STLinSTL 2024

As teachers, we spend a lot of time helping students get information into their brains to improve thinking skills, but we spend far less time guiding emotional regulation. The learning sciences make it clear, however, that there is no cognition without emotion, suggesting that teachers should also understand how they can improve learning environments through positive emotions. There is also evidence that self-regulation is almost twice as important as innate intelligence when it comes to learning outcomes. In this workshop we will first explore Antonio Damasio’s explanation of the relationship between emotions and feelings (2009; 2021), and then Moffit (2011) and Diamond’s work (2013; 2019) on executive functions and self-regulation. We will then debunk myths about emotions and the brain, and then show how teachers can learn to read embodied cognition cues in the classroom. We will close by showing how teachers can leverage this information for better learning.