Читать книгу Social-Emotional Learning and the Brain - Marilee Sprenger B. - Страница 22

"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!