April 2025 – Education & Teacher Conferences

Andrew Watson

April-20-2025

(How) Do Emotions Affect Learning?

When a conference speaker announces that “a student’s emotions matter for their learning,” few teachers rock back in surprise. OF COURSE emotions matter for learning. Who would have thought otherwise?

At the same time, we’re probably curious to know how emotions influence learning.

In fact, once we ask that question, some sense of surprise might start to creep in. After all, the word “learning” falls squarely in the realm of cognition. And the word “emotion” sounds much more like … well … emotion.

Aren’t cognition and emotion two different sets of mental processes? If they are, how does one affect the other?

Here’s where research can be really helpful, if we read it carefully.

One of the best known (and most misunderstood) insights in this field comes from LatB regular Mary Helen Immordino-Yang:

“It is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don’t care about.”

Why? Because — in the words of a recent study led by Benjamin Hawthorne — “the brain mechanisms that give rise to conscious emotions are not fundamentally different from those that give rise to cognition.”

In other word: the parts of your brain that do the emotional work also do the thinking work. Yes, LOTS of the same neural networks operate in both processes. These two seemingly “different sets of mental processes” share very substantial plots of neural real estate. (I will, by the way, come back to the misunderstanding of Dr. Immordino-Yang’s quotation at the end of this post.)

So, STEP ONE in this multi-step argument: “students’ emotions influence their learning because — at the neurobiological level — ’emotion’ and ‘cognition’ overlap.

Step Two

With this neuroscience understanding of the cognition/emotion relationship established, let’s turn to psychology. What mental processes might explain this relationship?

One potential answer: WORKING MEMORY (often abbreviated as WM). If emotions — positive or negative — have an effect on WM, then we can easily understand how those emotions affect learning.

This hypothesis is at the heart of that recent study, led by Dr. Hawthorne, that I quoted a few paragraphs ago.

Hawthorne’s team explored this question through the concept of “cognitive load theory.” The full theory is too complicated to review here, but the headlines are straightforward:

Students who can manage a WM task are facing an appropriate cognitive load.
When that cognitive load becomes excessive, then they experience WM overload.

Team Hawthorne hypothesized that:

negative emotions (or what the researchers call ‘painful’ emotions) might increase cognitive load, and thus result in WM overload. Result: less learning.
positive emotions might reduce cognitive load, and thus make WM overload less likely. Result: same (or more) learning.

Because they have this cognitive load theory framework (often abbreviated as CLT), they can rely on all the tools and surveys that CLT uses.

What Students Did; What Reseachers Learned

To pursue this line of inquiry, Hawthorne and his team followed a straightforward plan.

Roughly 350 students — 11 to 15 year olds in Australian schools — went through this process during their math class. In brief, they…

… watched videos teaching increasingly complicated algebra processes (that is: their cognitive load increased over time),

… rated their own experience of cognitive load for each problem,

… rated their positive and negative emotions, and

… took a final test, to see how well they learned the algebra processes.

When Team Hawthorne put all these data into the appropriate graphs and charts, they arrived at an interesting pair of results.

First:

Yes, negative emotions add to the students’ perceived cognitive load. Result: less learning.

Second:

But: positive emotions had no effect on their perceived cognitive load — although happier students did learn more.

And so, third:

Hawthorne’s team speculates that positive emotions might help cognition via another mental process … such as motivation.

What’s a Teacher to Do?

Given these results, we might reasonably ask: “so what? What can we do with these findings?”

Good questions. I have tentative answers.

First: we now have good reasons from two distinct scientific disciplines — neuroscience and psychology — to argue that emotion and cognition aren’t different categories: they overlap a lot.

Second: we know that students experiencing more negative emotion ALSO experience more cognitive load. Potential result: less learning.

Third: because of ambiguity in the study’s language, we can’t say if the negative emotions led to the higher cognitive load, or if the higher load led to negative emotions. (Because the study measured students’ emotions only once, we can’t know if the answer is “both.”)

For that reason, I think we need a rough-n-ready, flexible set of classroom responses.

If I see my students are upset, I can predict their WM might be reduced; I’ll need to simplify instruction for a while.
If I see my students’ just can’t get their WM in gear right now, I might wonder if there’s some emotional complexity underlying the problem. So: I should check out that hunch.

Neither of these suggestions is revolutionary, but they do let me think through the two-way relationship between negative emotion and WM.

A Two-Way Street

A few hundred words ago, I wrote that Dr. Immordino-Yang’s well-know quotation is widely misunderstood. When she says:

“It is literally neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don’t care about.”

Many people hear:

“And therefore we have to start by getting students to CARE about things, because otherwise they won’t learn about them.

In other words: students’ EMOTIONS preceed their COGNITION.”

But that conclusion a) violates the research we’ve been looking at, and b) doesn’t follow logically from the original statement. Let’s try another example:

“It is literally biomechanically impossible to walk (normally) without using your ankle joints.”

We should not, I think, extend this statement to say:

“We have to start by getting walkers to focus on their ANKLES, because otherwise they can’t walk.”

The sentence really means: “ankles are an essential sub-component of the walking process. They are one of many body parts that we should be aware of as we’re teaching walkers.”

So too, I think, Dr. Immordino-Yang’s statement means: “emotion and cognition always work together. Rather than prioritize one over the other, we should be aware of their intricate interactions as we make moment-by-moment teaching decisions.”

In other words:

Yes, of course, my emotional state influences my ability to think effectively. If I’m stressed and unhappy, I might well struggle to figure out whatever academic problem faces me.

AND

Yes, of course, my ability to think effectively influences my emotional state. If I accomplish a difficult thinking task — like, say, learning a complex algebra process — I might well feel less bad and more good.

The title of this blog post asks: “how do emotions affect learning.”

I hope I’ve persuaded you that the answer is: “don’t rely on people who offer a simple answer to that question. Emotion and cognition overlap substantially, and we must keep that overlap in mind as we think our way through leading schools and classrooms.”

And also: “at a minimum, we have good reason to think that negative/painful emotions complicate working memory. No wonder they’re bad for learning!”

Hawthorne, B. S., Slemp, G. R., Vella-Brodrick, D. A., & Hattie, J. (2025). The relationship between positive and painful emotions and cognitive load during an algebra learning task. Learning and Individual Differences, 117, 102597.

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick

Erik Jahner, PhD

April-17-2025

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick

The first time I caught a student using ChatGPT to write their paper, I felt… cheated. Like a conversation had been skipped. I took it personally. Like an opportunity was there to be knocked on with curiosity but had been bypassed with convenience. But instead of staying irritated (actually … still dealing with moments of this emotion), I did what I always ask my students to do: I got curious.

And that curiosity has since reshaped my teaching, my expectations, and, honestly, my sense of what’s possible. That journey mirrors the one Ethan Mollick lays out in Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, a book that doesn’t just explain what’s happening in the world of AI—it invites you to walk straight into the mystery with both eyes open.

Mollick, a Wharton professor and a longtime explorer of innovation, brings the gravitas of research and the warmth of lived experience. He writes not like someone predicting the future, but like someone already living in it—and handing you the map.

This isn’t a book about fearing AI or worshipping it. It’s about partnering with it. That’s what Mollick means by “co-intelligence”: not artificial intelligence, but collaborative intelligence. The kind that emerges when we stop asking “What can AI do?” and start asking “What can we do together?”

From Sleepless Nights to Syllabus Changes

Mollick begins with his own version of a tech-wrought dark night of the soul—three sleepless nights after encountering ChatGPT. That eerie sense that something has shifted, that the future is no longer ahead of us but suddenly beside us, whispering new possibilities.

Like many of us, I also had sleepless nights, then I began to rewrite my syllabus. I started teaching my students how to prompt. How to think with AI. How to use it not as a shortcut, but as a springboard. Like jazz musicians learning to improvise with a new instrument, we were learning to play off the rhythms of something alien—and astonishingly generative. If they are using it, I need to teach them to use it well!

And still, some days, it weirds me out. Like when a student turns in something more articulate than they can say aloud. Part of me marvels. Part of me wonders what this does to their voice, their confidence, their sense of authorship. Maybe that’s the point—not to land on a stance, but to live inside the question.

The Four Rules That Could Change Everything

Mollick offers an emerging way to think for teachers and students in the AI era. New skills:

Always ask for evidence. (Because AI is confident, not always correct.)
Be the human in the loop. (AI might be fast, but wisdom requires pause.)
Treat AI like a coworker. (It’s competent, but it’s not conscious.)
Learn to use it well. (Prompting isn’t a trick—it’s a literacy.)

What struck me most is how these rules don’t just apply to using ChatGPT. They apply to life in a world where knowledge is abundant, but discernment is everything.

AI as Creative, Coach, Tutor, and Companion

Mollick shows us AI not as a monolith, but as a multiplicity: a tutor, an artist, a coach, a co-writer, a companion in the fog of creative uncertainty. And I’ve seen that too. I’ve watched students ask better questions because they could test their assumptions privately. I’ve seen them write more boldly because they had a sounding board that didn’t judge.

Is it perfect? No. But it’s productive. And weirdly, it’s kind. Because AI, at its best, is a mirror—sometimes foggy, sometimes sharp—but always reflecting something back. What we see in that reflection says as much about us as it does about the machine.

The Real Magic: Partnership, Not Power

This is where Co-Intelligence really shines: not in showing off what AI can do, but in challenging us to consider what we should do with it. Mollick doesn’t hand us easy answers. He asks better questions.

If you’re a teacher, a writer, a thinker—anyone whose job involves shaping ideas—this book feels like a signal flare. Not a warning, but a guide. It says: The future of work isn’t AI or human. It’s both. And the quality of that relationship will depend on how we show up to it.

And if you’re feeling unsure? You’re not alone. Honestly, I’m still figuring it out too. Some days AI feels like a trampoline. Other days, a trapdoor. That ambiguity—that friction—is part of what makes this moment real.

Reading Co-Intelligence isn’t just about learning how AI works. It’s about learning how we work—under pressure, in collaboration, in awe. It doesn’t just give you a flashlight. It hands you the makings of a torch and says, “Build your light.”

So here’s the question Mollick leaves us with, whether he says it outright or not: If AI can think with us, can we learn to think better with it? Not faster. Not louder. Just better.

That’s co-intelligence. And I’m all in.

Book Review: Primary Reading Simplified, by Christopher Such

Guest Post

April-14-2025

Book Review: Primary Reading Simplified, by Christopher Such

Today’s guest book review is by Kim Lockhart.

Finding a new favourite book, one that checks all the boxes, is like finding a new favourite drink. You want to devour it without putting it down, while at the same time, you want to savour it so it isn’t finished too quickly. A good book leaves you feeling thirsty for more. And most of all, like all things we love, we want to share it with everyone we know so that they, too, can enjoy it and savour it as much as we do.

Christopher Such’s first book, The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading, was that book for me: the book that checked all the boxes, the book I didn’t want to put down, and was disappointed when it was over.

I wanted to share Such’s book with every teacher I knew because I wanted them to feel what I felt while reading it: a sense of relief that there was finally a book that contained the answers I’d been searching for throughout my career.

It was the first comprehensive, no-nonsense book on the science of reading I had come across.

Previously, most of what I knew about the reading research I had acquired from complex articles I read while working on my Masters of Education. But these research papers were not easy to read, not written in teacher-friendly language, and didn’t always make a direct connection between the research and what it looked like in classroom practice.

But Christopher Such’s book did.

Fast forward three years, and Such has done it again. He has written another can’t-put-it-down-until-it’s-finished book titled Primary Reading Simplified: A Practical Guide to Classroom Teaching and Whole School Implementation.

While Such’s first book focused on what teachers need to teach (phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, spelling, etc.), his new book focuses more on the aspect of how to teach it.

In other words: teaching all the components of the reading process is not always enough. As teachers, we have to ensure that students are learning what we’re teaching. Even the most well-intentioned of teachers does not always meet this goal!

This book tells us exactly how we can work smarter, not harder, to ensure better learning outcomes for our students – making sure they ARE learning what we’re teaching.

Such’s new book includes an important aspect of teaching that is often the missing piece in other professional books for teachers. In teacher-friendly language, he shares the research and explains the reading routines, classroom habits, and evidence-based instructional strategies that are essential for learning to happen.

Take the chapter on reading fluency, for example.

Not only does Such explain why reading fluency is important for reading comprehension. He explicitly and systematically lays out the structure of an effective fluency lesson, including:

how to pair students
how to choose the “just right text”
how to model reading fluency,
when to explain new vocabulary, and even
how long the fluency practice should be each day (Such suggests less than 30 minutes to allow for repeated reading of the text; too much time could result in disengagement and not be productive).

He leaves no guess-work for teachers.

But Such doesn’t stop at developing stronger, more effective classroom routines and systems for teachers. Part IV of the book is designed for anyone interested in school-wide and district-wide implementation of science-based reading instruction.

Until now, science-based instruction has been happening in specific classrooms, with a few individual teachers, in some school districts. In other words, it isn’t consistent. Such understands that for change to be sustainable, it needs to be implemented at the district level. These changes require fidelity, teacher support, and ongoing monitoring and commitment to change.

Chapters 13, 14, and 15 carefully outline structures for systems to be sustainable across districts. He shares the 4-Phases of implementation model (Sharples et al., 2024 as cited in Such, 2025): Explore, Prepare, Deliver, and Sustain. He also makes it clear that implementation can’t happen all at once. Instead, “implementing change across a school should be seen as an ongoing process rather than a one-off event”.

In this section of the book, Such also addresses the barriers that literacy leaders may face when trying to implement system-wide change: specifically, limited human resources, and time. He also offers practical suggestions for overcoming those barriers, including:

very clear expectations and vision,
flexible adaptations,
and the need to put other, lower-priority changes aside to focus on one priority and sustain it.

Such eloquently concludes this section of the book by explaining, “implementation is most likely to succeed if all involved feel it is something being done with them rather than something done to them.” (Such, 2025, p. 136).

Echoing the format of Such’s first book, each chapter of his new book is short and dense with evidence-based information in manageable chunks. I love this format because it is practical for busy teachers like me. If I have only 10 minutes to read a snippet before I have to run outside for recess duty, I can easily read a few paragraphs in a chapter, learn something, and know exactly where to return when I have time again.

Likewise, each chapter of Primary Reading Simplified concludes with an “In a Nutshell” section that reviews and highlights key information from the chapter. Such also includes the section “Further Reading” for science-of-reading-nerds like me who want to learn more. He even includes a retrieval-practice quiz for each chapter. (To be honest, I am often too scared to quiz myself because I fear that I won’t be able to remember as much as I hope to, despite my greatest efforts.) Best of all, each chapter concludes with a section called “Questions for Professional Discussion.”

Because reading proficiency is not the sole responsibility of the classroom teacher, I highly recommend Primary Reading Simplified for all teachers, reading specialists, literacy coaches, and administrators. Reading instruction is our shared responsibility. As Christopher Such says himself, “Our pupils deserve no less.”

Kim Lockhart is a French Immersion classroom teacher and Special Education teacher in Kingston, Ontario. She holds a Master of Education (M.Ed) degree with a research focus on evidence-based practices to support second language learners with reading difficulties. Kim has her Orton-Gillingham Classroom Educator certificate, CERI Structured Literacy Classroom Teacher certification, and was a Structured Literacy coach for the International Dyslexia Association of Ontario for 2 years. In 2022, Kim worked for the Ontario Ministry of Education as a Content Contributor for the new science-based Language Curriculum and has also presented for the Ontario Minister of Education, Stephen Lecce and his team after the release of the OHRC’s Right to Read report. She is currently teaching part-time at Vancouver Island University’s (VIU) Faculty of Education in the Literacy, Language and Learning Graduate program. Kim is passionate about the Science of Reading and strives to empower educators, parents and caregivers to be more knowledgeable, stronger advocates for all children’s right to read across Canada.

Andrew Watson

April-06-2025

How to Present at a Conference…

I spend most of my professional life talking in front of groups of people. Specifically, I talk about psychology and neuroscience research — and the (careful!) application of those findings to classrooms.

For that reason, I feel quite comfortable writing blog posts about research-based teaching advice: most recently…

… how goals and feedback might motivate students, and

… the relative importance of enjoyment and/or skill in reading instruction, and

… the potential benefits of PBL.

And so forth.

In recent years, I’ve also been getting questions about presenting in public.

While that topic isn’t central to this blog, it might be helpful. After all, I know MANY people who read this blog present at conferences. And I bet many more people would like to.

So: a few quick thoughts.

1: You Do You

No, seriously.

I won’t present well if I’m trying to do (exactly) what you do, and you won’t present well if you try to do (exactly) what I do. We’re different individuals.

While I do think the advice below is broadly helpful, you should also NOT follow this advice if it encourages you to act like someone you’re not.

That is:

If you try to be funny — because someone somewhere said “funny speakers are good!” — that advice will work only if you’re a funny person. If not, your audience will sense your discomfort (and your unfunniness) right away.
If I try to get adults up and moving around (“Everybody Conga!”) because John Almarode is GREAT at getting people up and moving, I’ll feel deeply foolish. That’s just not my style. And my audience will know I feel deeply foolish. (They will probably also feel deeply foolish.)

And so forth.

2: You Do What You Say

When I’m giving a talk about avoiding working memory overload, I have to be especially careful to avoid working memory overload. If I don’t, my audience will remember my hypocrisy; they will not remember my content.

If you’re talking about retrieval practice, include retrieval practice. If you don’t, your audience will wonder why you didn’t use the teaching practice that you said was so important.

Ditto if you’re talking about mindfulness, or mini-white-boards, or forming relationships. Speakers who don’t do what they say risk looking like hypocrites.

By the way, this truth creates real problems for presentations on specific pedagogies. If my message is “students best remember ideas they learn through open-ended inquiry,” how can I best make that argument?

If I give a presentation, then my medium contradicts my message.
If I let teachers open-endedly explore their own pedagogical interests, they might not explore “open-ended inquiry.” Or, if they do, their inquiry might not arrive at the same conclusion I do.

My point here is not to be snarky, but to note a real challenge for champions of more “student-centered” pedagogical styles. If I give a talk about the inherent futility of giving talks…the paradox probably overwhelms my message.

3: Highlight Structure

Most talks condense LOTS of information into relatively short periods of time. In fact, one reason speakers receive invitations is: their expertise allows them to organize many ideas into a coherent (if complex) package.

Alas, the more info I condense into my talk, the harder my audience has to work to follow my argument. With each passing slide, they think more nervously: “Wait — how does THIS set of ideas connect to ALL THOSE PREVIOUS sets of ideas?”

For that reason, I think speakers should include a clear outline very near the beginning of the talk. And they should return to that outline frequently throughout the talk to indicate progress.

For instance, I’ve got an upcoming talk on the subject of “Rethinking Intrinsic Motivation.” That talk will begin with this outline:

Act I: Here’s what everyone thinks about intrinsic motivation.

Act II: David Geary wants us to RETHINK intrinsic motivation.

Act III: Most people think that this other theory contradicts Geary. But I think it aligns with — and adds to — Geary’s theory.

Act IV: In fact, we need to RETHINK the other theory to convert it from a “to do” list into a “to think” list. Here’s how we do that.

Notice, this initial outline stays fairly abstract. I say that Geary “wants us to rethink motivation,” but I don’t get specific. I don’t even name the other theory. And so forth.

As I make my way through the talk, I explicitly return to that outline and add in all those specifics:

“As you saw in Act II, Geary wants us to rethink intrinsic motivation from an evolutionary angle. For that reason, he argues, school should emphasize topics that we didn’t evolve to learn, not those that we do.

Now, in Act III…”

By starting with an outline, and by returning to it, I clarify my ideas. Even more important: I clarify the relationship among the ideas.

4: Presenting Online

Four quick rules to raise your online game.

a) My eyes should not be at the center line of the screen, but 1/3 of the way down from the top of the screen. Film and TV shows are shot with this “rule of thirds,” so my audience expects it. Eyes at the midline look odd.

b) For heaven’s sake, I must NOT let my laptop camera point up at my face — and therefore up my nostrils. That view is really unpleasant. I should prop the laptop on books so that it’s level with my face.

c) In daily conversation, we don’t typically get very close to the people we’re talking with. If my face is too close to the camera, I’m a “close talker.” The look is unsettling. So, I should move the camera back so that most of my torso is visible.

d) My background matters. If the room behind me is cluttered and unkempt, I look unprofessional. I should find a simple, classy look.

None of those guidelines is complicated; all of them improve online presentations.

In Sum…

Although speakers should be themselves, some guidelines improve almost all talks. I hope the list above proves helpful.