Educate mind and body

A well-known proverb says "you learn by making mistakes" and we can all agree: only by experimenting and falling can we learn new things. Let's think of a child who is learning to walk: the balancing act that is necessary to take one step after another can only be learned by trying and trying again, falling and getting up again. But for the child not to get discouraged, it will be important to have someone close to cheer him up, console him in the moment of a fall, reassure him that he will learn little by little. Such an attitude seems natural and obvious to us! Let's try to translate this experience into the school.

Daniela Lucangeli, professor of developmental psychology at the University of Padua, reports the episode of a child she had followed due to learning difficulties: after having faced and resolved the school difficulties the child asked her: «Now that you have removed mistakes, do you also take away the pain of mistakes from me?” This sentence contains the heart of many problems related to learning at school (and beyond) and underlines the importance of the attention that a teacher must activate in the delicate task of teaching!

In the past, school was too often focused only on the transmission of knowledge, without paying too much attention to the needs and specificities of individual students. Today this attention to everyone's needs is widely recognized as necessary, especially when we talk about the emotional sphere of children and young people who attend school. These attentions have also developed thanks to recent scientific evidence on how emotions and cognitive abilities are interconnected in a very significant way.
In fact, until a few decades ago, it was thought that the cognitive part and the emotional part of our brain did not communicate with each other, because each function resides in a specific and distinct area. In reality this is not the case: in our brain no function is silent to the others, indeed in this complex system everything can be activated simultaneously.

Neuroimaging research, i.e. techniques that allow the active areas of the nervous system to be highlighted, have shown that every cognitive activity (learning something) always corresponds to the activation of an emotional part; the interesting aspect is that the combination between these two parts remains stable and is memorized.
What does all this imply? The child who talks about the pain of mistakes has certainly had a school experience that fixed in his mind that, when he goes to school, he is very likely to experience negative emotions, which are scary and from which it is better to escape.

Then every teacher should remember that there are many aspects that can leave their mark on the present and future life of the students they meet: if we sow positive emotions, empathy, closeness, these will become fixed in the minds of children and young people together with what we teach. And these ingredients will allow them not to feel like heads to fill, but treasures to discover and share.

Valentina Turinetto
NP March 2023