Children deserve exciting learning

“I associated math with pain,” he says, recalling his childhood Spanish writer Begoña Ibarrola, one of the guests at the II International Conference on Education: Crisis, creativity and educational transformation, held by the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador and coordinated by Victoria Palacios Mieles, PhD in educational innovation and lifelong learning.

What comes to your mind when you think of those classes in calligraphy, natural sciences or geometry? Now think about your children’s reactions to the idea of ​​going to school, taking tests, giving a presentation, or sitting down to do homework.

Student motivation determines their ability to learn, says Ibarrola, who calls this the emotional disposition, the attitude with which children and young people approach learning and to the content offered by their teachers.

“Neuroscience has discovered that in order to learn we activate not only the cerebral cortex, but also the affective factor. The teacher can have a magnificently prepared class, a fabulous communication capacity, but he will not be able to cause learning unless the student’s brain is opened, and that is something that cannot be forced”.

The teacher must know that he will work with that emotional-cognitive pairing, “a double-sided coin, inseparable from one another, that’s my brain”, illustrates Ibarrola, a child therapist known for her numerous titles dedicated to the collection bedtime storiesbut also for the volumes for parents and teachers, among which stand out exciting learning and Multiple intelligences.

Your children’s good emotional state not only means that they will have good grades at the end of the semester, but that their well-balanced brains will be able to make better life decisions, have self-control, defer gratification and therefore achieve more significant achievements in the long term. , and rank the values. “Emotions are the guards, they open or close the door of learning, and as leaders we can provoke the desire to learn and positive action”, or quite the opposite.

Ibarrola talks about four moments in the education of children. In the initial stage, they are motivated to learn something out of curiosity and interest. In the intermediate stage, they must use perseverance, study even if it costs them or even if they don’t feel like it. Then there is the stage of the obstacles, when they make a mistake and have to start over, and they feel frustrated because there is something they cannot master. And the final stage, in which many clash, is when they must demonstrate what they have learned, that is, in the exams.

“Here There are students who go blank due to excessive anxiety, one of the emotions that makes learning the most difficult, because it blocks access to memory”. The child studied, but he is blocked in front of the test, and he cannot use what he has acquired with so much effort.

Why do children fail in exams?

The answer is in well-being. All learning experiences can be linked to pleasure or pain. Children need two conditions; first, a classroom where you can feel calm and confident, and second, not be exposed to stress outside the classroom.

The calm classroom is not boring, but a place where, After absorbing a content or a text, there is room for reflection and interest, an emotion that provokes exploration behaviors, says Ibarrola, in which students seek to learn for themselves and return to their teachers with questions. It is more than curiosity, it is a motivated behavior to achieve a goal: learn, concentrate, investigate.

So, before talking about lazy students, Ibarrola thinks about students with a lack of motivation and, therefore, lack of interest. And also in students who need feel good in the classroom, which is a right of teachers and students, a right that is earned by contributing to the well-being of others. This is participation.

Things that contribute to the well-being of all: not criticizing and not judging, establishing respect in classes. “So there is confidence to be wrong. We want to be well here, we are going to spend many hours together, because we have a minimum for that, and then there is to say what values ​​we want to implement in our groups to learn in a relaxed way and that nobody cares about being wrongbecause they are not going to laugh at him ”.

Those attending the congress delved into the ways to achieve motivation for the students, and Ibarrola suggested starting by pique their curiosity, using elements of the game, to their liking, to explain content such as mathematics. Then change strategy. “If I see that many are unmotivated, I can set a different goal, to see if they get hooked.” Doing this requires humility. “We are human beings working with human beings”and that is why one of the skills of teachers is knowing how to identify where the emotions of their students are.

“Maybe it’s much better to ask how they feel and if they have any problems.” Adults have many resources to focus their attention in the midst of crises, but children’s sources of motivation may be outside the classroom, and here they are needed active social strategies. Ask how they feel. Play music. Use humor. “Do it for five minutes, and the rest of the hour is yours.”

This is the emotional leadership of teachers, being able to transform the emotional environment in the classroom, because their capacity for emotional influence is strong. “When you are not an emotional leader, you enter a classroom of angry students and you catch their anger.” Emotions are contagious, the therapist concedes, “but the key is who infects whom.”

But it is not limited to educators. “Learning is eminently emotional, and it occurs by imitation, by attachment to the father, mother, grandmother, teacher, anyone who is significant. If that is well established, they are like the foundations of a building, we can gradually incorporate other learning, but the executive functions began to develop in order”. (F)