When looking at Bloom's Taxonomy, there's an intense focus in education on the cognitive domain. Did you know there are others?
Never in my wildest dreams would I find more information from, of all places, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Who would have thought, the Center of Disease Control has trainings on how to professionally develop adults! Understanding there is an affective domain in learning means if you really want to teach someone about something, you need to consider how they feel and their emotions. Feeding someone facts and only facts is not effective. Consider this: you can know you are smart but feel dumb. You can know you are beautiful but feel ugly. You can know you are valuable but feel worthless. Just because you know something to be true doesn't necessarily change how you feel 100% of the time, and how you feel usually dominates. My district has a great course on Brain States and Their Role in Behavior and it's where I first started to hear that it requires the highest executive function to think rationally and learn, especially when the emotional brain is in charge, but we can engage with the emotion to push someone into the cognitive state. Facts have to come with a match of the heart and the feeling behind it. This might be the reasoning for student's approach and mindsets to math. If a student is excited about learning a concept, they will take note of the facts behind the reasoning. If they are bored or do not know how it can truly deeply connect to something they are passionate about, they will consider math class a waste of time. Maybe targeting the mind is a recursive cycle... it is what others have done to try and convince us, so shouldn't we apply that to them? Oh this person gave me facts, I will give them facts... and they then give more facts because it's the same cycle from their perspective! It's about time we break this cycle, because we know there is the affective domain! Have you ever had someone say "I don't know how you do it" when you discuss your role? What if when we get this question, we share our why. It reminds me of the differences between elementary, middle, and high school teachers. I tell my sister-in-law all the time "I don't know how you do it" but I know her why as a PreK special education teacher. The same is true for my brother, who teaches high school agriculture classes. I don't understand how but I definitely know why. Our students and colleagues can sense whether or not we have a why and establishing and sharing our why (why not now?) will infuse the world around us with a sense of calling, purpose, and passion and encourage others to do the same. I hope as the new year starts, we need to consider how there is more than the cognitive domain in education. Building relationships with students, having empathy to their life experiences, and sharing our why so that they can learn takes root in the affective domain.
References
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2018, March 28). PD201 - Domains of Learning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-ZEcFaqcoE&t=168s
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My husband lovingly teases me when I reflect on my day with him and say "I learned something new today!" because he would be surprised if I didn't learn something new.
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