June 21, 2023

This article by Alden Blodget is the first in our summer series about the findings of neuroscience, their connection to meaning-making, and how we apply this new knowledge to meet the present and future needs of our kids.

“I’m walking. I’m walking right out of the door. I won’t ever be back.”

The gray-haired teacher who was filmed during her classroom meltdown shouting those words to her students and doing exactly what she said became an instant nucleus of condensation for the torrent of frustration and stress felt by thousands of teachers. The number of psychologically exhausted educators that are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore is increasing. Teachers are looking for more tolerable jobs, while fewer of the best and brightest want to enter the profession in the first place.

And the mental health of the students also reflects stress and despair. Rates of teen depression and suicide continue to rise, along with an increase in “acting out,” which seems a woefully inadequate description of student behavior that includes violent acts of stabbings, shootings, and fights that have resulted in students being body-slammed and handcuffed by “resource officers.” 

I have been a teacher for 50 years—38 years in the classroom and the remaining 12 as a guardian ad litem (working in family and criminal courts with abused and delinquent children) and as a pro bono tutor (teaching students who want but can’t afford a tutor). During that time, in addition to the usual alienated students (the misfits, the bullied, the rebels) that hate everything about school, I have listened to countless students talk about how much they hate the classroom. Not the sports fields, not the opportunities to interact with their friends, not the adults who clearly care about them—just the classroom. No one encapsulated the feeling more succinctly than the student who characterized his experience as “the state-imposed mandatory four-year sentence of high school.”

This image of school-as-prison suggests that just as the mental health of the inmates and guards suffers in prisons so does the mental health of the students and teachers in schools. God knows, the sources of mental distress today are numerous. The apocalyptic visions of our future engendered by the collapses of major systems that sustain life and human dignity—our dying planet; political, religious, and economic corruption and incompetence; social, bigoted, and technology-fueled antagonism, alienation, and shootings—take a toll on all of us, and there is little doubt that adult stress affects our children. But schools? Schools should not be one of these sources.

Surely, we can design schools capable of building a solid foundation for good mental health: schools that nurture and sustain a sense of purpose and meaning, that graduate young people engaged in studies connected emotionally to their lives, and that instill feelings of achievement, competence, and resilience. Educators know how essential these traits are, but instead of designing systemic structures, practices, and policies likely to produce them, most retain a dogged devotion to the traditional system of school that undermines them. The failure of this system is evident in the frantic preoccupation with developing “interventions” aimed at depressed, unengaged students and “tips to reduce stress” offered to teachers. Well-designed schools shouldn’t need interventions or “tips.”

Research over the past 25 years into the science of learning suggests that we need to consider the possibility of a crippling mismatch between schools and how people learn. Perhaps schools unintentionally but inevitably create or exacerbate many of the students’ emotional problems that educators must then address by creating or purchasing curricular band-aids and treatments—mental health curricula, emotional intelligence curricula, social-emotional learning curricula, growth mindset curricula—that now support a lucrative consulting industry. 

In 2007, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio Damasio (both from the University of Southern California) published “We Feel, Therefore We Learn,” in which they explained the unbreakable connection between emotion and thinking: Rather than an impediment to good thinking and decision-making, emotion, they found, is the “rudder” for thought. “We think in the service of emotional goals,” says Immordino-Yang. “The aspects of cognition that are recruited most heavily in education, including learning, attention, memory, decision making, motivation, and social functioning, are both profoundly affected by emotion and in fact subsumed within the processes of emotion.” Not surprisingly, people think, learn about, and engage deeply in things that matter to them, that are emotionally relevant to them. “It is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don’t care about,” Immordino-Yang explains.

Her subsequent studies have focused on the essential interplay of three major neural networks, the healthy functioning of which is essential for human development and deep learning: The salience network (SN) that “weighs the relevance and perceived importance and urgency of information to facilitate further thinking. One can think of the kids’ emotional engagement and SN activity as fueling motivated thinking, either concrete or abstract, like the outboard motor that both pushes the boat and steers it.” And two other networks involved in focusing attention: the executive control network, which is recruited “to focus on the completion of goal-oriented tasks” in the outer world (homework, projects, tests, etc.); and the default mode network, which directs attention inward and “is activated when reflecting, imagining hypothetical or possible future scenarios, remembering the past, and processing morally relevant information. It is important for conceptual understanding, reading comprehension, creativity, nonlinear and ‘out–of–the–box’ thinking, for constructing a sense of self, and for feeling inspired.”

Immordino-Yang writes about the interplay among these three networks, particularly the developmental importance of people’s ability to toggle between focusing attention inwardly and outwardly—between the default mode and executive control. As a result, she is particularly concerned about schools’ almost exclusive emphasis on outwardly directed tasks. She is equally concerned about our focus on “learning outcomes,” which, in school, are more about factual and procedural recall than about the purpose and meaning of these outcomes to the individual students. Her most recent research explores the importance of helping young people develop their ability to engage in “transcendent” thinking: “to enrich their concrete, empathic, and context-specific interpretations with abstract, systems-level considerations that transcend the current situation.” 

In a recent NAIS EDU Podcast, Mackenzie, a fourth-year student at One Stone (ID), not only spoke of the importance but provided an example of this ability: “I think that there’s a lot of purposes to school. And I think one of them is showing people the pathway, or your pathways and your options, and what is your purpose, because if we go through life meaningless, then I’m not going to, personally, I’m not going to pay attention or put my all into anything, without purpose. … We do a lot of purpose-finding at One Stone. And not just the what, not just like, I’m going to go work in healthcare, I’m going to go work in construction or market at a lavender farm, or whatever. It’s why? Why do you do that? What’s important to you?” Transcendent thinking opens the door to making meaning and building a sense of self. “Learning,” Immordino-Yang says, “is not the aim of school. Learning is the means. The aim of school is human development.”

Central to developing transcendent thinking is the need to create conditions—such as designing schools—likely to increase the connectivity between the default mode and executive function networks: “We demonstrate that adolescents’ proclivity to engage with such thinking predicts key brain networks’ increasing interconnectivity over time and that this neural development is in turn associated with personal and social well-being in young adulthood.” Significantly, in this study, transcendent thinking and the benefits of this thinking were not related to IQ, ethnic background, or socio-economic status. The healthy functioning of these networks—not money, intelligence, race, or nationality—is the key to happiness.

What do these insights offer us? Lenses and criteria for analyzing current school structures and student behavior and clues to creating more effective structures. For example, developing emotional engagement, the ability to make meaning, and the propensity for transcendent thinking may result from more individualized programs of study, individualized graduation requirements, and institutional flexibility. These are not the hallmarks of traditional schooling, which is built on rigid universal requirements and one-size-fits-all curricula. Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates described his experience in the classroom as “a jail of other people’s interests.” Immordino-Yang’s research suggests to me that the way out is to enable students to build meaningful programs of study on their own interests. Students who have actually done so in the few schools that allow such freedom describe their experience as like moving “from feeling caged to being freed.” “I felt like my school had meaning, like there was purpose.” Teachers characterize their work in these nontraditional structures as “the most successful, enjoyable work I have ever done.”

Experience and research provide overwhelming evidence that human development, learning, and mental health depend on our capacity to create a better design for schools. Achieving this goal depends on the willingness of educators to study, understand, and internalize the research and then work together to explore the implications of new designs. The references below offer a great place to start. Perhaps the saddest dimension of teacher burnout is the continuing failure to recognize that the system so many teachers defend and protect from change is itself responsible for their burnout. Students forced to attend schools they experience as prisons will continue to torment their captors.

References:

Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen, and Damasio, Antonio, “We Feel, Therefore We Learn: The Relevance of Affective and Social Neuroscience to Education,” Mind, Brain, and Education, 2007.

Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen, and Knecht, Douglas R., “Building Meaning Builds Teens’ Brains,” Educational Leadership, May 2020.

Gotlieb, Rebecca J.M.; Yang, Xiao-Fei; and Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen, “Diverse Adolescents’ Transcendent Thinking Predicts Young Adult Psychosocial Outcomes via Brain Network Development,” 2023. 
“The Philosopher & the Neuroscientist – A Conversation with Zak Stein and Mary Helen Immordino-Yang,” Future Learning Design podcast with Tim Logan, 2023.