How emotions shape learning: S2 E8

Cheri Dotterer 0:00
I was at a conference, an Ulta conference. It's a dyslexia conference. They were just swarming me with questions and such. Hopefully we'll have some follow up with them here in a couple weeks.

Unknown Speaker 0:14
Hey everybody, it's

Cheri Dotterer 0:15
Cheri Dotterer. You are here at tier one interventions, where we are looking at activities that you can do for the entire classroom and teach all kids at the same time, but we can also expand these activities that we're teaching to small groups and one on one sessions. So for you occupational therapists that might be listening to this podcast, you might hear a lot of math, but you're also going to hear some of the non academic connections to what is going on with math, and especially today, when we talk about emotions and feelings and where they come from, neurologically. Jon Lee, welcome

Unknown Speaker 1:01
to the podcast today.

Cheri Dotterer 1:03
Tell us lots of teaching. Jay

Speaker 1 1:05
Z here. Jay Z in the audience. Joni zupanzik here, and I was actually going to make a really clean transition. Cheri is talking about emotions and feelings. I want to start there and teach through emotions and feelings to teach responsive teaching. So hear me out for just a minute. Our teaching on this podcast today, the outcome is responsive teaching, but the background of it. The vehicle to learn about responsive teaching, the vehicle to master that outcome, the vehicle to get to that ultimate goal is to really talk about emotion and feelings, because that is what's generating the need for responsive teaching. And don't get me wrong, I am a pretty tough love mom. I have two boys. I'm not so I hate when Cheri teaches on emotions and feelings. You get this hidden eye roll from me a little bit because we got content to teach. Okay, I can't worry about what you're feeling. But let me say this, learning is emotional, absolutely hands down. And when I say that kids are not going to learn if they don't like how you're doing it. Kids are not going to learn if you're not connecting with them. Kids are not going to learn if they don't like you. Learning is emotional, so my job as an educator, as a parent, as a therapist, as a teacher, any stakeholder that has any clout over our children in school, my job and my responsibility is to engage kids in experiences that they feel good about. They feel like they can have success, experiences that increase their confidence, experiences that make them feel like they matter. And I, as a secondary math teacher, I do this through mathematics. So my our goal for adults today is to learn responsive teaching through this idea of how learning is emotional and how we can create positive emotional experiences with rich, deep, complex, rigorous math content, because Jay Z ain't going to have emotional, positive experiences without truly gritty, rowdy, deep, rigorous, complex mathematics. But the way that we're going to create those positive emotions, because learning is emotional. I can't argue with that. Kids aren't going to learn from experiences they don't like, but the only way that I'm going to be able to provide those experiences is to increase the accessibility of those complex, rigorous experiences we've got. And let me take us through this timeline. And then, Cheri, I know you have a lot that you'd like to say about this. What I want to do today is talk about a complex, rigorous math topic, how I can engage kids in a. Positive experience that's very conceptual, contextual, that they are going to have a good feeling about. They're going to feel like they can persevere and work independently. They feel like their thinking matters. And ultimately, when I teach you about that process you're going to learn about responsive teaching thoughts on that.

Speaker 1 5:35
Cheri, do you want to tell us a little bit about emotions and feelings now? Or, left, okay, or I was gonna say it's see and respond. Look at this. I just modeled this. Don't miss this. Responsive teaching

Cheri Dotterer 5:49
is all

Speaker 1 5:50
about chicken and egg. You plan certain chunks. I always plan in chunks, not sequences. That's why I struggle to teach out of a textbook the way that people think a textbook should be taught out of from beginning to end. First of all, that's not how the brain learns, so let's just get that out of the way. But second of all, I can't do it because I don't plan in sequences. I plan my important chunks. I know today we're going to talk about a rigorous, complex math topic. I want to make it accessible. I want to teach it through an experience that's going to generate positive feelings. And I want to teach all of us adults today about how this is responsive teaching and how that works. But notice what I just did I know Cheri has a couple chunks to teach. I know I have a few chunks to teach Cheri, and I don't come together and lay out a linear form. We used to, and I was like, I can't do this, Cheri. I can't do it this way. You plan your chunks. I plan my chunks, and then we know what chunks we want to teach. We know what chunks each other wants to teach, because we do plan our chunks together. We just don't know the order that it's chicken and egg. So I was a very responsive collaborator and teacher today, because Cheri, I just said all that, I know I could teach one of my chunks now, but maybe that's a good segue for Cheri to come in, but then she can decide whether she wants to grab the stage or she wants to throw it back to me, this is how I want us teaching our kids. I want us to have our chunks planned, get their perspective, and we're we're going to talk about exactly how to do this, but get their perspective. Let me just tell you. I use my favorite three words. Tell me about so if my content is negative numbers, or if my content is rate, or if my content is solving equations with unknowns, I give the kids the equation, the rate, the negative number, and I say my favorite three words, tell me about I get their perspective, and then that triggers me to teach whatever next chunk is going to connect to their perspective. But Cheri, hopefully I gave you enough time to decide, do you want me to go into one of my chunks, or are you ready for one of your chunks?

Cheri Dotterer 8:17
Everybody knows that we have five senses, right? We have vision, hearing, taste, smell and touch. When you think about those emotions, those sensory impulses, those stimulus think back to your classroom with your students. Right now, I want you to think back to your students. Think about this week on a blank piece of paper, I would go blank and you take the column and make two columns out of it. On the left side of your empty piece of paper, I want you to go through in your mind those sensations that you have seen the kids respond to. It could be that you have one kid who was impacted by the lighting in the room. You could have one kid who the odor was just too much for the rest of the kids. So on the left side, I'm going to give you 60 seconds. All I want you do is list out a bunch of those ideas and those that are coming to your head about what are some of the things that happen with your kids this week already, I'm giving you 60 seconds. Go All right, time's up. Were you able to come up with some ideas of how kids were responding in your classroom? When I asked you about our census, did you know we actually have three more? I think we've talked about these in the past. But I want to reinforce them. We have proprioception. We've had vestibular and many teachers have heard those words. They might not know exactly what they are, but they've heard those words. I'm going to talk a little bit today on the third one, and that's interoception. Interoception is sensory, so it's going from the body to the brain. Interception is looking at all those internal organs that are in your torso and relaying that information to your brain. It's telling your brain how fast your heart is beating. It's telling your brain, I'm hungry, you're and it's creating the growl in your the motor function, and is creating the growl to alert you to, oh, maybe it's time that I should put some sustenance in there. The Dry mouth is saying, you know, it's time for some liquid. Okay, all of those things that we don't really control, how fast we're breathing, how fast our hearts beating, hunger, digestion. You know that kid who's squirming in their seat because they have to go to the bathroom, but they're too afraid to ask, I must confess, that was me in first grade. I was the kid who was too afraid to ask and in those days, we did have to go out in the hallway and go down to the end of the hall to go to the bathroom, not like today's kindergarten and first grade classes, where the bathroom is in the room and you're not really leaving. So we did have that issue many years ago, but when I talk here about interoception, I'm really want to get that you understand that then it's that the internal organs connections to the Brain, and then there's a motor response that happens. You may have seen this before. You may not have what do you see? What do you notice? How does it make you feel now? John Lee always talks about, tell me about. And when she talks about, like, she talks about, how many math questions can you come up with?

Unknown Speaker 12:23
I go with,

Cheri Dotterer 12:24
how does it make you feel? And the reason I ask that is because then you are aware of what's going on inside, in that gut response that's going on in your torso. It's giving you that opportunity to your heartbeat, notice your digestion, notice your respiratory rate. This picture, I'm hoping, is more like that calming. It's slowing it down, whereas this picture might be raising it up, making it a little bit more intense before we go into actual lesson on emotion and explaining the difference between what an emotion is and what a feeling is, I want you to in your right column. Now go to the thought that you had there. I made the connection with lighting that my kid might not work with lighting. What emotion is going on in that or feeling is going on in that kid's brain that might be going along with that? Or I want you to write down words that are emotions and feelings, and then we're going to talk a little bit about which one they really are. So here's your 60 seconds, 321, come on back to me, Natalie, what are some of those things that you put on your left column and then the match up on the right? Let's share two or three of them.

Speaker 2 14:00
Yeah. One I have a light that keeps flashing in and out, and it's distracting. The kids are getting a little irritated or annoying. Myself included. Maybe we hear a loud noise in the hallway that can be distracting, or even maybe surprising or worrisome, body spray, icky smells in the classroom that are disgusting or unpleasant.

Cheri Dotterer 14:23
All right, how about you, Sarah, have any other thoughts?

Speaker 3 14:29
Some of my own students, and we're in a virtual environment, so it eliminates some of those smell, some but sound, obviously, they're in their home environment. Sometimes some crazy things are going on, which are like, I can't focus, or I'm less virtually listening. But also, if chat isn't turned off, and students are off task around just randomly typing things in the chat, and I'm focused on what they're saying. And sometimes it could be some things that are fun, it could be some things that are offensive. It could be just. Just don't know those kinds of things.

Cheri Dotterer 15:04
How about you, Teresa? You're coming at it from the therapy perspective, so you might be seeing different things. It

Teresa 15:11
just so happened yesterday, we did play doh and my plate. So then I play doh was scented, so the kids are like, Oh, this smells like blueberry. This smells like linen. So they have all the food scents. And I have one kid in particular. I have regular markers, but I also have smelly markers. And I had to segregate the smelly markers because he wanted the smelly markers. He walks out of my room with all markers all over his face because he smells the markers all day long. So that's one of them. And then my intercom is the loudest of loud. So the kids, we are all jumping every time the intercom goes off. And you mentioned and it was funny, because of all of us, I'm probably the one person that's going to be into interoception. And I had a kid who comes to me and says, Is it time for lunch here? And then another one I said, Do you need to bring your water bottle? We're only there for a little while. My mouth is always my mouth is very dry. I need to bring my water so, you know, I'm thinking interoception, because I know those kids and they're always thinking of something to eat and something for food. So yes, most definitely, I get those outside senses always on the Tweak

Cheri Dotterer 16:21
and Amy or Kirk, the same

Speaker 4 16:22
thing I tried for first grade. I get a lot of I need to, can I go get a drink? Can I when's lunch? When's recess? When's whatever we've built in? It's it doesn't happen as often now, because now I've got things built in with the routine of they know when they come we have specials at 905, so when they come back at 1010, they know that's their that snack. I feel like now it's cut down on stuff, because they know they're going to get their snack and drink at 1010, and then they know they go to lunch at 1125, or whatever. And I've got a kiddo that's real sensitive to the bell and alarms and things he now knows. He just goes and he grabs his headphones. He comes in and he unpacks and he grabs his headphones. And then after announcements, he puts them away, and then after, before the bell rings at the end of the day, he packs up, he puts the headphones on.

Cheri Dotterer 17:12
He's accommodating. He's accommodating himself independently, which is a fabulous, fantastic thing, and I love that you are having predictive instruction. I didn't say productive instruction. I said predictive instruction. You are. You have set up a schedule within your class that is creating prediction for the students that is very helpful in those early years. Kirk was on the writing, congratulations, Kirk,

Speaker 5 17:41
one of the things that I do a lot is try to meet the sensory needs of my students and meet students in person. I try to do it someplace where they can get something to eat, if they are eating a food that's a positive experience, and that makes the math easier to swallow that. That's all way to say

Speaker 1 18:04
it, cool. Way to say it. I have two things. Okay, there. Joni, number one, I don't want to just skim by the word of the day here, when we are talking about responsive teaching, filtering through emotion and feeling. The word of the day is awareness. That's it. That's all we need to remember right now. I need to be aware of my students perspective. They need to be aware of their own perspective during my facilitation, and that's another cognitive science phrase called metacognitive feedback. Metacognition, once I'm aware of their perspective, I need to make sure they're aware of their perspective. Awareness. Achieving awareness is the key to responsive teaching. That's big idea. Number one, I want us to keep thinking about that as we go once and then here's number two, once I'm aware, once I have an awareness, this is the harder part. Gaining the awareness is the easy part. Once I have the awareness, what do I do instructionally to customize and individualize for the awareness that I have about their perspective. I just want to let us think about those things as you go on Cheri

Cheri Dotterer 19:44
Robert, P, L, U, T, C, H, I, K. Did some research. He is a PhD psychologist. He did research on emotion and feeling, and he narrowed down emotion to eight, whereas you were thinking about those. Things that you put on the right side of your paper. Did those things bring joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger or anticipation, Amy, you described something that was more like a way of predictive in the predictive instruction to do, yes, there's some anticipation of what's coming next, but they know it. Natalie talked a little bit about a lot about distraction. Notice the word distraction is not here. So where does distraction fit? Is that surprise maybe, is that joy? Is that disgust depends on the situation with that distraction, I believe, where that might fit in. So when we look at what emotion truly is, emotion is a neuro biological stimulus. It is that initial response that is coming from your sensation to your brain. When it hits your brain and your brain interprets it, you get an experiential, behavioral or physiological change. That emotion, when you start to really think about it, becomes feeling. Where did it? Does the feeling go? There we are, that conscious evaluation, that responsiveness, that alignment with previous experience. So when we're talking about responsive teaching, we are aligning those feelings with previous experience. And then I comment here a lot about fear, and I make the mention about fear here a little bit more intensely with this. Here is because fear is one of those things that's going to stop learning, because it's a basic, intense emotion of an imminent threat. Remember, but the emotion is that biological reaction. It gets interpreted, and then there's this conscious response. If we break it down a little bit further and we just look at fear, we have that stimulus that creates that emotion of fear. Your response is going to be fight, right or flight. Get those three out your emotions are going to shut down. You're going to shut down the frontal lobe, and you're going to be responding in your Olympic system. What's going to happen? Learning stops, because if your frontal lobe is not interpreting and making connections with previous experience, you are not going to have that response, Cheri,

Speaker 1 23:02
just in talking about what you just said, with all of that, you just described, the majority of student reaction to mathematics, but I want to say this about fear, and This is also part of awareness and part of teaching our kids. Fear is a choice. Now, Cheri, you can disagree with me in a minute. Fear is a choice. Danger is very real.

Cheri Dotterer 23:40
Fear is a choice, and that is very real. Go ahead, right? And that fear is that conscious response. So fear is the raw emotion, the response to it, whether it's dangerous or not, is the feeling that comes with that which is a continuation of fear, but that initial emotional neurobiological response is of fear is that first initial reaction, then how we consciously or subconsciously interpret That response that, oh, it's dangerous. That's where that comes in. And kids are afraid of writing. They're afraid of Bath. Some kids are even afraid of reading. That's why the dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia are where we are focusing our work. Because we would like to under kids to understand, adults to understand that the way we create the instruction is going to either facilitate or negate what comes next.

Speaker 1 24:54
Oh, Cheri, I'm going to say what she said again, the way that we facilitate. Facilitate our instruction. It's going to make or break the learning. It's really the how. It's not the what it's it's really the how we do it, how we instruct kids is where we're going to move the needle for achievement. It's not the standards, it's not the content. It's actually not even the complexity or the rigor. It's how we do it, how we get kids to engage, how we ask the questions, how we prompt so that we can our whole goal as the facilitator is to decrease the fear and anxiety through our instruction, through our tone, through our facial expressions, through our body language, through our responses to student, perspective and thinking, we are generating The make or break of learning.

Cheri Dotterer 26:01
Yep, so that was brilliant. What I have one more thing I want to share with you, and this one, you're going to do as many as you want, because I want you to sub my puzzle the QR code. If you scan that QR code, you're going to come to a memory puzzle. That memory puzzle has definitions on it. You may or may not have even heard them before. You may or may not have even had any connection and have no idea, as we do this, those of you who have previous experience are going to be a little bit more accustomed to what is going on in this puzzle. That is the intention of this puzzle is that, oh my gosh, am I going to get the right answer? Teresa probably is going to be the first one done, because she's gonna go, Oh, I know what that is, but might be the last one done if she's not matching the definitions and the part of the brain. Do you see what I'm saying here? So for those of you who are watching this on the podcast or listening to it on the podcast. There's a QR code to go over to the YouTube channel. Get that QR code off of this segment of the podcast and see if you can finish my little puzzle. Natalie, you're smiling. What was your reaction to that?

Speaker 1 27:44
She got it she got it. Girl, so

Cheri Dotterer 27:48
unmute. Tell us a little bit about your experience. Did you have that initial icky feeling in your Come on, unmute. Let's talk about it. Did you have that initial feeling inside your gut? Tell me more.

Speaker 2 28:04
Yeah, that countdown, okay, ew, I don't like it. It's getting closer. Put the pressure on.

Cheri Dotterer 28:10
Put pressure on. Think about that. When we're doing timed test, math test with kids, that pressure is on and all of a sudden shut down. There's no way I'm doing this. Ain't gonna happen. Yeah,

Speaker 2 28:24
I would never do a time test, because that is the worst memory I have from elementary math. So I would never put my kids through Oh,

Cheri Dotterer 28:33
and this is ego one better. We used to have to stand up and do them when I was in elementary school, because that was before your time. Anybody else want to share their response to the puzzle? Go ahead, Theresa, tell me more.

Teresa 28:59
I just kept picking questions. I kept I couldn't find the brain pieces. I kept getting wrong questions. But no, this has to do with what you were saying and the fact of pushing. I was thinking about a kid I had and doing the right thing in fear. I had a little girl, and I had her in the sensory room, and I had her and she would not go backwards at all. And when you when Jonily mentioned saying the right thing and doing the right thing, I then was away from her, and I said to her, because she wouldn't go backwards on the swing, and I went, why don't you lay down? Do you think if you lay down? We'd been in there a couple of times, and every time I asked her to she wouldn't do it. This past Tuesday, I said, Why don't you lay down and kick it with your feet? She did. So after you know what I'm saying, I didn't. We've been going on there. We've been going on the ball, and I've been trying to lay her back because she's had a fear of laying backwards. And when I first got her in the room, she wouldn't let me, she wouldn't even let me lean her back so she'd. Weight on the swing, and I said to her, put your feet up on the swing. Let me push you. So she's finally engaged in doing that. When I did it to her fear, she wouldn't let me do it. She jumped right up and she ran away. Now that she's doing it. So I think again, it's how you've approached it, but it's her versus me. She's done it for herself versus me doing it to her. So I think again, that's looking at a different perspective of how you do it versus how that happens.

Cheri Dotterer 30:28
Swings are fearful.

Unknown Speaker 30:30
Oh yes.

Cheri Dotterer 30:32
Well, that vestibular system, for kids who have an immature vestibular system, swings are fearful. Amy, your visual you have your video on? Yeah, I can talk today. Amy, you have your video on. Do

Speaker 4 30:48
you want to share? No, I feel like the same thing. I feel like you have to give the kids choice.

Cheri Dotterer 30:57
You guys have a great you guys have a great month and look forward to seeing you at Saturday math and impact

Unknown Speaker 31:04
Wednesday before next

Cheri Dotterer 31:06
month, talk to later.

Unknown Speaker 31:07
Hi guys. Bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai