Website move!

To all of our loyal readers, Kids Are Dramatic has moved its blog website to WordPress.  Our new web address is www.kidsaredramatic.wordpress.com.  We hope that you will make this move with us to this new and improved website!  You will find all of our previously posted articles on this new blog, and they are even categorized by topic!

Happy reading!

-Jacob

KAD Founder

~Emotion and Reason: Why Education Needs Both~

Traditionally, emotion and reason are seen as polar opposites of each other. Emotionality is relegated to the realm of touchy feely love poems and diary entries, while rationality is the solid stuff of science and smart business investments. Common sense tells us emotion should be suspended when making rational decisions, that passion clouds judgment. To us, emotion and reason are distinct entities, and they do not play well together. They work in different ways, they accomplish different things, and if they do interact, they only hinder one another.

Or so we once thought.

Recently, however, research is beginning to uncover a startling finding: this dichotomy between passion and reason, between emotionality and rationality, may not be that clear cut after all. There is, as identified by many researchers, a rational component to emotional information processing, just as there is an emotional contribution to cognitive mechanisms (Pessoa, 2009; Salovey & Mayer, 1990). That is to say, not only do emotion and reason interact, they are also interdependent.

In fact, higher cognitive functioning would be impossible without both. Processes such as decision-making and social interaction require input from both the emotional and the rational side of the human psyche. Yet, when it comes to education, schools have traditionally emphasized only the rational. We heavily train our students in the core skills of reading, writing, and mathematics, while disregarding their social and emotional needs. However, we cannot afford to overlook the critical role emotion plays in academic success and healthy personal development. So let us consider, then, how emotion impacts our “rational” cognitive processes with a view toward how we can improve the education of our children.

The Role of Emotion in Cognition

What we think of as cognition—the mental processes responsible for things like attention, learning, memory, and problem solving—is not wholly independent from our feelings and instincts. A growing body of scientific evidence lends support to a whole new model of the human mind, a model emphasizing the role emotion plays in cognitive processes (Pessoa, 2009).

Perception and attention are greatly enhanced by emotion. Happy or angry faces are detected much faster in a visual search task than neutral faces (Eastwood et al., 2001), and people are much better at detecting emotionally-laden words, such as rape, than they are at detecting neutral ones (Anderson, 2005). However, patients with lesions in the amygdala, a region of the brain responsible for processing emotional reactions, do not exhibit this same improved rate of detection (Anderson & Phelps, 2001).

These findings all seem to suggest that we are more attentive to emotional stimuli. In other words, we do not divide our attention equally among all objects in our environment. Rather, our supposedly “rational” cognitive system seems to have a marked preference for emotional qualities.

Similarly, people are also better at remembering emotional events or information as opposed to neutral ones. Recall for both film clips (Cahill et al., 1996) and pictures (Bradley et al., 1992) proved to be better for emotionally arousing stimuli than for their neutral counterparts.

To use a more relevant set of examples, consider how emotionally intense experiences often seem to be burned into memory. Most people can remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about major historical events, such as JFK’s assassination or September 11^th. Why? In part, because these are also extremely emotional events.

This same principle applies to personal life experiences. Events such as car crashes or weddings tend to be particularly memorable, while psychiatric conditions such as Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) occur precisely because patients cannot forget exceptionally intense, traumatic emotional experiences. Once again, we see that emotion greatly impacts seemingly straightforward cognitive processes. What we remember and how well we remember it are dependent, in part, on our emotional reactions.

Finally, in an interesting case study, Antonio Damasio (1994) documented the vital role emotion plays in decision-making. One of Damasio’s patients had suffered a brain injury that left him perfectly functional except that he could not experience emotion.

One day, when asked to choose between two possible dates to schedule his next appointment, the patient proceeded to list the pros and cons of each date for over half an hour, but he could not come to a decision. His inability to make such a simple choice was not due to any deficit in his ability to reason—he performed higher than average on intelligence tests and he proved his ability to rationalize the pros and cons of each date—but rather, his inability to make decisions stemmed from an emotional deficit.

Because he could not experience emotion, both dates felt the same to him. That is, if he chose the first date for the appointment, he might have to reschedule lunch with a friend. If he chose the second date, he might have to get up earlier than usual. However, rescheduling lunch did not feel any better or worse than having to get up early, and so he could not decide which option he preferred.

In this sense, we see that emotion assigns value to the different alternatives we must choose between when making a decision. Indeed, emotion is so critical to the decision-making process that a deficit in emotion renders us incapable of making any decision at all.

This body of research demonstrates that cognitive processes such as attention, memory, and decision-making are not independent from emotional processes. Rather, emotion informs cognition, such that if we want to better understand how we think, we must also consider how we feel.

What This Means for Education

The research presented above clearly indicates that emotion plays a critical role in cognition. The key issue, then, is how this research applies to the current education system. Schools emphasize a core academic curriculum that does little to address the social and emotional needs of their students. However, schools cannot expect students to master these core academic areas if they do not first teach students how to effectively manage these emotional forces.

Namely, if schools care so much about developing certain cognitive abilities (such as attention and memory and decision-making), and if emotion plays such an important role in these same areas of cognition, then why is emotion being ignored? Why are students not being educated emotionally as well as academically?

From test anxiety to the boredom of an interminable history lecture to the frustration of algebra, emotions play a central role in students’ daily classroom experiences. They greatly affect students’ ability to learn, and thus, they cannot go unacknowledged. How can educators expect students to concentrate on their work when they are too preoccupied with parents fighting at home or kids picking on them at school? Shouldn’t these emotional factors not only be taken into consideration, but also given priority?

Indeed, students primarily drop out of school not because of academic reasons, but because of emotional reasons (Marcus & Sanders-Reio, 2001). Dropouts frequently report that they do not feel safe at school, they do not fit in socially, they do not feel attached to their work, and they have not developed strong relationships with teachers. These feelings of social disconnect and isolation are more important regarding students’ willingness to continue with school than actual academic achievement. One would think we should make a serious attempt to address this extremely important issue.

Approaching the problem from a different angle, emotions can also be hugely beneficial by positively contributing to education. They serve as important motivating forces, such as the proverbial “love of learning” teachers so often strive to instill in their pupils. Schools should foster environments where students develop a sense of pride in their work and are intrinsically motivated to succeed. By focusing on these positive benefits of social and emotional learning (SEL), a number of programs have shown huge success in the past.

In a meta-analysis of 73 SEL programs, Durlak & Weissberg (2007) found significant improvements in self-confidence, self-esteem, school bonding, positive social behavior, school grades, achievement test scores, and reductions in problem behavior and drug use among the youth these programs served. Focusing specifically on academics, the programs reported a collective 12% gain in academic achievement—the equivalent of a whole letter grade.

It is extremely important to note that these are not tutoring programs. They do not help kids with math or writing. They do not touch their homework, and yet, they still produced a massive improvement in their success at school. Why? Because emotional competency is, in fact, hugely important for academic achievement. Indeed, that 12% difference can be interpreted as the price students pay when their emotional needs go unmet.

Yet, as important as this emotional competency is to healthy child development, children today are increasingly faced with a limited opportunity to acquire these all-important emotional skills. Usually, kids learn most of what they know about emotional regulation and appropriate social interaction from their parents, as the home environment is critical to teaching kids emotional literacy. However, not all kids have such a place where they can learn these skills. Those from disadvantaged backgrounds, such as those who are raised by only one parent or whose parents work multiple jobs, do not have the same opportunities to pick up important social skills.

So if not in school, and if not at home, then where will they find the help they need?

To this end, Kids Are Dramatic is staging an intervention in the local Colorado Springs school system. KAD recognizes the critical role emotion plays in the inward personal development and outward social integration of youth in our community. As such, we believe there should be more to education than merely addressing traditional academic subjects, such as reading, writing, mathematics, and the like. We believe students have immediate emotional and social needs as well, and that these needs are just as relevant to students’ overall success and personal well-being. KAD strives to address this problem by applying a wholly unique approach—that of theater. Theater promises to be a powerful tool for developing students’ emotional literacy and improving youth behavior.

So rather than suppressing or ignoring all together the role emotion plays in the very cognitive skills we seek to foster through education, perhaps it is best we take a step back and contemplate a different viewpoint. Let us consider educating our children not only academically, but emotionally as well. As the Dalai Lama once said, “It is vital that when educating our children’s brains, we do not neglect to educate their hearts.”

Metacognition and Emotional Intelligence in Drama

As a varsity diver in college, I have often been asked about the subjective nature of scoring in the sport, and whether this has a large influence over who wins and loses in a diving meet. Generally, I respond by saying that there is usually an observable consistency between judges scoring each dive. The crowd members and other observers of the meet usually agree with the scores thrown by judges, and the subjective nature of judging does not play a highly influential role in changing how contestants place within a meet. Likewise, one might ask how a drama class can become stratified by skill level, and whether a teacher is justified in any objective sense in dividing up a drama class based on skill level. I believe that metacognitive development provides objectively verifiable grounds for determining the skill level of drama students, and that the metacognitive development of our students is integral both to developing our students as individuals and for furthering their academic success.

           Metacognition develops gradually as an individual comes to have greater conscious control over cognition that monitors, regulates, or reflects on first-order cognition (Kuhn 2000, 178). Deanna Kuhn differentiates between declarative knowing ("knowing that") and procedural knowing ("knowing how"). She proposes that the metastrategic cognition of procedural knowing plays a major role in selecting adequate strategies for problem-solving while also expelling inadequate strategies. This is important because it fills the previous gap in Developmentalist psychology of addressing how change occurs in cognition, and, perhaps more interestingly, why it does not occur in some situations.

         The freedom within a drama program permits students to demonstrate their understanding of the adequacy of various strategies to problem-solving in a given situation, as well as their proficiency to monitor and regulate the influence of outside sources upon their declarative knowledge. Teacher feedback from strategy employment at the degree of performance occurs at the meta-level; students in an advanced class, then, should be more willing to adapt to teaching comments and be able to modify their behavior in class through strategy training at the advice of an instructor. Since the early 2000s, metacognitive functions have been investigated in terms of text comprehension, memory, reasoning, and problem solving (Kuhn 2000, 80). We see a parallel to the acting world in each case: text comprehension for understanding a written script; memory to remember lines and character development from other members of a production as well as logistics of drama production; reasoning to make quick decisions in how to act onstage; and problem solving for the process of staging a play through taking directions from a script.

          Complex meta-knowing capabilities stand as the end goal in metacognitive development for Kuhn, which some adults never reach. Meta-level control of both one's own knowing processes and the knowing processes of others in social groups are integral to raising one's awareness and becoming reflective upon their thinking, as well as acknowledging the sources of knowledge that influence one's thinking. Due to its emphasis on social interaction, a successful drama class should enhance the meta-cognitive capacity of its students, and it should give them the creative room to demonstrate their relative level of meta-cognitive development. In turn, effective drama teachers should be able to gauge the meta-cognitive development of their students and assign them new tasks that are adequately difficult for their level of meta-cognitive development (Vygotsky 1978, 31).

         For Lev S. Vygotsky, learning is specific to the elements in a set of tasks which one is given: Learning is more than the acquisition of the ability to think; it is the acquisition of many specialized abilities for thinking about a variety of things. Learning does not alter our overall ability to focus attention, but rather it develops various abilities to focus attention on a variety of things. This is due to the fact that each activity depends on the material with which it operates, and the development of consciousness is the development of a set of particular, independent capabilities. (1978, 31)

         Adhering to Vygotsky's view might imply that the skills learned in a drama class would only be extricable to other instances of improvisation games, modeling emotions, and interacting with the emotions of others -- despite these being no small skills to learn. Daniel Goleman's book Emotional Intelligence: Why it Can Matter More Than IQ spurred a worldwide interest in Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). Throughout the globe, more than ten thousand students currently uphold a SEL curriculum requirement as an essential skill for living, and it can be present from kindergarten to the last year of high school (Goleman "Emotional"). While these curricular goals were originally instated to solve behavioral problems among students, they have also been shown to boost the academic performance of students. Likewise, the business world is also latching onto the necessity of emotional intelligence within the workplace, which Kids Are Dramatic seeks to develop through students at the middle school level.

 

Works Cited

Goleman, Daniel. "Emotional Intelligence." Daniel Goleman. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Apr. 2013.

Kuhn, Deanna. "Metacognitive Development." Current Directions in Psychological Science 9.5 (2000): 178-81. Print.

Vygotsky, Lev S. "Interaction Between Learning and Development." Readings on the Development of Children (1978): n. pag. Print.

~Intrinsic Motivation, Extrinsic Results~

Students frequently battle issues of motivation and procrastination when it comes to schoolwork. Schoolchildren report that they have no impetus to get them to care about their assignments or in-class participation. While “getting good grades” is the reward for hard work, it is often not reason enough to keep kids engaged and truly learning. What is lacking is intrinsic motivation. Using other mechanisms to bribe students into paying attention is not the answer. Students should want to learn; they should want do their work. However much of a stretch this may seem, it can be achieved within the classroom walls. It all starts by presenting the material in an inspiring and relatable way, and then proceeding by teaching students that they have ownership over their own education while still pushing them to expand their boundaries. Utilizing many of the integral aspects of the Constructivist Learning Theory, Kids Are Dramatic boosts intrinsic motivation and shows students that they are in control of their academic careers.         

The Constructivist Learning Theory coined the idea that the learner constructs knowledge for himself (or herself) by building a personal schema. This schema is based on the learner’s individual and socially-based learning of the world around himself or herself. Some of the ideas included in this theory define learning as an active process, which takes shape contextually. “We learn in relationship to what else we know, what we believe, our prejudices and our fears,” not passively accept “knowledge which exists “out there” but that learning involves the learning’s engaging with the world (Hein, 1991).” Learners gain knowledge by taking new information and fitting it into a system of meaning; they also learn by constructing a system of meaning out of the new information itself. A new skill or concept is sure to be understood when the learner can transfer that knowledge into a series of various contexts. The idea of transfer is not new to the world of education, however ideas of how to approach and incite it are. “For transfer to happen, research suggests an individual must recognize the wide applicability of a particular skill, principle, or concept and when a particular situation calls for the use of them (Kuhn, 1986).” One tactic for transfer is to ensure that teachers show an eventual implication or connection of the material outside the classroom. Kids Are Dramatic’s plays, especially the current production titled The Pinballs, are centered on topics which are prevalent in our society, yet they do not always find a way into classroom curriculums (foster care, in this case). Furthermore, transfer is induced by making students apply their thinking and knowledge into as many contexts as they can. This is where the art of theatre can be utilized for the act of transferring. As mentioned in the Theatre is Crucial for Critical Thinking post, actors and actresses—over the course of being in several productions—are challenged to consider similar themes and concepts (such as love, heartbreak, friendship, loss, etc.) through a myriad of different emotions and character perceptions. This kind of practice helps to form well-rounded schemas, and it also challenges the students’ perception on how just one situation can be perceived. While this describes transfer in itself, other skills that must be mastered in theatre, including comfort on stage, memorization, portrayal of potentially inexperienced emotions, practice of empathy and teamwork, as well as the art of acting itself, are all skills that can be utilized in everyday life. In order for children to make the most out of what they are learning, it is imperative that they know how what they are learning is relative to their lives and that they are able to take notice of its effects. When students become cognizant of transfer occurring within themselves, and they are aware of utilizing knowledge acquired in school in outside contexts, they being to see the effects of their hard work coming into fruition. Making a connection between hard work and positive effects is a realization which motivates students to look for more ways in which the material they are already learning can be applied to their daily lives. After all, students are learning for their own benefit. If they do not realize this, the greatest wrongdoing is on the part of their educators.

The most important part of the beneficial aspects of theatre, however, is that the actors and actresses—ordinary students—are able to connect with their art and their work. This emotional connection creates a personal drive for students to better themselves, and it directly ties the effort put in by the individual to his or her work and actions. In experiments conducted by Karen DeMoss and Terry Morris, it was found that “students took more responsibility for their learning in their arts units than their non-arts units…students found the arts to bring enjoyment to their learning irrespective of their teacher’s personal style” (DeMoss, Morris, 2002). The added pressure of being on stage for one or two final performances also emphasizes the importance of enthusiasm, energy, and a direct evaluation of talent. The findings in the study conducted “suggest that the arts can play a critical role in the general culture of children’s learning, providing more positive and meaningful connections with academic work, connections that may have ancillary effects on long-term motivation” (DeMoss, Morris, 2002). Theatre embodies all of these aspects as fuel towards students’ intrinsic motivation. Kids Are Dramatic provides students with a safe environment where they are given freedom and opportunity to explore and be constructively critiqued to improve their talents. Because this is an optional, after-school program—though it does demand responsibility and time once committed—the participating actors and actresses choose to take ownership of their time and talent. This is an initial decision, which will prove fruitful in their academic and general achievements. Self-sufficient, intrinsically motivated learners have always been the goal for the education system, and the solution is plain as day: show students how to find these objectives within themselves.