Now let's learn how to do calculus.
Exactly.
Our students who come to us with emotional baggage in the form of anxiety, trauma, and/or high stress may find it nearly impossible to learn new information, or even to recall information they have previously learned. Zadina says that "emotion and learning cannot be separated".
One young man I worked with came to the 5th grade with significant emotional trauma. It took a good 6 months of keeping a safe, positive learning environment for him to truly engage and put forth significant effort, but WOW WHEN HE DID! He sat by my side for an entire school day while his peers were enjoying a 'free day,' to pull his grades up. He worked and worked and worked until he had an A in mathematics, and he was SO PROUD of himself. I will never forget that look on his face.
Math anxiety, specifically, is a well documented issue, because as a society we are awful about saying things like "I hate math" and "I suck at math" and our children absorb these comments.
Read an NPR article on math anxiety here.
The ways teachers can help students who come to our classrooms with emotional difficulties are well documented (self-efficacy, routines, safe environments, deep breathing, class norms, etc).
Two of the strategies that Zadina talks about that I have found extremely helpful are teaching students about emotional intelligence and focusing on effort. I kept a picture like this on my classroom wall (link to original source in caption).
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| Seth Sandler - The Three Zones Everyone Should Know About |
First, this visual helped the students to discover that learning takes effort. If you are comfortable with the material, you are not learning anything new. However, we do not want to be pushed over into the panic zone where we completely shut down. We were able to "check in" on our emotions throughout the school day and the students were able to recenter.
Discussing how emotions and learning are linked made me wonder how we can use our 'emotional pathway' to help (or at least not hinder) learning for our students with dyscalculia.
Even once we've set the stage for a safe, positive learning environment, our students with dyscalculia will still undoubtedly come to us with negative emotional baggage about math that we will need to address, however, some of the wonderful things about emotions are that we can leverage the positive ones to help us learn and be excited about learning!
Before we can ever get to the nitty-gritty of a math problem (the numbers!) we need to help our students have positive feelings about working with us, and with the math.
Some of the positive emotions I was able to brainstorm were comfort, pride, humor, and excitement, and as a teacher I have experienced that when we emulate these emotions, our students often reflect them back to us. Even if we just start off by helping our students with dyscalculia to approach mathematics with a sense of humor, knowing that they can be safe and comfortable working with us, we are making great strides. I'm not talking about working within the comfort zone....I am talking about working in a safe space where our students can comfortably make mistakes (a low-risk environment). As we point out even the smallest victories ("you really worked at that problem!!!") our students are learning pride and excitement about math rather than anger, fear, dread, apathy, etc.
Before we can ever get to the nitty-gritty of a math problem (the numbers!) we need to help our students have positive feelings about working with us, and with the math.
I love the learning zone visual for your classroom wall. I wonder- do your students ever adopt the language in the classroom when discussing their experiences and emotions?
ReplyDeleteThey do! At first they usually prefer the privacy of a "show me a thumbs up if you are in the learning zone or a thumbs down if you are in the panic zone", but as the year goes on and we develop trust, the students would start complaining if they thought they were in the panic zone. We had to discuss what that meant and looked like because usually they were in the learning zone...they just preferred to be in the comfort zone. And Mrs. Pettrey is not comfortable in the comfort zone! :)
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