Deep in everyone’s brain lie two diamond-shaped structures that make up the amygdala. Owing to its high level of connectivity with the rest of the brain, the amygdala helps regulate emotional learning, reward systems, and memory modulation. These functions in the amygdala can facilitate or hinder student learning. For both teachers and students in Jewish day schools, understanding the relationship between the amygdala and learning benefits both the learning process and how students approach their connections to Judaism.
As part of the brain making meaning out of reality through the various senses, interpreted information flows through various areas of the brain. When sensing comforting impulses, the amygdala fuels the release of certain hormones, like the rewarding chemical, dopamine, to help the brain “remember” how to return to that environment. Quite the opposite happens in high stress situations. The amygdala becomes over-activated when it senses a threat. In students, the amygdala translates environmental stressors into feelings of helplessness and anxiety combined with physical responses – such as releasing adrenaline – to defend against threats. When the amygdala enters this state of stress-induced commotion, scientist Stephen Krashen notes that the amygdala blocks new sensory information so it cannot access new memory and association circuits. Dr. Krashen refers to this as the Affective Filter. During this state, a student’s ability to gather new inputs and generate new outputs declines, which effectively diminishes the learning process. So, for example, in a 5th grade Chumash class, students with language or attentional issues may experience difficulty decoding the text. They therefore cannot absorb the information in the text or its moral message due to the Affective Filter having been activated.
In order to create an environment in which a student can overcome the Affective Filter, Alfie Kohn suggests the “exuberant discovery environment.” This type of environment avoids quiet work, direct lecture, or simple questioning of the students in order to review a text or material. Kohn suggests conducting lively group exercises, investigating ideas, and using preferred tools (laptops, handheld devices, or pen/paper). Kohn describes his paradigm of exuberant discovery as kindergarten-style curiosity and avoidance of typical classroom order, which will lead to peer-reinforced excitement. While Kohn has the right neuroscientific goal, that of disabling the Affective Filter, his method belies the realities of a neurodiverse, attentionally dysfunctional classroom population, something that we typically see in Jewish day schools.
Affective Filter occurs in response to individual mind schema. Trying to create a group response benefits the teacher but ignores addressing the unique characteristics of each student (which requires a good deal more time and investment by the teacher). Rather, a teacher, and the student themself developmentally over time, need to create an environment that responds to stressful moments before the actual moment occurs. One fixes the roof when it is not raining. Teachers can create class materials with themes that spark interest and maintain curiosity which make the materials inviting to the brain. Students could be trained to do confidence-building tasks that reduce the sense of threat from potentially challenging material. The teacher could offer appropriately given (right time, right method), detail-oriented feedback so the student feels supported, overcoming some of the negative effects of the overactive amygdala. All of this supports an agenda of building trust, confidence, and, most importantly, an array of types of intrinsic motivation, which serve to modify the student’s brain’s perception of threat.
As JEIC has repeatedly pointed out, intrinsic motivation incorporates multiple benefits. Aside from activating the learning steps, intrinsic motivation also moves students past the Affective Filter problems. In that way, intrinsic motivation acts as a part of the resilience process allowing the student to recover from difficulty.
Teachers can change the underlying assumptions we have developed as to why students fail to learn, pointing less toward conscious resistance and more toward unconscious causes. Once the teacher recognizes that a student’s resistance may very well be physiologically induced, they can modify the classroom culture and retrain the child’s brain in what constitutes an actual threat. If not done this way, the 5th grade Chumash teacher runs the risk of cementing in a student’s mind a path of avoiding sacred texts, due to the Affective Filter effect. Knowing how the amygdala works in concert with the brain can help the teacher show the student how to switch off the Affective Filter and switch on the path to success.