 Hi, this is Tracy Tegahame Espinosa, and this is a video on the Tenant of Challenge and Threat. Today we're going to look at these pairs of seemingly different concepts, challenge, threat, motivation, achievement, effort, and performance, but really try to look at them more on a continuum. They're not really opposites, but they actually are a continuum of emotion and that we want to explore a little bit further together. Challenge and Threat is one of these 21 tenants, and the reason it's so complex is because there's a huge range of human variation. What challenge is one person is not necessarily a challenge to the person sitting right next to him. In fact, it may be considered a threat. So how do we really define this challenge is very interesting because different social contexts create different types of learning motivators for different types of people. So challenge is experienced when there's an opportunity for self-growth and in which there are coping strategies and scaffolding without which the exact same situation can be considered a threat. So the big idea in general is pretty much the Goldilocks effect, right? Human beings like things that are a little bit more difficult than they can do on their own. It's kind of like you don't want the bed that's too hard, you don't want the bed that's too soft, you want the bed that's just right, or the porch that's too cold or the porch that's too hot, you want the porch that's just right, right? So this Goldilocks effect basically means that learning is enhanced by challenge but repressed by threat. And this is unique to the individual because we determine threat based on prior experience and says no to people have the same identical experiences. Threat perception is technically unique, though what we just saw about faces and the perception of fearful expressions, for example, is universal among all humans. And what's so interesting in looking at this these days with up-to-date technology, before we used to just speculate that emotive or psychological aspects of learning existed, but they were very unmiliable because we couldn't really measure and compare things. Now with the help of technology we can actually see how the brain reacts to different emotive states to threat or to fear or to joy or happiness or surprise as well as how social contagion can take over it and brains can actually get in sync based on one person's emotional state and work together to resolve problems. So we now know that this is not just in the psychological realm, but we could actually see these things in brain scans. And since everything that we feel is generated in the brain, so everything ranging from pleasure to horror to stress to fear to excitement to joy, everything is generated in the brain and is measurable pretty much through chemicals, the neurotransmitters that are emitted that make us have that emotion. Now what's so interesting is that emotions are not the same thing as feelings, which we'll talk about a bit more in class. The idea is that emotion is something that is inevitable, it's something of the body, whereas the feeling is what we decide to experience based on those chemicals that are emitted. The very interesting thing about the concept of challenge and threat is that certain neurotransmitters are better or aid or facilitate learning while others actually impede the neural connections that are being made at that moment because the balance of chemicals needs to be just right and threat can keep those connections from being made. So again, back to this Goldilocks effect, manageable challenges. Humans don't like things that are boring, right? So we like things that are slightly more challenging or what is manageable to each individual. And those things are definitely favorable to learning. So the key is as far as being a teacher is concerned, how do we get to that balance, right? That perfect balance of challenging students without making them feel threatened. So as mentioned in prior classes, right? All new learning passes through the filter of prior experience and all learning occurs through your senses, right? So you have sensory perception. You receive information about your world, right? Either through what you smell or see or hear or touch. This goes up to the base of your brain. First stop is pretty much in the amygdala, basically a double check. This is a key hub for memory formation related to motive states. So is this something I should be fearful of or worry about? But less than a split second later, it goes frontal lobe and then back to the hippocampus. It's kind of a double check to confirm the information. So we know that all new memory passes through these filters of these key hubs for memory before it actually latches on to something already existing or seeks out to create a whole new connection. This is why threat perception is really high on the radar. If anything should threaten the body, which houses the brain, the brain is going to send a signal that says, run, get out of there, right? So threat perception is kind of low hanging fruit as far as reception is concerned in the brain and is perceived very quickly. As soon as the body comes into contact with any new sensory information that might indicate a need to react fearfully to that threat. So we think about all this related to this big concept of motivation and achievement. Since we will be talking about motivation in another video, what I want to just point out is one big thing. Related to motivation and achievement is that the more motivated you are, basically the more time you spend on task. And this is really clear, for example, related to teacher clarity. When a teacher clearly identifies the task to be done, this instructional immediacy being able to react immediately to students' queries or concerns about what am I supposed to be able to do, right? This enhances the motivation for learning. So the clarity can be achieved through simple vocabulary, precision of words, or any other interactions that they have with a student. Instructional immediacy has to do with the nonverbal communication, the way that we choose to time our interventions or interactions with the students. And that motivation for learning then enhances the time on task. Because students feel self-motivated to get the task done, they actually decide to spend more time on task. More time on task speeds up the efficiency with which they can learn something new. It doesn't really change the steps in the process, but it does make it faster. And finally, this last concept that has to do with effort and performance. And this is something known since, thank you, No8, the Yerkes-Stadtsin Law, was this concept that your brain has to spend a lot of energy. There's effort that goes into learning new things, right? And we can talk about this in terms of stress, the kind of a stress, for example, right? So when we have this point of peak arousal, we're actually experiencing what's called u-stress. This is actually very positive. This is actually a good stress. We need some kind of stress to be able to push us to that peak performance. But just a little bit beyond that, and we tip, and this becomes distress. And when we're in distress, that challenge becomes a threat. And we no longer are optimally performing, right? So this idea of challenge and threat is very much tied to the idea of effort and performance. And the key idea is how do you get to this sweet spot, this Goldilocks moment here, right? When you've got just the right amount of energy, you're engaged, you really want to learn something. And this is where you are actually performing at your best, right? But a little bit too much, and then it becomes a threat. And when it becomes a threat, you begin to have poorer performance over time. And this is precisely why the way the teacher chooses to teach, the activities they choose to use, are so, so important to the learning process. The difficulty is that since challenge and threat are incredibly individual, it's very hard to know where the tipping point is gonna be for each kid in your class. The same activity may cause one kid a high amount of stress, put him in distress, and not allow him to learn. Whereas the same thing might work very well for another group of kids who have a different perception of threat based on their own prior experiences. So a teacher's choice of activities is really important because it determines that really key sweet spot of a Goldilocks effect, right? The big problem is in a class of 20 or 30 kids, it's very, very difficult to keep your finger on the pulse of exactly where each kid is. So you cannot just simply generically say, this is gonna be a motivating activity. Because to some kids it will be a challenge, to other kids it will be a threat. So the final big idea in understanding that this is one of the tenets is that learning is influenced by both challenge and threat as perceived by the learner, not the message sent, but the message received, okay? So what one person might find a challenge, another would find a threat. So we have to be very, very sensitive to that as teachers and realize that some kids may be tipped by activities that we thought were not gonna be difficult for anybody. We can find that some kids may actually find that too much of a threat and will not learn. So this really pushes us to think, this is really one of the main reasons that we can justify the need for differentiation in the classroom is that different kids are going to perceive different types of challenges and threats based on their prior experience. So I'm really looking forward to talking with you more about challenge and threat when we get together in the live class. Please come with a lot of great questions. Looking forward to seeing you.