 Have a think back to your favorite year at school. What memories stand out? Did you enjoy coming to school every day? Did you feel you belonged when you walked in the classroom? Without a doubt, the relationship you and your classmates had with your teacher and the feeling that was experienced in the classroom were very important factors. The quality of relationships that exists between a teacher and a learner, between the teacher and the class, and between learners, sets the social tone of a classroom. The classroom is a dynamic, highly social environment. And using our knowledge of relationships, emotions, and empathy, we can harness this to enhance a range of cognitive, emotional, and social outcomes for both the learners and the teacher. Now think about what sorts of interactions occur in your classroom. When do they occur? How are interactions used to motivate students for deeper learning? Let's have a look at some different types of interactions. When students are placed in a class, they become a group. The various people within that group, in particular the teacher, can influence the thoughts, feelings, and the behaviors of individuals in this group. If the group shares these thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, then the group will feel more connected, will have a greater rapport, will be more agreeable, and this will mean they'll be more cooperative, they'll experience more positive emotions, and they'll be more likely to achieve success. They'll be more motivated to engage in the learning experiences. They can see it has benefits not just for themselves, but for others as well. When individuals interact with one another and feel this shared sense of connection, they will tend to coordinate their actions so that the acts of one supports the actions of another. What the teacher is doing here in this example is engineering social synchrony between these students. And this is a powerful tool that can be used in the classroom, not just with small groups, but on a larger scale as well. Learners report feeling safer working with people that they know and who they know understand them. Within these safe groups, learners will take calculated risks. They'll contribute ideas and they'll engage in discussions. Modeling pro-social behaviours and deliberately constructing social learning environments in this way motivate students to support one another to achieve a shared sense of understanding and experience. There you go. Yeah, right there, right there. Oh, I wish I could sit still up. Yeah, I'm so happy. Like, I wake up, I check my Facebook. And then I'm so excited to do it. Oh, it's there. I was just going to check it during school. Yeah. You check it during school. Oh! Not during lessons though. No, no. So I'm not talking, not just Facebook, I'm talking Instagram. 7 to 11. What's that other thing called? Snapchat. Anything like that. 14 hours a day. Oh, I don't know. But please, what about Instagram? Instagram, I'm just looking at the photo. It's not interacting. Yeah, but you're looking at it though. You're looking at it. Interacting. So just someone in like the more you talk, the higher the number goes. And then basically you get sort of like rewards or something like that. You can get like this golden heart or like... Oh, is it like, you know, those games you can play that are connected to Facebook? So that if you're, you know... I don't know anything about Facebook, but probably. No, but it's so Snapchat. It's like a challenge basically. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty much like... Right, excellent. It's this long inside. Children of this generation are starting at a younger age. Starting to use social media at a younger age? For a longer period of time. Yep. Cool, so we're just concentrating on what's happening. Not the why it's happening yet. Social media. What I'm putting... It's part of the government, so I include it as the government. Just government or government? Government and the government is in the same box. Yeah, yep. Or even in the same box, government, e-safety commissioner. Do we have to fill up all the boxes? Just go with the perspectives. The government's making the stitches, government and students. Yep. Do you have the general... I'm going to give you the second part to this article in a minute, and then you might... I'm going to ask you how it's changed. If it changes. So what is happening when this teacher is interacting with these students and when the students are interacting with each other? When we interact with another person, we have a conscious or unconscious response to the person and to the interaction, and this response determines how emotionally connected we feel with that person. Making an emotional connection with a student demonstrates to that student that the teacher gets them, that they understand what the student is thinking and feeling, and this increases their sense of trust in and respect for the teacher. The learner feels safe in that interaction, which increases their sense of belonging in and relatedness to the class and to the teacher, which is essential if they're going to take academic risks. This connection motivates the young person to be engaged with who they are learning from, which will enable them to then become engaged in what they are learning and how they are learning it. We notice that the students start to mimic some behaviors of the teacher. This is known as behavioral contagion and occurs usually unconsciously when we start to connect with the person we're interacting with. These behaviors then trigger a physiological response, so the students start to literally feel what the other students are feeling through a process of emotional contagion and they become emotionally connected or synchronized. New wearable technologies are helping us to measure conscious and unconscious emotional states in the classroom. States of arousal such as excitement, stress, anxiety or boredom can be detected in learners by measuring their electrodermal activity or the sweat response in their skin. These measures can be used to provide an indication of the levels of physiological arousal. A number of studies have been conducted that also look at the neurological activity that occurs when people start to connect or synchronize in these behavioral and emotional ways. And what has been found is that interacting partners who report feeling connected to another person also show mimicry at the neurological level. When we observe others' actions or emotions, the same neural states in their brain are mirrored or emulated in our own brain as a form of shared experience. We come to understand others' intentions and goals through this neural emulation or mirroring process. Interestingly, these appear to be highly automatic process in the brain that leads us to share some of the emotion that we observe in others. Our brains are wired so that we literally feel some of their joy and their pain. And that's thought to be the biological process that allows us to understand and empathize with the people around us. Importantly, these neural mirroring processes in the brain are strongly influenced by the social relationships we have with the others that we observe. So mirrored brain activity is much stronger when we're observing people who we perceive as part of our own group or family or even our own race than for unfamiliar people. This also fits with well-known research on social bonding, showing that we tend to imitate people we like and we tend to like people who imitate us so that this form of emotional contagion leading to shared experience also drives positive social relationships. In the neuroscience lab, we usually examine these mirroring processes with MRI brain imaging. When we put people in the MRI scanner and show them pictures or video clips of others in distress or pain, we actually see patterns of brain activity for negative emotions similar to what we would see if they were experiencing distress or pain themselves. We've been studying these effects of social group membership on these mirroring brain processes and importantly, we show they're not fixed but they change with experience and learning. As we gain more experience with previously unfamiliar people, we start to show more neural mirroring activity in the brain when observing those people's actions and emotions. In school classrooms, of course, we can't use MRI scanners and measure children's brain activity directly but we conduct research with wristbands that detect changes in the children's physiological arousal states such as heart rate and skin sweating responses that are driven by the brain. We can then examine synchrony between the children's biological responses to events in the class when groups of students show the same physiological responses at the same time as a measure of their shared experience. So social bonding is the result of behavioral and therefore neural synchrony and this sense of connection and belonging is foundational to motivating students to engage with the how, what and who of the learning experience. The unconscious and conscious factors that impact a learner's sense of belonging in the classroom and therefore their motivation for deep learning is directly impacted by the social and cultural context in which that learning experience takes place. As educators, we need to be aware of the conscious and unconscious experiences and indicators of social connection in the classroom and mindful of how we can be using it to enhance the teaching and learning experience.