The Practice of Affective Teaching: A View from Brain Science

In the educational field, the cognitive side of learning usually gets a great deal of attention, but affective factors are always ignored. Recently neuroscience researches have accumulated much knowledge about the relationship between cognition and emotion, which attract educators’ concern. This article aims to glean brain science knowledge about emotions, further recognize the functions of emotions, and relate these to affective teaching to effectively improve students’ learning. The author argues that cognition and emotion deeply interact for overlapping cognitive and emotional brain areas which is quite malleable and influenced by maturation and experience, and that emotions possess motivational, informative, regulative, protective functions, and that learning relies on emotions state, which determines what we pay attention to and what we learn. In conclusion, teachers first eradicate threats, and then involve emotions into students’ learning through affective teaching including modeling emotion exhibition about the learning and the subject, affective processing material, making affective instruction. The future educationists need to strengthen contact with other scientists such as neuroscientists, psychologists, socialists, biologists, to work hard together to shrink the gap between education and neuroscience.