According to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), firefighters respond to 3,230 school-related fires over the course of the year in the United States. This number represents situations in which actual fires are present, not how many times they respond to a fire alarm. With roughly 100,000 school buildings in the United States, this means there is a 3% chance that any school will experience an actual fire each year.
I have to admit, that number seems higher than I expected when I started looking into the statistics. Then I remembered the scorch marks in our staff room where a donated microwave burned a hole in the kitchen counter. I also vividly remember catching a science experiment on fire in my chemistry class. Luckily, disaster was averted and I was able to extinguish the blaze before the teacher noticed. I did, however, get caught using a bunsen burner in an inappropriate manner my junior year. I thought it was creative expression. My teacher reported it as vandalism.
Now that I’m a teacher, this helps me remember why students and staff members are required to go through a designated number of emergency training drills each school year. Students practice fire drills dozens or hundreds of times so that they know exactly what to do in the unlikely, but potential emergency fire event. Yet, despite years of training and practice, whenever a fire alarm goes off in my classroom the same thing happens. My students do not orderly exit the classroom and walk towards their designated rally point. Nor do they panic and dive screaming out the windows. They all do the exact same thing every single time.They look at me.
This moment is a perfect example of the need for co-regulation in the classroom. During a fire drill, or in any number of unexpected events that may happen, students will look to the teacher to see how they should react. Is the teacher panicking? No. Then it’s not a big deal. Is the teacher running out the door? It’s definitely time to leave.
But, it’s not just moments of confusion that students look to the teacher to gauge the emotional temperature of a moment. In fact, it is often the teacher who is cultivating the climate of the classroom and shaping how the students feel whenever they walk in the door.
The ability to understand the emotions of others begins early and develops rapidly between the ages of three and five years old. By the time a child enters preschool, they are interpreting the emotional states of teachers, parents and other children. As they mature, children experience a wider range of complex situations and emotions and continually learn and analyze what they mean. Additionally, neurological development adds additional cognitive resources to this task. While it seems like a simple matter of observation, the ability to understand and react to another person’s emotions is a complex process involving many different parts of the brain:
The amygdala reacts to physical cues such as facial expression and tone of voice and decides if there is a threat or not.
The right posterior superior temporal sulcus is activated when interpreting facial expression in others.
The prefrontal cortex can differentiate and infer emotional state from visual stimuli in 100-120 milliseconds, which is as fast or faster than the ability to recognize the object itself.
Research indicates that the insular cortex may be responsible for creating similar emotion stats as those which are observed in others.
The human brain continually attunes to the emotional background of a situation and uses that information to adjust its own emotional state.
Additionally, students are looking to teachers for feedback on their own behaviors, consciously or not. A stern glance communicates that now is not the time to be talking. A smile of encouragement creates a sense of safety when responding to a question. These acts of co-regulation are continually shaping how a student not only feels, but how they act within the classroom.
When a student, or anyone, is placed in a new or unfamiliar environment, or presented with new information or a challenging circumstance, they will instinctively read the room for caution or validation. This neurological process is a complex interaction of different areas in the brain develop with time and practice. It often falls on the teacher to be the anchor that holds the emotional ship in place, or the executive function that directs behaviors and actions in the classroom. Without that guidance, students must learn how to respond to new and different situations with varying degrees of success. The trial and error of experiences is less likely to fall to extremes if there is a calm and experienced adult in place to guide students through difficult or confusing situations.
Emotional states are not individual processes alone, but are communal experiences shared between people and can be tempered by modeling a less reactive response. Behaviors are not performed devoid of any influence or feedback and actions can be reconsidered when seen through a different perspective. And maybe, if my amygdala had noticed my teachers widening eyes and tightening lips, or if my right posterior superior temporal sulcus had correctly interpreted those expressions as anger, I could have avoided detention my junior year.
Boyatzis, C. J., Chazan, E., & Ting, C. Z. (1993). Preschool Children’s Decoding of Facial Emotions. The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 154(3), 375–382. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221325.1993.10532190
Spunt RP, Adolphs R. The neuroscience of understanding the emotions of others. Neurosci Lett. 2019 Feb 6;693:44-48. doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2017.06.018. Epub 2017 Jun 15. PMID: 28624265; PMCID: PMC5732077.
Kawasaki, H., Adolphs, R., Kaufman, O. et al. Single-neuron responses to emotional visual stimuli recorded in human ventral prefrontal cortex. Nat Neurosci 4, 15–16 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/82850
Nummenmaa, Hirvonen, Parkkola, Hietanen. Is emotional contagion special? An fMRI study on neural systems for affective and cognitive empathy. NeuroImage. Volume 43, Issue 3. 571-580. 15 November 2008
Photo credit: Students take a walk to practice evacuation (U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Carissa Wolff)
