The Puzzle: Blog

A number of new books on education have come across our desk lately. Among the standouts— those that have us talking about our own experiences in school and what we wish for our children — is Tom Newkirk’s “Embarrassment: And the Emotional Underlife of Learning,” which was released this month from Heinemann.

As the subtitle indicates, Newkirk sets out to explore the emotional underpinnings of learning. Generally, he wants us to acknowledge that the emotions play a significant role in both teaching and learning — and that it would be wise of us to pay more attention to this in school. In particular, he asks us to think about the role of embarrassment and related cheek-flushing emotional responses as barriers to learning.

Embarrassment, of course, is a perfectly natural emotional response to various situations. We all have our moments. As social beings, we are more or less programmed to want to act in a competent way. When we don’t — “when we are inappropriate, when we commit a gaffe, when we are publicly awkward,” Newkirk writes, “we feel for a moment outside the human collective, standing alone.” Embarrassment, shame, and related emotions are evolutionarily developed qualities that serve as a kind of social glue. They help us act for the collective good. People we think of as shameless are people who can be — and often are — socially destructive.

How, Newkirk asks, can we create conditions of support in school so that students can fail publicly without succumbing to the kind of embarrassment that shuts them down?

Educators talk often about the importance of helping students develop what Stanford researcher Carol Dweck calls a “growth mindset.” The logic is clear. A fixed mindset inhibits learning because it resists or flat-out refuses to take risks. A growth mindset enables us to dig into learning new topics and skills. It asks us to lean into the discomfort of the process, accepting that we’ll stumble our way along, fail at times, try again, ask questions, practice, slowly develop our skills and knowledge, grow. There’s one problem: fix-mindset triggers are everywhere. If we feel panicked, or defensive, or anxious, or pressured, or belittled, or too much in the spotlight, we are inclined to clam up or develop an oppositional attitude. As Newkirk puts it, “Because we must misperform publicly before we can be competent, the very act of learning can be fraught — or avoided.”

Newkirk explores many of the ways in which embarrassment can arise in school. He examines the intersection between embarrassment and the disadvantages some students bring to school — including issues associated with race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. He surfaces the problem of microaggressions — that steady rain of small but painful putdowns, slights, and criticisms that undermine the learning experiences of those not in the cultural majority — and in so doing, surfaces our need to better understand their source and impact. He also explores the question of how educators can counteract the human instincts to withdraw — how, in other words, we can get students to see that the gamble of learning will be worth the effort, even when it doesn’t always feel that way. What can teachers do to create classrooms of respect and support — especially across the host of differences we carry with us?

Newkirk makes it clear that learning always involves some level of stress. But it’s a problem when we are in a continual environment of stress. Educators, along with all their other skills and content knowledge, need to be highly attentive to the emotional state of their students. To that end, Newkirk explores the way we run our classrooms, the way we ask questions, how we respond to writing and other student efforts, what we consciously do to engage students where they are, how we urge them to take risks, seek help, explore ideas, collaborate, develop skills, and grow.

This is, at heart, an argument for inclusive classrooms and teachers with highly tuned multicultural awareness. It’s an argument for locating every student’s source of strength so that they will engage in school. And it’s an argument for consciously teaching students how to develop the metacognitive skills that enable them to leverage emotions for learning. In this way, we help them find and develop areas of competency (the great counterweight to embarrassment), learn to embrace small steps and celebrate improvements, and understand how they learn best. But key to it all, he says, is the need to keep a kind of intelligent empathy front and center.

“To put it another way,” Newkirk writes, “if students are to take on a growth mindset, they need to engage in the kind of inter­nal dialogue that allows for an acceptance of failure and risk-taking. And as I have argued, there are powerful evolutionary biases that distort perception and work against this open, fluid, undefensive sense of self. As parents and teachers we have work to do to help these inner conversations be productive ones.”

Because Newkirk, a recently retired English professor at the University of New Hampshire, has long specialized in the field of teaching writing, most of his examples of how to work with students so they feel emotional safe and willing to take risks come from the writing classroom. In this regard, the book may be best suited for English teachers and university instructors teaching intro writing courses. To this end, Newkirk is very clear about our need to encourage teachers to focus on helping students build learning strategies when reading — look for salient facts that reverberate with them individually; pay attention to the emotional impact of reading, the feeling of being with the book; and identify thematic links that anchor both the salient facts and the emotional connections. Perhaps more important, he wants us to “tell a better story,” as he puts it, about writing. This means that we focus not on teaching strict organizational structure (the five-paragraph essay, for instance, or the single strategy of claim and evidence) but on improvisation — the exploration of possibilities so critical not just to creative writing but also to analytical fluency. Helping students understand the process of improvisation — the weaving of emotional and intellectual engagement with a subject — has been widely explored in recent decades. The problem is more in our resistance to embracing it in schools. Newkirk makes a strong argument here for how helping students understand and employ the writing process will also help them work through any embarrassment they might have at the start of any project (it’s sloppy every time) in order to produce writing of value.

Of course, Newkirk does offer examples of useful approaches in math and other subjects — and, with a little imagination, the lessons can be applied to any course. He also focuses on more general, multimodal teaching strategies that can be applied across the board. What matters most is that we acknowledge the role of emotions in learning and come to greater clarity about how we help students manage them.

Newkirk also addresses the question of grit — or rather the misunderstanding of the role of grit in learning. “The qualities of persistence that we can call ‘grit’ or ‘stamina,’” he writes, “are really by-products (or perhaps the outer appearance) of a capacity for sustained engagement, for keeping things in motion. If we make grit the goal, we are telling the wrong story.”

There’s much to admire here, including Newkirk’s willingness to explore the role of emotions in his own learning and professional life. He also draws lessons from top athletes — all of whom needed to persevere increasing levels of challenge and a steady flow of setbacks. In particular, we like how the book ends, shifting the focus from how we support students in embracing and managing the range of emotions woven throughout the learning process to support teachers themselves in embracing the range of emotions woven throughout the teaching life.

Newkirk acknowledges how hard this is — especially when it comes to voicing our heartfelt views with colleagues. “Sometimes we may fear retribution, but usually the discomfort is enough to shut us down. To speak up violates a desire that I think we all have to be cooperative human beings, to perform in an agreed-upon way and avoid embarrassment. There is a real seduction in following the rules, going with the consensus (even an artificial one) — it eases stress both for us and for others in the room.”

There is personal value is speaking up, of course. We feel better in the long run. To this end, Newkirk argues for a greater dose of “self-generosity” — for a better, kinder, braver voice in our head, especially one that can see our shortcomings, mistakes, failures, embarrassments clearly, but then let them go. Move on with self-respect in tact.

But we can’t help but also see a sneaky plea here  — for educators who want to resist the increasingly damaging stream of politicized mandates and broad policies that undermine learning — that, in fact, completely miss the role of emotion in learning — and in doing so acknowledge the deep humanity at play each day in school. Teaching and learning, both, are deeply emotional undertakings. We do it best when we see each other fully.

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