I have to confess that I am not the biggest fan of psychology as an area of study. A friend of mine took it at university, and she did a rather good job at putting me off when, in response to my gushing “Ooooh, personality - do a personality test on me!”, she told me a tale about pigeons and gave me an alarming number of statistics. That said, for an educator, knowledge of child psychology is useful, especially if, like me, you have a professional interest in special educational needs and disability.

The Emotional Learner, I am pleased to report, has nothing to do with pigeons and everything to do with people and how they learn.

It can be tempting to see learning as entirely the business of cognition. It is fashionable to talk about recall and phonological loops, neuroscience and other brain-related things that have a bamboozling whiff of Science (my capitals) about them. There is a danger that this view of learning can result in curriculum, lesson and even school design having a mechanistic feel, with one-size-fits-all approaches. In my experience, nothing could be further from the truth; as Marc Smith writes, “The process of learning certainly requires the engagement of cognitive processes, but without other so-called non-cognitive processes learning simply won’t take place.” In other words, ignore the emotional world of learners at your peril.

After explaining why teachers need to take notice of emotions, Smith takes us on an informative journey into the psychology of learning and the impact that emotion has on it. As I read the chapter on “masters and performers” (children with a mastery style are more likely to enjoy the challenge of learning - and mastering - something new; those with a performance style are more likely to go for the things they know that they can already do well, and fear the unknown), various faces floated across my mind’s eye. One of the things I liked about this book was that the same had clearly happened for the author, and each chapter is peppered with stories and examples from his own teaching, bringing authenticity and helping readers to see where the theory fits together with the practice.

Anxiety barrier

It is difficult to put my finger on which chapter would be the most important or most useful. Today, as societal anxiety rises over the mental health and wellbeing of our young people (and their teachers), I found that the chapter on anxiety resonated with me. I have seen anxiety cause students to act out in all sorts of ways that, left unchecked, form a barrier to learning that can be hard to break down and that tips into the SEND category social, emotional and mental health (SEMH).

But, as Smith points out, anxiety isn’t always the bad guy. Over the past few decades, we seem to have become conditioned to the idea that all negative emotions must have negative consequences (he writes informatively about positive psychology and how the pursuit of happiness is not necessarily all it is cracked up to be) but, evolutionarily speaking, fear has a protective function that keeps us from harm - as does fear’s near relation anxiety.

Learning to deal with anxiety does not, and should not, mean that we should do all we can to prevent students from ever feeling it. (Of course, this doesn’t mean that we should go out of our way to produce circumstances that create anxiety in students, rather that it is a problematic emotion when it gets out of control and a young person has no idea how to go about dealing with it.) This insight has certainly given me food for thought when considering how to help students to deal with their school-based anxieties.

Other chapters on motivation (intrinsic and extrinsic), boredom and interest and curiosity give insights into how teachers might harness learner engagement in their lessons, again illustrated by case studies from Smith’s own teaching. At first, I thought that the chapter on the teenage brain wouldn’t be useful to me as a primary practitioner (although very useful as a mother of teens) and, to be fair, it does go into more detail than I need in a professional sense, but it is always useful to see where our charges have both come from and are heading to, so I wouldn’t let the undeniable secondary school flavour of this book put you off if you are a primary person.

With each chapter ending with a useful summary and suggestions for further reading, this book is a solid and useful introduction to human psychology, and emotion and its connection to learning, with plenty to both challenge your thinking and make you smile.

As Smith says, “Teenagers are, put simply, quite amazing.”

Nancy Gedge is a consultant teacher for the Driver Youth Trust, working with schools and teachers on SEND. She is the author of Inclusion for Primary School Teachers. She tweets @nancygedge