The Spark of Learning ─ Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion

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.

Sarah Rose Cavanagh is an associate professor of psychology at Assumption College, where she also serves as associate director of grants and research in the Center for Teaching Excellence. She contemplates the connections between emotions and quality of life in her writing, teaching, and research, blogs on affective neuroscience for Psychology Today, and has appeared on The Martha Stewart Show.