Читать книгу Student Engagement Techniques - Elizabeth F. Barkley - Страница 62

How students feel—about life, about themselves, about what teachers are trying to teach them—plays a critical role in how they learn. Many educators believe motivation, sometimes defined as the feeling of interest or enthusiasm that makes somebody want to do something, is at the heart of student engagement. As Wlodkowski (2008) points out, “To put it quite simply, when there is no motivation to learn, there is no learning … people motivated to learn are more likely to do things they believe will help them learn” (pp. 5–6). Sharing Wlodkowski's emphasis on the importance of motivation, Lee Shulman (2002) pairs motivation with engagement and identifies the two as the first stage in his table of learning (p. 2). Yet students' emotions have been the least studied and most overlooked aspect of classroom teaching.

Although Bloom's taxonomy of the cognitive domain has been one of the most influential constructs in education, far fewer teachers are aware of the taxonomy of the affective domain (see T/S 48, “Incorporate Multiple Domains When Identifying Learning Goals”). Most teachers put their efforts into designing goals and activities that help students achieve cognitive outcomes; few instructors identify or assess learning goals having to do with feelings.

Affect is the emotion associated with an idea or action, thus the affective domain includes our feelings, values, enthusiasms, and attitudes. We discussed the function of neurons and neuronal networks from primarily a cognitive perspective (see Chapter 3), so let us take a moment to explore their role in affect. From a neuroscientific perspective, affect is just as much a part of the brain's neuronal network as cognition. Although scientists used to think emotion was centered in the specific limbic area of the brain, Ratey (2002) observes that now research demonstrates “Emotion is not the conveniently isolated brain function that once we were taught. Emotion is messy, complicated, primitive, and undefined because it's all over the place, intertwined with cognition and physiology” (pp. 223–224). Even though our emotional responses are distributed throughout the brain and body, scientists are starting to figure out how the different components are interacting.