My rule #4 for teaching middle school will make your adolescent students happier and more engaged, which will make you happier and more engaged. They’ll behave better and you’ll discipline less. Take my advice and give it a try!

I believe that affective learning is the most effective learning of all. To explain, I’ll share my incredibly simplified version of the learning theory that has driven my career in education. So here goes. When we take in information, we either 1) use it temporarily and then discard it (because it doesn’t have greater meaning to us), OR 2) store it into our minds by connecting it to other memories that have already been formed (which gain even greater meaning for us by connecting to each other).  Yes, just two choices when we take in information: 1) Take it, OR 2) Leave it.

In order for your brain to “take it” (store it), there needs to be a sense that to do so would be rewarding – either now or in the future. That sense of it feeling rewarding comes from the neurotransmitter dopamine. When you simultaneously learn something new while feeling this sense of reward, you are gonna remember it later!

And here’s a life hack: we can purposely make ourselves feel pleasure and connect to positive memories while taking in new information that we want to store to memory. How do we do this? By activating our five senses — the gateways to pleasure — while trying to learn something. We can use our eyes, our ears, our nose, our sense of touch, and our mouths (such as sampling Greek food while learning about Greek society wearing Greek clothing). We can also think positive thoughts. One of those positive thoughts is this information will be valuable and help me later.

Have you ever noticed how hard it is to learn new information while someone is yelling at you? It’s so much easier to remember that same information when it’s delivered in a soothing, kind voice along with a compliment. Read on to get some ideas for making your classroom THE place to learn.

Oh, and for those of you who were wishing I had provided a simple definition of affective learning, I found a good one I like in a paper by Susan Gano-Phillips (Citing Miller): “Affective learning is concerned with how learners feel while they are learning, as well as with how learning experiences are internalized so they can guide the learner’s attitudes, opinions, and behavior in the future (Miller, 2005).”

The Goal is this, which is my Rule #4 for Teaching Middle School: Facilitate Affective Learning

Key Takeaway: Simultaneously Activate their Senses & Positive Emotions While Teaching Them

Here are some ways to incorporate affective learning:

• Make them laugh. Laughter feels good. Now if you can get them to laugh while you’re trying to teach them something new, voila!
• Center them first. Sometimes you need to settle everyone down and get them receptive to even hearing you, which you can do with quick meditational activities. Use a soothing voice, turn off a light or two, ask them to close their eyes, and then tell them it’s time to get ready to learn this new thing that is good to know about.
• Activate the sense of SIGHT:  look at or draw pictures, watch or make a video, use graphic organizers to visualize the information differently, do visualization activities with closed eyes, ask them to describe the appearance of their pets, make eye contact while speaking and listening to each other, keep a neat and tidy classroom versus a cluttered one, posters and such should invoke pleasurable feelings and be simple enough to quickly take in, etc.
• Activate the sense of SMELL:  Add to the good feeling tone by making your room smell good (in a scent somehow related to the content would be even better). Also, think about your upcoming teaching agenda. Ask yourself if there is any way you can associate the content with a smell you can present to students (perhaps in an essential oil)…such as a smell or seasonal odor that is mentioned in a story you’re reading.
• Activate the sense of TASTE:  this goes along the same lines as the one above…earlier I gave an idea about serving Greek food while teaching students about Greek civilization. The reason I said this is because I still remember doing this as the student when I was in 6th grade! See it works!
• Activate the sense of HEARING:  set the feeling tone for writing with classical music, have students analyze figurative language in songs, write songs, lip sync, make rhymes, play music that relates to the content (such as music played during WWII), etc.
• Activate the sense of TOUCH:  have students get up and move around, make a hands-on project, and make sure your room is at a comfortable temperature (it’s hard to learn when you feel too cold or too hot)…
• Do funny LOL Language instead of boring language. LOL Language is a set of no-prep printables I designed that combine serious learning (such as punctuating dialogue, using commas correctly, choosing the right vocabulary word, analyzing poetry, story starters, and much more) with humorous content! It’s all standards-based, important language practice, but the content consists of jokes and puns. Kids love it.
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• Plan activities that involve art, such as: drawing a comic strip of a scene, drawing a character’s thoughts inside a blank head, filling out a graphic organizer in the shape of the topic, drawing vocabulary words, make up a creature and describe it, etc.
• Plan activities that involve drama, such as: write a skit and act it out, act out a scene, play charades, etc.
• Play review games, such as: Jeopardy, Bingo, etc.
• Incorporate popular games into learning (with some prep on your part to adapt the content), such as: Balderdash, Scattergories, Heads Up!, etc.
• Get up and move around How about the Hokey Pokey?
• Plan comedic writing activities, such as: fractured fairy tales, a sitcom screenplay, a funny story, writing puns, etc.
• Here are some other fun and free activities

Here’s another trick I learned. When you provide your students with high-interest learning resources they feel are relevant to them and interesting in some way, they will actually behave better. They will get sucked into whatever you are trying to get them read, write, or do and forget about misbehaving.

So, that’s why I created these high-interest informational texts and tasks. I went out of my way to make the articles super interesting to middle schoolers by writing about things that interest them. And, guess what? It worked. I keep hearing from teachers how kids get so into these passages. They actually want to answer the questions. They even want to discuss the articles as a group. 

And teachers keep reporting how much time and hassle I have saved them. I did that by aligning every text and task to a specific Reading Informational Text Standard and did that 10 times to cover all 10 of them individually. Now teachers don’t have to go searching for the right articles that bring out the right skills.