Social-Emotional Learning and the Brain

Strategies to Help Your Students Thrive

Marilee Sprenger

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781416629528
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

ASCD Bestseller! Today's teachers face a daunting challenge: how to ensure a positive school experience for their students, many of whom carry the burden of adverse childhood experiences, such as abuse, poverty, divorce, abandonment, and numerous other serious social issues. Spurred by her personal experience and extensive exploration of brain-based learning, author Marilee Sprenger explains how brain science—what we know about how the brain works—can be applied to social-emotional learning. Specifically, she addresses how to- Build strong, caring relationships with students to give them a sense of belonging.
- Teach and model empathy, so students feel understood and can better understand others.
- Awaken students' self-awareness, including the ability to name their own emotions, have accurate self-perceptions, and display self-confidence and self-efficacy.
- Help students manage their behavior through impulse control, stress management, and other positive skills.
- Improve students' social awareness and interaction with others.
- Teach students how to handle relationships, including with people whose backgrounds differ from their own.
- Guide students in making responsible decisions.

Offering clear, easy-to-understand explanations of brain activity and dozens of specific strategies for all grade levels, Social-Emotional Learning and the Brain is an essential guide to creating supportive classroom environments and improving outcomes for all our students.

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Chapter 1

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Building Teacher-Student Relationships

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The brain is most interested in survival and has a deep need for relating to others.

—John Medina

If you read no other chapter in this book, read this one. This reading alone will make a big impact in your classroom—as it could in every classroom. Building and maintaining relationships is the core of life. The central role of relationships is also backed by research. According to Hattie (2017), positive relationships between teacher and student have an effect size on learning of 0.52. The effect size is a measure of how important a difference is between two groups. This means that based on a meta-analysis of relationships, teacher-student relationships can accelerate learning more than the average 0.40, which represents a year's worth of growth. Before we can teach students how to handle relationships with their peers, we, as educators, need to model relationship building.

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When it comes to the subject of history, there isn't a finer teacher than Sarah. She loves her content and can often mesmerize her students with stories, monologues, and rare tidbits of information about a country's war heroes and relationships, both personal and professional. When the school survey was given to 6th through 12th grade students, however, Sarah did not fare well.

She was crushed when she reviewed the answers her students gave in several areas. Although 88 percent of her students agreed that Sarah explained things in a different way if students didn't understand, only 15 percent said that she noticed when they were having difficulty, and only 5 percent said that she helped them when they were upset.

At first, Sarah was angry. She thought, "With all the time I spend preparing the best lessons for them, making sure that I help them see and hear history, how can they say I don't notice their content and personal issues? What's wrong with them?"

By the time Mr. Mercer called her in for a meeting to discuss the results, Sarah had begun to calm down and was trying to figure out how the students had come to their conclusions. She sat down across from her principal and mentor. He smiled and began by saying, "Sarah, you know you are a great teacher and you reach most of your students. Your teaching style is above reproach. My observations in your classroom have shown me how you can dazzle reluctant learners, and whether I'm observing your 8th graders absorbing the nuances of the Civil War or your 10th graders tackling the reasons leading up to the war in Vietnam, your kids view you as a knowledgeable historian. You can make them feel connected to Holocaust victims and survivors, but you don't seem to make them feel connected to you! It wasn't until I studied the surveys that I realized this.

"I apologize for not looking closely enough to realize that you have a relationship with your class, but you don't really relate to your individual students. That is, you don't have a personal relationship with them. Your dynamic presentation of material draws them to the content, but you must establish a way to draw them to you. They need to trust you as a person. Many of them need to feel noticed as individuals. Seventy-four percent say that you give them specific suggestions for improving their work, and out of the 150 students you teach, that says a lot. But only 25 percent say that you support them both inside and outside the classroom. Let's talk about what you can do to increase this. You see, the students who are upset about this are the ones who can't get your full attention, the kids who need to know someone cares about them, not just their content or their grades.

"It's not always easy to build relationships with pre-adolescents and adolescents. You and the other adults in their lives are their last best chance to get beyond some of the trauma and stress they experience—many on a daily basis."

At this, Sarah sat back in her chair and sighed. "Mr. Mercer, I've never been good with relationships. Even though I can conjure up unusual and interesting lessons, I don't relate to people well. I think I need to take a course!"

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Sarah isn't the only one with this problem. If you ask adults how many teachers they had meaningful relationships with—that is, how many teachers they trusted and knew cared about them—most respondents would probably come up with only one or two from grades K–12 and most likely none at the university level.

But the brain isn't finished developing until the mid-20s, and it needs so much guidance! When we ignore the importance of meaningful teacher-student relationships, we miss opportunities to help our students grow and relate to others in their world. Whether you teach kindergartners or postgraduate students, building relationships with those brains that are entrusted to you—even for just a few hours per week—offers the largest payoff in terms of learning and working in a world full of people with whom relationships can be life-changing. In other words, relationships should come first in the classroom, the staff room, and the board room. The goal should be to prepare our students for making lasting connections throughout their lives.

Maslow Before Bloom

"You can't take care of the Bloom stuff until you take care of the Maslow stuff!" says Alan Beck (1994), founder of Advantage Academy. Beck was born into poverty, but with the help of various teachers along the way, he became a successful student, attained a PhD, and pursued a successful career in education that eventually led to opening the academy. He pledged to teach students in a way that provides hope for the future.

Beck's comment about Bloom and Maslow refers to the work of Benjamin Bloom (Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956) and Abraham Maslow (1998). Most teachers have a basic knowledge of the work of Abraham Maslow, who created a hierarchy of human needs. They also are aware of the push to use Bloom's taxonomy, a hierarchy of learning objectives classified into levels of complexity. Bloom's work is usually presented only in the cognitive domain, leaving out the affective and sensory domains. However, getting our students up the scale of Bloom's taxonomy is impossible without first meeting their basic needs. Too often our traditional approach to education has focused on levels of cognitive learning, leading up to higher-order thinking and largely ignoring students' needs.

Today, many schools and organizations are focusing on Maslow's hierarchy. But in my most recent book on memory, How to Teach So Students Remember (Sprenger, 2018), I offer a comparison between Maslow's hierarchy and the hierarchy presented by Matthew Lieberman (2013), who believes that Maslow had it wrong. Maslow's hierarchy arranges basic needs this way: physiological, safety, belonging and love, esteem, and self-actualization. Lieberman, in contrast, believes that we should begin with belonging and love. He argues that it is relationships that provide us with our physiological needs and safety needs. Think of an infant who needs food or a diaper change or warmth. The infant obtains those things through crying to get the attention of a caregiver. Following Lieberman's view, I like to present the argument that our students hold their social needs above some of their physiological needs. (Think of the 7th grade girl who almost wets her pants rather than run to the restroom because teams are being chosen for volleyball.) Belonging comes first! (I describe Lieberman's research on social pain, a related concept, in Chapter 5.)

Getting back to the quote from Alan Beck, social-emotional learning gives students the opportunity to deal with stress and anxiety, so they will be able to focus on higher-level thinking. Maslow before Bloom!

Relationships in the Brain

When studying the brain, neuroscientists look at both structures and chemical reactions. The frontal lobe houses the structures where most brain activity occurs when people care about each other, trust each other, and want to be friends. The limbic system houses the amygdala, the seat of emotion. The limbic system is loaded with receptors for chemicals for two different hormonal systems: the stress-response system and the trust/love system (Cantor, 2019). (See Figure 1.1.) When we are stressed, cortisol is released, triggering the stress response. By contrast, when we care about and trust someone, oxytocin is released and we feel connected.

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Figure 1.1. Relationships in the Brain

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A true connection goes deeper than casual acquaintance. Rather, it involves someone who offers motivation, excitement, or even comfort. When we begin a relationship, the brain releases dopamine, noradrenaline, and, as just mentioned, oxytocin (Pearce, Wlodarski, Machin, & Dunbar, 2017). The limbic system is stimulated and the reticular activating system (the brain's first filter) in the brain stem is relaxed, which allows new information to enter the brain in a calm way and make its way up to the limbic system. Dopamine is the brain's "seeking" chemical (Davis & Montag, 2019); it keeps us working toward a goal and stimulates our brain's reward system. When we connect with others, we feel good about ourselves and the other person. Noradrenaline is an excitatory chemical. Oxytocin, as noted, is released when we feel an attachment. Once a relationship is established with someone, even thinking about that person can cause the release of oxytocin and dopamine.

Strategies for Building Teacher-Student Relationships

As I mentioned in the introduction to this book, I created the word selebrate to stand for "social-emotional learning elicits brain responses appropriate to experience." Many researchers (including Nadine Burke Harris, Bruce Perry, Marc Hackett, Eric Jensen, and David Sousa) tell us that a single relationship with an adult can change the course of a student's life. Classroom teachers probably spend more time with students than any other adults. This is an opportunity to model appropriate social interactions, show students that we care for them, and support them in their endeavors. These may sound like parental responsibilities, but our children—our future citizens—are everyone's responsibility. We can positively affect our students' brains. Educational consultant and author Horatio Sanchez (2015) says, "For the brain to do anything, chemical movements have to occur. Health is the ability to manage all the different chemicals the brain produces within a normative range at all times." This ability creates a kind of homeostasis—a state of internal balance and stability among interdependent elements. The following strategies are intended to help teachers help their students reach this level of balance and stability.

Display Vulnerability

Researcher, author, and public speaker Brené Brown (2018) has addressed the need for displaying vulnerability in our lives and in our relationships. We need to model for students that we are willing to be vulnerable (which includes being honest and transparent) and create a safe space for them to do so, too. Displaying vulnerability ranges from admitting you are feeling tired and irritated after an all-nighter with a sick child to acknowledging that you grabbed the wrong assessment from your file and, as a result, students were asked some questions that had not been discussed in class. For students, it can range from attempting to answer a question when they are not sure they are correct to admitting they overreacted to a remark from another student. When our students show up, put forth effort, and fail, it's important to let them know that we all have those experiences and it's OK. We understand one another, and we keep going.

One of my favorite Brené Brown suggestions is to say, "This is the story I am telling myself right now …" and then explain how you are feeling about what is happening. For instance, "The story I am telling myself right now is that you are upset with me or someone in the class, and that is driving the behavior I am seeing. Is my story correct?" From this point, you can usually lead students to tell their story.

Greet Students at the Door

A recent study suggests that greeting and welcoming students each morning increased achievement by 20 percent and lowered disruptive behaviors by 9 percent (Cook, Fiat, & Larson, 2018). The study included the following suggestions for teachers:

• Say the student's name.
• Make eye contact.
• Use a friendly nonverbal greeting, such as a handshake, high five, or thumbs-up.
• Give a few words of encouragement.
• Ask students how their day is going.

My granddaughter once said to me, "My favorite part of coming to your house is knowing you'll be waiting at the door to see us! How do you know exactly when we will be there?" In response, I said, "It's simple, Maeve. When you look forward to seeing someone—you know, that 'I can't wait' feeling—you make that foremost in your mind. I ask your parents to text me when you are close, and I wait at the door. I always greet my students at the door to let them know how excited I am to see them and that I care about them!"

And so I did—and I do. The truth? As a teacher, I couldn't wait to see most students, but I had to be there for all of them; so I was always at the door to greet them. In fact, some classes waited outside the door until I showed up to welcome them in. I did this every day, for every class. And it made a difference. For those who did not appear to be receptive, I was still there, smiling, saying, "Good morning" or "Hello" or just "Happy to see you!"

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They were 5th graders. It was a tough school, a tough crowd. It was hard for me to believe that 11-year-olds could be scary—that is, until I stood before them. I was acting assistant principal when one of our 5th grade teachers divorced her husband, broke her contract, and moved away with her two kids. She had been struggling for months with her marriage and had used up all her sick days for mental health reasons and to see her attorney.

The students at this school came from backgrounds of generational poverty or broken homes or had a parent in prison. They had trusted this teacher, and slowly, over time, she had let them down, just as their parents had let them down. When she left, the students trusted no one and found yet again that they were alone in the world. They were angry. And we know that anger is the bodyguard of fear. They were afraid to trust. After several subs came and went, we decided that I would take over this cla...