Goldilocks Challenge
Why is it that I remember the negative quicker than the positive. We all have stories to share from our past experiences, yet the most memorable are those that are filled with emotion, particularly fears, anger, or sadness. I’m not saying we don’t remember wonderful, heartwarming stories, but those that pop into our short term memory from the vaults of our long term storages, are those that are fraught with difficulty and challenge.
This comes from the reading I’m doing as I prepare for this upcoming course (6411 Cognition and Learning) but also because I’m preparing courses that I will teach in the coming term. If I want students to truly be successful, have a positive experience, and remember what I’m teaching, how can I shape their learning without creating too much cognitive dissonance or overburden them with tasks that initiate negative emotional reactions. Daniel Willingham, in Why Don’t Students Like School?, states that ‘solving problems brings pleasure’ (p. 9) and learning happens when cognitive work has a moderate challenge (p. 19). Here lies the Goldilocks Challenge of getting it just right – just enough dissonance, just enough support, just in time learning events, with just enough emotional connection that is negative with positive, to bring forward the best learning results.
Willingham ends Chapter 1 with a section that rings true for this PhD program, and was introduced in the first Doctoral Seminar course – keep a journal for reflection on, of, in action. This echoes the fact that our short term memories may be brief and elusive, while our long term memories may be difficult to bring forward into short term memory, without a clue, cue, or emotional response. Keeping a journal is an aid for our long term memory retrieval. Yet paper journals may complicate the retrieval process, relying on an archaic system of hunt and seek, I’ve selected to use a blog journal, with categories and tags, to ensure my long term retrieval of bits and pieces I may recall can be fully searched with ease. This blog is a support for remembering where cognitive dissonance occurs, without the strong, negative emotions (I hope) that make learning events memorable.
