The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion: 1 (Teaching and Learning in Higher Education)

Historically we have constructed our classrooms with the assumption that learning is a dry staid affair best conducted in quiet tones and ruled by an unemotional consideration of the facts. The field of education however is beginning to awaken to the potential power of emotions to fuel learning informed by contributions from psychology and neuroscience. In friendly readable prose Sarah Rose Cavanagh argues that if you as an educator want to capture your students attention harness their working memory bolster their long-term retention and enhance their motivation you should consider the emotional impact of your teaching style and course design. To make this argument she brings to bear a wide range of evidence from the study of education psychology and neuroscience and she provides practical examples of successful classroom activities from a variety of disciplines in secondary and higher education.