Tag Archive for: Peer Pressure

Student Engagement Tips: Getting Students Physically Engaged

Demonstrate with the Body.

Say, “We’re going to do something very
 interesting in just a moment. But first, please stand up.” This raises heart rate 
and arousal states.

Ask your audience to take in a deep breath and let it out
 slowly. Now you, a group leader or assigned person can lead a team, group or
those at a small table in some slow stretching.

Now, take a math problem and ask students to use their hands and body to act 
out the numbers. Use the body to demonstrate connections, links, relationships 
and key ideas. Your body can make a number, a movement or a show a plant,
rock, mineral, cloud or river. They can show prefixes, suffixes or periods (stomp).

Who is Doing the Work?

Any time you have materials to get to the students, 
get lazy. Under 90% or more of the circumstances, your students should be
 passing out papers, materials, handouts or any other item.

Organize this through 1) the team leader 2) a volunteer 3) assigned in-class delivery students 4) a
 quick vote 5) form small impromptu groups, then ask those in them to pick the
“fastest runner” or other fun designation.

In other words, if you want more
 engagement, stop doing the student’s work for them.

Peer Drawings.

They can stand up and use their elbows to draw out a key
word for the lesson. Spell out or they can use their head, knee or toes. This gets
 the epinephrine up!

There are other types of drawings. For example, keep a bag, bowl with some or
 all of the student names on cards or paper slips. The students do a drum roll on
 their tables for added suspense. At a point during each class let one student
 come up to the container and draw out two student names. One of the
 names gets a standing ovation (pure fun!) and the other gets to answer two 
questions from the group and they get one “lifeline” (ask another student, or they
 can look it up on the spot.). The peer pressure is both fun and stressful! If both
 answered correctly, then win a silly prize or favor.

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Teaching Strategies: The Use of Social and Emotional Activities


Valentines, Feelings and Affect: The Use of Social and Emotional Activities

Here’s how they work together: The emotions research always starts with the classics. An older, brilliant study done was done by emotions pioneer Paul Ekman. You may know the Fox TV series “Lie to Me” is based on his skill set and life’s work. Ekman found that when we artificially generated certain facial expressions, it induced the corresponding ‘genuine’ feelings (Levenson, et al. 1990). Act a certain way, and the emotions will follow.

But this door goes both ways. This means, getting kids emotionally aroused can enhance their physical effort (Schmidt, et al, 2009). And when we enhance both, like combine the emotions of social contact with shaking hands, we remember the event better (Nielson and Jensen, 1994). Emotions and physiology are fully linked.

Translated, when we arouse emotions in our kids, they are more likely to get off their ‘you know what’ and start engaging more. Even when seated, emotional responses enhance our memory of the details of the event. But wait; it gets better. If you can focus on engaging the class leaders (the ones that others follow), you have a good chance of bringing on board the rest of the students. Why? Have you ever noticed that when one person yawns, others around often yawn? Actually, some research suggests that emotions are contagious (Wild, et al.2001).

Now, when you put all this together (mind, body, emotions, class leaders and peer pressure), you can get classroom miracles. How?

There’s a whole new field developing. It’s called cultural neuroscience. It’s the field of how cultures change our brain. Your school creates a culture. A classroom will have a culture whether you orchestrate it or not. Many teachers actively shape their culture, while those that struggle complain about their class culture.

Successful schools consciously shape their cultures while the schools that struggle complain about “how the kids are these days.” A great primer on this field was Wexler’s book Brain and Culture (2006).

Recent studies show that when you use rituals well, you can shape behaviors. In fact, rituals can activate students to do things that require personal sacrifice (wow) because of the peer-power and social effects. This allows teachers to erase problems with task activation, socializing and discipline. The bottom line is that anthropology is now being influenced by neuroscience. Well, you know I love the research, so here it is on our emotional, social and physical states, and the brain’s activation for functionality and organizing dynamics.

REFERENCES Brown RA, Seligman R. Anthropology and cultural neuroscience: creating productive intersections in parallel fields. Prog Brain Res. 2009;178:31-42. Cahill L, Haier RJ, Fallon J, Alkire MT, Tang C, Keator D, Wu J, McGaugh JL. (1996) Amygdala activity at encoding correlated with long-term, free recall of emotional information. Proc Natl Acad Science U S A. Jul 23;93(15):8016-2. Levenson, RW, Ekman P, Friesen WV. (1990) Voluntary facial action generates emotion-specific autonomic nervous system activity. Psychophysiology. Jul;27(4):363-84. Nielson KA, Jensen RA. (1994) Beta-adrenergic receptor antagonist antihypertensive medications impair arousal-induced modulation of working memory in elderly humans. Behav Neural Biol. 1994 Nov;62(3):190-200. Phan, KL, Wagner T., Taylor, SF, Liberzon, I (2002) Functional neuroanatomy of emotion: A meta-analysis of emotion activation studies in PET and fMRI. Neuroimage 16: 331-348. Schmidt L, Cléry-Melin ML, Lafargue G, Valabrègue R, Fossati P, Dubois B, Pessiglione M. (2009) Get aroused and be stronger: emotional facilitation of physical effort in the human brain. J Neurosci. Jul 29;29(30):9450-7. Wild B, Erb M, Bartels M. (2001) Are emotions contagious? Evoked emotions while viewing emotionally expressive faces: quality, quantity, time course and gender differences. Psychiatry Res. Jun 1;102(2):109-24. Wiltermuth SS, Heath C. (2009)Synchrony and cooperation. Psychol Sci. Jan;20(1):1-5.

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