Introduction

Any teacher, educator, trainer, speaker, coach, in short anyone who engages in a process that consists of teaching someone to learn will ultimately ask himself these key questions :

How do we learn?
Why do some people struggle to learn while others learn easily?
How can we maximize the learning process of those who learn?

Without a doubt, the most troubling question at present remains, why are there so many adolescents who drop out of school? In the United States, for instance, about 25percent of 13 year-old students do not complete their high school education and the differences between states and cities are huge. In public schools in New York and Washington the percentage reaches 45 percent. Overall one out of every four American children will drop out of the school system without having acquired basic knowledge . Here in Quebec, the percentage of students who will never graduate during their lifetime was 17.5 percent in 2000-2001 while the school dropout rate was 11.4 percent among 15-19 year olds, 22.4 percent among 20-24 year olds, and 26.4 percent among 25-29 year olds in 1998.

In psychology, the term ‘learning’ is defined as “a relatively permanent modification of the behavior or the behavioral potential resulting from the exercise or the experience that was lived “. But during the education process, ‘learning’ refers much more to the acquisition of knowledge in the classrooms, to the acquisition of practical and technical skills, namely those that are linked to our professional life or to the acquisition of our life’s habits such as discipline, responsibility, and motivation. In fact, ‘learning’ is defined during the education process as “the acquisition and integration of new knowledge in order to reuse them functionally “.

In all educational environments, the learning process comes mainly from a formal educational approach, so much so that a good learning process is often linked to a good teaching method. In fact, if a deficiency is observed among our students, we automatically question our teaching methods. For the past few decades, tens or hundreds of teaching methods have been invented, experimented with and, unfortunately, very often put on the back burner. Each time a new method was introduced, its proponent believed that they found THE method that would bypass or solve all the learning difficulties encountered by the students. And how many times has this situation repeated itself?

Efforts, in this sense, are quite prevalent. A teacher who questions his methods and approaches is undoubtedly very sound and sane, to say the least. Nevertheless, it is possible that the questions one is asking, however pertinent, may be incomplete, i.e., that they only cover one aspect of the entire mechanism involved in the learning process. What we realized is that a high percentage of the teaching approaches, and consequently their evaluations, are essentially cognitive. The reason for this is simply because it is said that the learning process is fundamentally cognitive, i.e., that it basically lies on activities involving the treatment of information . Therefore, we can logically conclude that in such instances where a student is struggling to learn the problem must be cognitive in nature.

Several clues, scientific and intuitive, lead us to believe that emotional skills can explain not just a large part of the learning difficulties encountered but also the learning successes as well. Other researchers come to the same conclusion. In fact, in the monograph « Understanding the brain, toward a new learning science » from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), we can read the following :

«In the past, when discussing goals for education, more discussion centered on how to achieve cognitive mastery through reading, writing and mathematical skills. However, scientists are beginning to realize through experiments what educators have seen in schools; emotions are, in part, responsible for the overall cognitive mastery present in children and adults and therefore need to be addressed more fully. Contemporary cognitive neuroscience provides the tools for performing fine-grained componential analyses of the processing that underlies specific tasks. Such analyses have traditionally focused on cognitive aspects of learning. Similar analyses on the emotional or affective areas have been neglected, as they have not yet been recognized for their role in successful cognitive functions. As such, information in this domain is sparse and incomplete. Lack of measurement and theoretical foundation limits progress of the study of emotional regulation in educational practice ».