In our first Crew meeting of the year (Moving to Independent Learners), Katie Hutches taught us all about the brain and how it supports or inhibits learning. Using brain science in education is not new, but it was new to me. I learned about the brain’s way of protecting itself from a perceived threat, called the amygdala hijack. We learned that if a student were to have an amygdala response in class, their brain would actually be incapable of taking in any information for 20 minutes. Thus, as teachers, it is important for us to do whatever we can to avoid provoking this protective brain reaction in our students, which would inhibit them from learning for a precious 20 minutes.
This all made sense to me and as a proponent of SEL, I intentionally do what I can in my class not to put students on the spot, call them out in front of their peers, hand back work in full view of everyone; I want them to feel seen, known, cared for, etc. It is now a scientifically-based goal of mine to avoid the amygdala response in my classroom so that students are able to stay focused and benefit from the class.
I am participating as a learner in a training at the Berkeley World Language Project this year. It takes place over five Saturdays throughout the school year. A couple of weeks ago, we had our second session. The training is about how to create a thematic lesson in language classes, using authentic resources. An authentic resource in the Modern Language classroom is anything that was created for speakers of the target language – an article, a children’s book, a novel, an infographic, TV show, etc. In the class at Berkeley we are reading a novel and watching the corresponding film, and then discussing ways one might use these types of resources in our own classrooms.
The excerpt of the film that we watched during our last session was quite violent and very disturbing – at least in my opinion. I tend to be sensitive to violent images which is why I listen to the news rather than watch it, and avoid action movies, etc. I found myself quite upset while watching, a feeling which culminated in an amygdala response.
About 18 minutes in to my brain’s protective reaction, I realized what was happening, and was able to observe myself and my reactions. It was really interesting. It played out just as Katie had described! One thing that wasn’t expected, however, was the feeling I had toward the workshop presenter. For the rest of the day, I found I could not and did not want to make eye contact with him, and I don’t think I learned very much from him for the rest of the day.
Obviously, we want to avoid provoking an amygdala response in our students in order to not lose those valuable 20 minutes in the short term, but what I learned from observing my own experience was the effect on the student-teacher relationship in the long term. The presenter apologized, but it didn’t help me feel better. I was too far into my brain’s reaction to change course by that point. I may not have learned much that day in that PD, but the experience reinforced what I am learning in my crew, and turned out to be great training.
This is fascinating that you got to watch yourself go through the process. I'm wondering if they had provided a "trigger warning" if your response would've have been as drastic. Incidentally, one of the Scientific Research students is investigating something quite close to this.
I understand that people will have thresholds that cause this reaction, and I also wonder how much it is our role as educators to, in essence, desensitize them to reasonable stimuli levels so that they will be more resilient in the future.
Kristy, this is a fascinating post. I love this. It is a total reminder of how strong our brain is and how we react to our environments. It applies pretty much to so many things in our life. The fact that you lived the experience in such a unique way is particularly fascinating… I mean he did not intentionally create an unsafe environment — he was not shaming or screaming at you… so it is sobering to think about the fact that MANY things can make an environment unsafe