Culling Fears Part 3: Nurturing Innovation & Certainty

  This is the third of a series on Culling Fears of Classroom Cultural Shifts.  The first blog of the series focused on why it is important to design classroom environments which promote learning and stretch young people while at the same time avoid an amygdala hijacking caused by triggers of anxiety.  This week I wanted to follow up on the “why” by continuing to discuss just how the Design Specifications for Learning Environments can lower anxiety and as a result promote learning.

     Below is a chart which summarizes the connection between the social interaction elements found in schools which could lead to threats or fears (i.e. anxiety) that undermine learning and the design specifications to consider when creating learning environments to counter these threats.

SOCIAL INTERACTION ELEMENTS THAT ACTIVATE THREATS & THE ENVIRONMENTS THAT WE CAN DESIGN TO COUNTER THE THREAT

Element	Description & Threat (Hammond, 2015, p.65)	Design Specs to Counter the Threat
Standing	One’s sense of importance relative to others.  Threat = not belonging/being expelled	-Beyond Points & Grades -Honoring Identity Through Relationships
Certainty	One’s need for clarity and predictability. Threat = embarrassment/not knowing what to do	-Nurturing Innovation
Control	One’s sense of empowerment. Threat = being told what to do, where to go, how to behave	-Honoring Identity Through Relationships
Connection	One’s sense of connection and security with others. Threat = fear of being an outsider/excluded	-Learning is Social
Equity	One’s sense of fairness and non-biased exchange with others. Threat = feeling of being disadvantaged or others being advantaged	-Process vs. Product -Honoring Identity Through Relationships

This week’s focus is on designing environments that reduce uncertaining through routines which promote innovation.

Countering Uncertaining with Certainty

    Our brain, specifically the amygdala, does not like uncertainty and much more prefers predictability.  That is why it is easy to fall into the trap of swooping in to “save” students who start to struggle or who say, “I don’t understand” immediately after a problem or challenge is introduced.  When this happens this feels like we are teaching, and being told what to do is interpreted by students as learning, because after all they now know what to do for that situation. So in the end, everyone is happy because we all just avoided an amygdala hijacking, yet we also avoided an opportunity for the young person to learn.  Instead, if we are more intentional about routinely putting young people in situations that encourages them to think differently we can create a classroom culture that promotes learning while still avoiding the dreaded amygdala hijacking. This can be done if we keep in mind Nurturing Innovation when designing learning environments for young people.

     The brain develops according to how it's used and therefore environments should promote active reflection and productive struggle by giving young people meaningful practice in iterating through failure, even at the cost of efficiency.   The key adjectives here being productive and meaningful. Young people need to first connect to the problem in some way. This is the first challenge when designing activities. We must keep empathy on the forefront of our mind when designing lessons.  An important question to ask ourselves is, “How can we grab a young person’s attention with a “hook” or draw them in with a connection to the past?”   Once a connection to the problem is made, we have to next design the activity in such a way that it accounts for the variety of hurdles or potholes that young people will encounter along the way.  This does not mean that we remove the barriers and fill the holes for them, but instead design environments that routinely put young people in situations which allow them to remove the barrier or skirt around the hole on their own.  This can be done if we design low floor/high ceiling challenges and activities. Such activities or situations provide multiple entry points that not only promote productive struggle, but also routinely put young people in situations that help them to build a tolerance to uncertainty.  In essence, they start to become more resilient as they establish habits that will assist them in achieving goals and rethink a chosen process after reflection.  If we can design environments in which this routinely happens, young people (along with their amygdalas) will begin to think differently when confronting a challenge and will as a result start to become more desensitized to uncertainty when they meet it. They will instead develop a routine that asks,  “What is the next best step?” This routine will actually reduce the uncertainty that arises when a challenge or obstacle is met and will allow the young person to think clearly about what to do next.  By doing this, they become more innovative in their approach to thinking and will start to be able to “know what to do when they don’t know what to do.” This action alone is the hallmark of a LEARNER who is becoming more future ready.       (AURORA LEARNERS-FUTURE READY)

Thanks for Reading.  Next Week: Control, Connections, & Equity