Learner Decision-making

Stronger and smarter learners depend on the ability to make good decisions. When learners develop their own learning plans, when they define, plan, execute, and evaluate their own learning, they make hundreds if not thousands of decisions about what and how they will learn.

Recently, Arthur C. Brooks, a contributing writer to The Atlantic and a Harvard professor, wrote an article titled “Why You Should Trust Your Gut,” which emphasizes the importance of “how you feel” decision-making, whatever you happen to be doing – learning or otherwise.

Brooks writes,

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“The connection between decision making and gut feelings has become a hot field for research. Our understanding of the mechanisms of ‘gut’ and brain is still incomplete, but tests of the quality of decisions made from feelings as opposed to conscious analysis yield strongly suggestive and useful results.”

For example, researchers writing in the journal Emotion in 2011 asked survey participants to make car-buying decisions that varied in complexity. Those decisions were based either on their intuitive feelings about the options or solely on reasoning about the details at hand. The researchers found that for simple decisions, it didn’t matter which method they used to reach a verdict. But for complex decisions, a feeling-based decision was more than twice as likely to lead to an optimal outcome as one based on an analysis of the details.”

“This finding suggests that it doesn’t matter how you decide something straightforward, such as whether to take the one job available when you have been unemployed for a long time. But when you have multiple professional options, using your gut to evaluate the choices may be the best course.”

“This is where being able to recognize which of those three key feelings your gut is trying to communicate comes in. The one that should never be absent when you’re considering a job [or a learning plan] is excitement. Another way of defining this sort of excitement is prospective happiness, or joy about having a better future in sight. If you don’t have that sense of excitement when you hear about an opportunity, your subconscious is telling you something important – that this opportunity is unlikely to provide enjoyment, a sense of accomplishment, and especially meaning. Researchers have run experiments that illustrate how central excitement about the future is to an activity’s ultimate satisfaction. Psychologists writing in 2019 in the Journal of Happiness Studies showed that anticipated meaning, which is crucial for well-being, and excitement about the future are closely linked.”

“The second feeling to track as you evaluate an opportunity is fear. This comes in two varieties: danger and dread. In the right dose, the first of these is positive, but the second sort is always negative. Fear founded on a reasonable degree of danger when taking an opportunity provokes an increase in the brain’s dopamine regions in anticipation of a possible victory while facing risk. This matters because it indicates that you’re sensing an imminent challenge of a difficult but doable task. No danger means no real challenge; boredom is the likely result.”

“When I was hired as a professor at Harvard some years ago, I felt a positive fear of a somewhat dangerous challenge. If I had been, say, drafted into the NBA instead, the feeling would have tipped into dread (the anticipation of something entirely negative), because I would have failed at that with 100 percent certainty. Dread is so destructive of well-being that in experiments, some people who know for sure that they are going to get a painful electrical shock will accept a higher voltage immediately rather than experience dread of the future pain.”

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“This brings us the third feeling to watch out for in your gut reaction: deadness (which some scholars alternatively refer to as emptiness). Researchers have found that this sensation is associated with such feelings as boredom, loneliness, numbness, despair, and hopelessness. So if you feel dread, ask yourself whether it portends this deeper deadness – because this living death is exactly what you should avoid in a job [or any other pursuit], notwithstanding whatever pay, power, or prestige it seems to offer.”

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So the next time you are putting together a learning plan for yourself (and all of us do it), think about excitement, fear (danger or dread), and deadness or emptiness. If the learning goal is exciting, contains a bit of danger but is absent of dread, and doesn’t seem empty, then that goal might be one worth pursuing.

Finally, how many young learners in our traditional K-12 system face days of no excitement, fear in the form of dread, and an empty feeling every time they enter the school doors?

I’ll let you decide the answer to that one.

Friday News Roundup tomorrow. Til then. SVB