As a longtime educator and positive psychology researcher, I’ve come to realize an essential understanding about human behavior: Emotion drives decision making far more than logic does. This holds especially true for our students. The emotions students experience in our classrooms directly influence their academic outcomes. For example, emotions factor into whether students show up to class and arrive on time, how they greet us when entering the room, their approach to bell work, and their willingness to participate or ask for help.
If we want better academic outputs, we need better emotional inputs. Teachers must have access to an emotional pedagogy that is just as robust and rooted in research as their approach to cognitive pedagogy. Unfortunately, the way we train teachers doesn’t always prepare them for the emotional side of learning.
Cognitive Pedagogy vs. Emotional Reality
A disproportionate amount of time and energy goes into training teachers on cognitive learning taxonomies. I recall hours and hours of practicum classes and professional development on Bloom’s Taxonomy: I learned how to design instruction, craft assessment questions, and correctly word objectives to move learners up the cognitive hierarchy. These skills were crucial, of course, but I was on my own to figure out how to get students to want to pay attention to the scaffolded lesson I designed or motivate them to make an effort on those precisely crafted assessments.
That gap—knowing how to teach the material but not knowing how to read students emotionally—is where affective pedagogy comes in. When professional development trains teachers to be affective, they learn to facilitate rather than react to students’ emotions. Just as a skilled teacher knows the right questions and activities to move students from remembering to analyzing, an affective teacher knows the right strategies to move students from disengaged to curious, frustrated to hopeful, or overwhelmed to calm.
So, how do we help our teachers be more affective in order to be more effective? We can start by building professional development around the why, what, and how of emotions in classrooms. The following three traits can be observed in affective teachers.
Three Key Traits of an Affective Teacher
1. Affective teachers understand the science of emotion.
Affective teachers know that emotions are constructed, not chosen. They know that emotions are a complex interplay between:
- A person’s thoughts: Am I confident I can do this? Is this relevant to my personal goals? Have I succeeded with this in the past? Am I curious what comes next?
- A person’s physiology: What’s happening in my body? Is my heart rate high or low? Am I hungry or tired?
- A person’s environment: Do I trust and know the people around me? Am I overwhelmed by the stimuli in this space?
Affective teachers don’t expect students to manage their emotions alone—or blame them when they struggle. Instead, they might shift the classroom environment with music, lighting, and seating changes. Or they might facilitate physiological changes by energizing sleepy seniors with walking reviews.
Affective teachers ask, “How are my pedagogical choices affecting the emotional states of my students?”
Affective teachers don’t expect students to manage their emotions alone—or blame them when they struggle.
2. Affective teachers know the nuance of which emotions support student learning.
The most affective teachers are precise with their emotional facilitation. They know, for example, that adding small elements of surprise into a lesson can engage student attention short-term, but facilitating curiosity will hold attention longer. They know when to create feelings of calm to reduce cognitive clutter from busy minds. But they also know when a little bit of pressure, coupled with a sense of safety, yields eustress in a way that helps learners grow.
Affective teachers go beyond inaccurate emotional dichotomies like motivated/unmotivated or positive/negative. Instead, they ask, “Which precise emotion(s) will promote better results during this phase of learning?”
3. Affective teachers are proactive, not reactive, with strategies.
To facilitate conducive emotions, affective teachers have a wide repertoire of skills they proactively use. Rather than waiting for students to give up from frustration, affective teachers plan “emotional influencers”: They craft review games of previous content to build confidence and affirm students individually to foster pride and belonging. If they know their 3rd graders will come in hyped up after lunch, they plan whether to leverage that joy with a high-energy learning task or to facilitate calm before diving into a more focused task. They plan emotions into their lessons just as judiciously as they integrate taxonomies.
Affective teachers ask, “Which techniques will facilitate the conducive emotions I want students to feel?”
Effective and Affective Teaching
Just as we train teachers to advance learning via systems and taxonomies, we must train them to facilitate the emotions underpinning learning, like calm, hope, curiosity, and joy. Student learning improves when teachers understand—and work from—the emotional reality of their classrooms. If we want more effective teachers, let’s build more affective teachers.
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