We have often been told by educators that implementing learning about emotions and how to regulate them into their classroom would be great but that there is simply no room in the school day to squeeze it in.
We are going to make the case for you to do it anyway. Why? Because learning to manage one’s emotions is hugely beneficial for academic performance. Stress and emotions are intimately connected to learning through memory and attention. How?
Our brains can appear to have limitless long-term storage capacity. Many people can remember being 4 or 5 even into their 80s and 90s without necessarily forgetting the most remarkable events in between. However, our short-term or working memory capacity is hugely limited. This is the reason that multitasking is believed to be so inefficient.
How many times have you forgotten your keys, because the phone rang or your kid walked out without her backpack on your way out the door?
One excellent metaphor for our limited working memory capacity is that of a chalkboard, which has a finite capacity for what can be written upon it. Once full, in order to add something new to the chalkboard, something else must be erased. Another good metaphor for the technophiles is that our working memory is much like our random access memory (RAM) in our computer. And the RAM in our computer is much more limited than our hard drive storage. If you don’t know what RAM is, just think about how your computer behaves when you have too many applications open.
Anger, worry and dread act like items on our chalkboard (or more open applications on a computer), further burdening our finite working memory capacity. How many times have you forgotten something important because you were late or in an argument with your partner? How about being so upset about something that you are unable to focus?
Thus learning to manage emotions and tame that lizard brain (here’s how) leaves more space on the chalkboard for new information to be held.
This is especially important when we are learning completely novel or complex concepts which require that we hold several new and important pieces of information at once in our working memory/on our chalkboard.
And, just like everything else in our incredibly plastic brains, our ability to manage our emotions and keep a clear chalkboard gets better with practice. So, when a teacher can spend regular but brief bouts of time helping students to manage their lizard brains, time previously lost to out-of-the-classroom stressors can be much more easily reclaimed and used to meet inside-the-classroom academic goals.
Neuroscientists know that emotional regulation stands on its own merits and should be a component of every curriculum. We are building citizens after all. But another argument for making small investments in these skills now is the long-term payoff of students that are paying attention the first time.