At the bottom of the hippocampus is a smaller structure called the amygdala. Since we are bombarded with perceptual stimuli every moment of our lives, our brain must determine what is most important so that we are not “on overload.” The amygdala is a vigilant monitor that reacts to experiences before we consciously understand them—especially to those that appear threatening or dangerous—by priming the brain to be alert for possible action. The amygdala performs this function by comparing incoming information with long-term memories from past experience, and then deciding what the body should do about it. The “fight or flight” response is an emotional response that happens before one's thinking brain, the cortex, can get involved because stopping to think would take too long before a needed decision was made (Newquist, 2004; Ratey, 2002; Wlodkowski, 2008).
When we are not in life-threatening situations, the hippocampus and the amygdala work together to help us “read” nonverbal information, interpret social situations, and understand and deal with our own and other's feelings. The upper cortex, which involves our thinking brain, and the lower limbic structures, which involve our emotions, are in continuous communication with each other. Interestingly, there are many more connections from the small emotional limbic center into the large logical and rational cortical centers than the reverse. When emotions overwhelm us (we become too scared or too excited) we can usually use the reasoning centers in our cortex to overrule and manage them so that we can stay in control of our behavior—but not always, causing us to react or speak before we think (Newquist, 2004; Ratey, 2002, p. 228; Wlodkowski, 2008).
Affect and Learning
Emotions impact learning in two distinct ways: the emotional climate in which learning occurs and the degree to which emotions are associated with the learning content. A positive learning climate in which students feel comfortable, a sense of rapport with their teacher and their peers, and as though they can be successful, leads to the release of endorphins in the blood, which in turn gives feelings of euphoria and stimulates the frontal lobes. A negative environment, in which a student feels dumb, disrespected, or disconnected, leads to the release of the hormone cortisol into the blood, which results in raised anxiety and refocuses frontal lobes to fight or flight (Sousa, 2006, p. 84). In terms of learning content, students are more likely to remember material in which they have made an emotional investment. This is why many teachers try to help students care about what they are learning by using simulations, role playing, journal writing, and relating what students are learning to real-world experiences.
Designing courses to address students' emotional states is valuable for several reasons. Tapping into students' emotions can inspire them to put forth their greatest effort, thus propelling them toward achieving their highest potential. Helping students care about what you are trying to teach them increases the likelihood that they will learn more deeply and remember longer. Recognizing and making adjustments for when a student feels sad, stressed, or threatened can remove roadblocks not solvable by cognitive strategies alone. Collectively, students' feelings greatly impact the interactions and relationships that contribute to—or undermine—the sense of classroom community. In short, how students feel about what is happening in the classroom is critical to how they engage in (or disengage from) the learning that teachers are trying to engender in the classroom.
The Psychomotor Domain
Physical learning has been around from the beginning, ever since people learned to use fire, water, and land for their own survival. Ratey (2002) discusses the degree to which humans, at least over the past few centuries, have tended to undervalue the importance of physicality to our human identity. For example, “civilized” humans have defined themselves as “above” the animals because they can “think,” whereas animals just “act.” Physical movement was thought to be a lower brain function, and cognition a higher brain function that only humans have evolved. Until somewhat recently, most people didn't think any portion of the “motor brain” did anything but react to incoming stimuli and monitor or implement motor functions. But scientists are rapidly finding that regions associated with physical functioning also play a large role in activity related to planning, calculating, and forming intentions. As Ratey (2002) observes, “Clearly, catching a ball involves the brain's motor function. But making a mental calculation does too … mounting evidence shows that movement is crucial to every other brain function, including memory, emotion, language, and learning” (pp. 147–148).
When someone is first learning to do something physically, such as riding a bike or driving a car, they are using the “thinking” part of the brain, the cortex. But as the activity becomes better learned and more automatic, the responsibility for controlling it shifts to neurons in the lower parts of the brain, freeing up neurons in the cortex for new learning. This is the same process for cognitive acts. The cortex is directly involved when we first learn our multiplication tables or how to formulate a grammatically correct question, but once these tasks are mastered, they are moved to lower parts of the brain and become automatic (Ratey, 2002, p. 149). Thus, the older view that the brain is comprised of specific regions that are each responsible for isolated, discrete functions is inaccurate: motor function is crucial to some forms of cognition and to behavior, just as behavior is the acting out of movements prescribed by cognition.
The Psychomotor Domain and Memory
The psychomotor component is also evident in procedural memory, the memory responsible for recalling skills that you've learned over a long time. These kinds of memories are almost impossible to forget because your body and brain have worked so hard to create them. This is the memory that helps you remember how to play a musical instrument or throw a football or button the buttons on your shirt. Novice learners start out imitating the teacher or more advanced peers as they develop skills in taking notes, participating in discussions, and performing laboratory procedures. As they move toward being experts, they become increasingly capable of doing these well on their own, ultimately attaining an unconscious mastery of the skills and often even adapting them in ways that best meet their individual needs.
Acknowledging the role of the psychomotor domain in engagement may be a stretch for many academics, but “the doing” of the visible, auditory, and kinesthetic activities of active learning involve psychomotor skills. “Thinking” and “feeling” are internal, but they are expressed and often “worked out” through talking, writing, reading, and performing actions. At all stages of learning, students with learning styles that respond best to kinesthetic experiences will most be more engaged in learning tasks that incorporate aspects of the psychomotor domain. Finally, teachers know that even the most attentive and well-intended students cannot stay focused when they are sitting idly and physically inactive over long periods of time. Therefore, where possible and appropriate, effective, holistic engagement strategies add psychomotor dimensions, even if it is something as simple as getting students re-energized and refocused by having them stand up and move around the room to talk to each other or find partners for group work.
Integrating the Cognitive, Affective, and Psychomotor Domains
In some fields, experts must be skilled in all three domains. An accomplished classical pianist must be able to read abstract musical notation, memorize thousands of notes, create a unique interpretation by synthesizing what he knows and understands about the piece's historical context with what he believes to be the composer's concept, blend this with his personal artistic vision, and perform physically in a nuanced manner at split-second speed. Similar domain spanning is evident in the work of actors, surgeons, archeologists, athletes, and others. From one perspective, student engagement may be the process and product of spanning domain boundaries and taking advantage, in an intentional way, of the contributions of each.
Many of the current thinkers on education recognize this complexity. Fink (2003) proposed his taxonomy of significant learning because he believed that higher education was expressing a need for new kinds of learning: leadership and interpersonal skills, ethics, communication skills, character, tolerance, and the ability to adapt to change (p. 29). These kinds of learning go beyond the cognitive domain. Shulman's (2002) table of learning involves cognitive,