Wonder in the Classroom

 This week's article summary is How Experiencing Wonder Helps Kids Learn. Its focus is how critical a sense of awe is in learning.

Our students are at the onset of a new grade: through this newness they will experience awe as they’re exposed to new knowledge, content, and classroom expectations. 

These elementary years are so enjoyable because student learning and growth is so dramatic and visible.

While we may think awe in humans is primarily an emotional experience, it also occurs in the cognitive realm. I still remember an a-ha moment as a sixth grader when I finally understood how to add and subtract negative numbers; I had struggled for days with this concept and then in an instant a light switch went on in my brain. I experienced both awe and relief (as I was the last kid in class to understand this concept).

Our students are innately curious, yet a sense of excitement and wonder help them maintain interest and motivation to learn new things.

As many of us know, for new information to be retained in long-term memory, it requires frequent reinforcement. Hearing or seeing something new one time rarely results in the information being remembered. Awe helps us find new ideas intriguing, but then it’s up to practice, including retrieval, to store it permanently.

Awe is the impetus, or, as the article states, “awe motivates people to explore things that stretch their understanding of the world.”

Our young learners are eager and excited to learn. Our responsibility is to offer them experiences and ideas that stimulate their awe.

Thank you for a great start to the school year!

Joe

----

Awe is perhaps our most overlooked and undervalued emotion. It is what we feel when we encounter something vast, wondrous, or beyond our ordinary frame of reference. It is the feeling that washes over us when we hear a beautiful song, watch a flock of geese fly south, or see images from the new NASA telescope.

Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley who has spent two decades studying this emotion, describes three ways you might know you are experiencing awe: tears, chills, and “whoa.”  For example:

• Think of a moment when you watched your child do something beautiful, and your eyes got misty (tears).
• Think of a time you heard a song or a story on the radio, or read a passage of text, that gave you goosebumps (chills).
• Think of a time when you saw a stunning sunset or vista that prompted you to utter, “Wow!” (whoa).

For kids, especially, I would add this: wide eyes. I love seeing a young child’s eyes pop with amazement when they encounter something brand new—like a chicken hatching out of an egg, an ocean wave, a parade, a street performer, or a baking-soda-and-vinegar volcano. 

We can all find the extraordinary in the ordinary  -- the wonders of life are so often nearby.

Awe is more than an emotion of the heart. It also improves our thinking. That’s because cognitive accommodation is a feature of awe. Put simply, when we learn something new, we alter or expand our existing mental schemas to make room for it.

Cognitive accommodation is at the heart of good education: It is what allows students to build on prior knowledge to revise, expand, and deepen their understanding of a concept. 

Awe is sometimes described as a “knowledge emotion.” Paul Silvia, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina describes knowledge emotions as “a family of emotional states that foster learning, exploring, and reflecting.” These emotions include surprise, interest, confusion, and awe and stem from experiences that are “unexpected, complicated, and mentally challenging, and they motivate learning in its broadest sense.” According to Silvia, awe is a powerful educational tool because it motivates people to explore things that stretch their understanding of the world. 

According to researchers, curiosity has a “fundamental impact on learning and memory.” When kids are curious, they are more motivated to learn and more adept at retaining information.

This is news teachers and parents can use. Engaging with kids’ big questions and helping them discover what sparks their curiosity is a concrete way to support their learning in general. The challenge is not to make them fall in love with all subjects. But what if we nurtured their curiosity with one or two? What if we paid close attention to what sparked their interest, what inspired their awe, and nudged it along?

What Fulfills People?

Thank you for an uplifting and productive first week of preplanning! So much productive energy, camaraderie, dialogue,  consistent messaging, and ample time to prepare classrooms -- especially in the EED -- and plan with classroom and grade teams.

For me, there’s always a mix of excitement and worry as we begin prepping for and putting the finishing touches on what’s needed for a smooth start of school. I feel the same when I host Thanksgiving or Christmas!

Yet, preplanning is professionally fulfilling with its opportunities for to learn, grow, collaborate, and socialize together.

This year there’s special aura of esprit de corps. Let’s continue to build on this momentum and inaugurate the year with energy, positivity, purpose, and, of course, fun!

For those of you new to Trinity, most Fridays during the school year, I send out a summary of an article that piqued my interest and that I hope provokes thought in you as well.

I don’t agree with every article. In fact, I  especially enjoy the ones that challenge me to reflect on my educational beliefs and even confront my educational biases.

This week’s article summary is What Makes People Flourish.

Finding personal and professional happiness and fulfillment is the life goal for most of us. Teachers are selflessly dedicated to their students, yet we need to ensure we’re attending to our needs as well. 

The French philosopher Voltaire is often credited (somewhat erroneously) with the aphorism perfection is the enemy of the good. I know we strive to be perfect in all we do for our students, but as we gear up for the start of the school year, let’s accept there will be times when good enough will have to do. Give yourself grace to not be perfect every day of the school year.

According to the article, happiness and fulfillment (human flourishment) comprise six key dimensions:

• Life Satisfaction and happiness
• Physical and mental health
• Meaning and purpose
• Character and virtue
• Close social relationships
• Financial and material stability

As head into the new school year with responsibility for 602 students, think about how you help develop and support these flourishment dimensions in your students (excluding financial stability), colleagues, and especially yourself!

Enjoy the final weekend of summer break!

Joe

--

What does it mean to live a good life? For centuries, philosophers, scientists and people of different cultures have tried to answer this question. All agree that the good life is more than just feeling good − it’s about becoming whole.

More recently, researchers have focused on the idea of flourishing, not simply as happiness or success, but as a multidimensional state of well-being that involves positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment − an idea that traces back to Aristotle.

Flourishing is not just well-being and how you feel on the inside. It’s about your whole life being good. Things such as your home, your neighborhood, your workplace, and your friends all matter.

An international collaboration called the Global Flourishing Study annually surveys people to find patterns of human flourishing across cultures. Do people in some countries thrive more than others? What makes the biggest difference in a person’s well-being? Are there things people can do to improve their own lives?

The survey asks people about their lives, their happiness, their health, their childhood experiences, and how they feel about their financial situation. It looks at six dimensions of a flourishing life:

• Happiness and life satisfaction: How content and fulfilled people feel with their lives
• Physical and mental health: How healthy people feel, in both body and mind
• Meaning and purpose: Whether people feel their lives are significant and moving in a clear direction
• Character and virtue: How people act to promote good, even in tough situations
• Close social relationships: How satisfied people are with their friendships and family ties
• Financial and material stability: Whether people feel secure about their basic needs, including food, housing and money

Some countries and groups of people are doing better than others.

We were surprised that in many countries young people are not doing as well as older adults. Earlier studies had suggested well-being follows a U-shape over the course of a lifespan, with the lowest point in middle age. Our new results imply that younger adults today face growing mental health challenges, financial insecurity, and a loss of meaning that are disrupting the traditional U-shaped curve of well-being.

Married people usually reported more support, better relationships and more meaning in life.

People who were working tend to feel more secure and happy than people who were seeking jobs.

People who go to religious services once a week or more typically reported higher scores in all areas of flourishing – particularly happiness, meaning, and relationships. It seems that religious communities offer what psychologists of religion call the four Bs: belonging, in the form of social support; bonding, in the form of spiritual connection; behaving, in the cultivation of character and virtue through the practices and norms taught within religious communities; and believing, in the form of embracing hope, forgiveness, and shared spiritual convictions.

Your early years shape how you do later in life. But even if life started off as challenging, it doesn’t have to stay that way. Some people who had difficult childhoods, having experienced abuse or poverty, still found meaning and purpose later as adults. In some countries, including the U.S. and Argentina, hardship in childhood seemed to build resilience and purpose in adulthood.

Some countries are doing better than others when it comes to flourishing.

Indonesia is thriving. People there scored high in many areas, including meaning, purpose, relationships and character. Indonesia is one of the highest-scoring countries in most of the indicators in the whole study. Mexico and the Philippines also show strong results. Even though these countries have less money than some others, people report strong family ties, spiritual lives, and community support.

Japan and Turkey report lower scores. Japan has a strong economy, but people there report lower happiness and weaker social connections. Long work hours and stress may be part of the reason. In Turkey, political and financial challenges may be hurting people’s sense of trust and security.

One surprising result is that richer countries, including the United States and Sweden, are not flourishing as well as some others. They do well on financial stability but score lower in meaning and relationships. Having more money doesn’t always mean people are doing better in life. In fact, countries with higher income often report lower levels of meaning and purpose. 

The Global Flourishing Study is helping us see that people all over the world want many of the same basic things: to be happy, healthy, connected, and safe. But different countries reach those goals in different ways. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to flourishing. What it means to flourish can look different from place to place and from one person to another.