last several years our understanding of the relationship between emotion and learning has taken off. My impression is that neuroscientists today spend less time trying to locate exactly where in the brain things happen and more time trying to understand the different neural networks and what activates them.

Everything is integrated. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang of the University of Southern California shows that even “sophisticated” emotions like moral admiration are experienced partly by the same “primitive” parts of the brain that monitor internal organs and the viscera. Our emotions literally affect us in the gut.

Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington has shown that the social brain pervades every learning process. She gave infants Chinese lessons. Some infants took face-to-face lessons with a tutor. Their social brain was activated through direct eye contact and such, and they learned Chinese sounds at an amazing clip. Others watched the same lessons through a video screen. They paid rapt attention, but learned nothing.

[Powerful illustration. Depending on the details of the study, could be a serious indictment of online education.]

Extreme negative emotions, like fear, can have a devastating effect on a student’s ability to learn. Fear amps up threat perception and aggression. It can also subsequently make it hard for children to understand causal relationships, or to change their mind as context changes.

[Just children? What about these children as adults?]

Even when conditions are ideal, think of all the emotions that are involved in mastering a hard subject like algebra: curiosity, excitement, frustration, confusion, dread, delight, worry and, hopefully, perseverance and joy. You’ve got to have an educated emotional vocabulary to maneuver through all those stages.

[Perhaps. And yet we all know so many who have mastered tough subjects like Algebra and display daily their complete lack of social skills or emotional maturity. So, Brook’s use of ‘got to have’ seems like an overstatement here. I am willing to accept that ‘having’ it is likely to increase or deepen mastery, but this is where Brook’s journalistic work falls short of academic analysis. We need to know more and more specifics. This is not a criticism of Brooks; it is a recognition that was have these two professions for a reason. Each provides a valuable skill and distinct contribution.]

And students have got to have a good relationship with teachers. Suzanne Dikker of New York University has shown that when classes are going well, the student brain activity synchronizes with the teacher’s brain activity. In good times and bad, good teachers and good students co-regulate each other.

The bottom line is this, a defining question for any school or company is: What is the quality of the emotional relationships here?

[This question invites the binary Brooks claims to reject. His question should be to what extent are the experiences in your classrooms both emotionally and cognitively engaging, challenging, interactive, and based on the best available data about both your field and about teaching & learning? If you start by saying we need to reject either/or notions about emotion and cognition, then your question here needs to reflect that aspiration. If this question is ‘not an add-on’ as Brooks asserts below, than don’t frame your question as if it were an afterthought.]

And yet think about your own school or organization. Do you have a metric for measuring relationship quality? Do you have teams reviewing relationship quality? Do you know where relationships are good and where they are bad? How many recent ed reform trends have been about relationship-building?

We focus on all the wrong things because we have an outmoded conception of how thinking really works.

The good news is the social and emotional learning movement has been steadily gaining strength. This week the Aspen Institute (where I lead a program) published a national commission report called “From a Nation at Risk to a Nation at Hope.”

Social and emotional learning is not an add-on curriculum; one educator said at the report’s launch, “It’s the way we do school.” Some schools, for example, do no academic instruction the first week. To start, everybody just gets to know one another. Other schools replaced the cops at the door with security officers who could also serve as student coaches.

When you start thinking this way it opens up the wide possibilities for change. How would you design a school if you wanted to put relationship quality at the core? Come to think of it, how would you design a Congress?

[So, thank you Mr. Brooks for reminding us that teaching and learning are complex, holistic, endeavors. Thank you for pointing readers in the direction of several leading academics in the field, because we all need to deepen our understanding of how we think & learn: from educators to the general public. Most educators I know are already knee-deep in trying to figure out better ways to do what we do.

Mr. Brooks’ audience, the general public, is usually subjected to powerful misinformation on this topic: teachers are lazy, teachers’ unions are obstacles to quality education, and the solution is some (toxic) combination of endless testing & assessment (with metrics determined by legislators) and to run schools like a business.

Sadly, Brooks does not frame his analysis here in a way that allows most readers to use his otherwise useful contribution toward advancing this public good. For instance, we might ask why those pushing educational reform think government is always the problem except when it comes to legislators creating pointless metrics to punish their children’s hard working teachers, preventing them from doing their jobs.

Thinking about thinking and problem solving as a public good in this way could, as Brooks notes, extend to our understanding and analysis of Congress and the president. I am not sure why Brooks chooses to single out Congress, because it seem beyond challenge that the most emotionally immature leader in DC is our president. 

But certainly Congress includes members who could similarly benefit from thinking about governance & leadership as challenges that requires us to engage with fellow citizens as humans with families and aspirations, emotionally and cognitively, rather than simply instrumentally.

But, the central point here remains worth thinking about. Experts, from academics studying the brain to educators in the classroom, know a lot about the conditions that advance teaching & learning. Yet legislators and lobbyists posing as educational reformers like our current Secretary of Education ignore the best available data. They are primarily interested in finding ways to punish teachers and transfer public expenditures from education toward lining their own pockets and the pockets of their private sector allies.

Yes, it is true that our best teachers engage fully, emotionally and cognitively, in our classrooms. 

But that is hardly a new insight and the challenge we face if we want to recognize the importance of this insight, as Brooks suggests he wants to do, goes well beyond dabbling in a few scholarly studies, to portray yourself as an expert in a field where you are not, and asking about the quality of relationships in your workplace--instead, support teachers.]