15. The Power of Positive Emotion

1. Intro/thesis — Based on Spencer Kagan's Brain-Friendly Teaching: eliciting positive emotion is one of the easiest, most powerful research-based tools for a brain-friendly classroom (~300 studies support it).
2. Why it matters — Positive emotion broadens students' attention and improves thinking, problem-solving, learning, creativity, and test performance.
3. Music — Use uplifting music/music videos (e.g., "Made By God," "Peace in Christ," LDS youth videos, Christian music/lyric videos).
4. Happy recall — Have students recall a happy/proud/successful memory before tests or tasks to boost performance.
5. Video clips — Share uplifting, inspiring videos (LDS youth videos, "On the Road with Steve Hartman" kindness stories) to spark discussion, including tying kindness to Christ. Sample: 
6. Count your blessings — Simple exercise: have students name blessings to a neighbor.
7. Three wishes for others — Twist the classic genie question to focus wishes on friends rather than themselves.
8. Recalling helping — Have students share a time they helped someone and felt good.
9. Power posing — Have students stand and strike a superhero pose for 10–20 seconds to generate laughter and positive energy.
10. Praise — Use positivity statements and peer praise (e.g., high-fives) to make positive emotion contagious in class.

Transcript

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The power of positive emotion. In his book, Brain-Friendly Teaching by Spencer Kagan, he has an entire section on eliciting positive emotion in our students and the power that can come from positive emotion in a classroom. To start, I'll quote a little bit from his book. He says, "A large body of research converges on one conclusion. Eliciting positive emotion is one of our easiest, most powerful research-based tools to create a brain-friendly classroom. Nearly three hundred research studies demonstrate the eliciting, that eliciting positive emotions improves thinking, problem-solving, health, learning, energy, creativity, friendships, and even test-taking. Most important for us as teachers, when we elicit positive emotions in any way, students have a broader attention and are able to think better. Taking just a few minutes to elicit positive emotions literally makes our students more perceptive and smarter. So in his book, he lists thirty-seven ways to elicit positive emotion. I'm gonna give you five that I think are really powerful just to make it simple. Number one, music. Using music videos such as the Youth Album, Made By God is a, a great one, or Peace in Christ, or you can just search LDS youth videos and find some of the music ones that are super powerful. And I also use Christian music, and some of the Christian music videos, and sometimes I just show the lyrics, videos, but they're very powerful at eliciting emotion. Number two, happy recall recalling a happy event prior to a test is a research-based way to elicit positive emotion and to improve test performance. Before learning tasks, projects, and tests, we can have students take a minute or two to remember any number of positive emotion events. A time they were proud, a time they were happy, a time they felt joy, a time they felt cared for, a time they felt successful. We can ask students to simply remember one of those times, take a few s- minutes to write about that experience or tell a friend about it, and share one of those times using timed pair share. Quote Kagan on that. Number three Video clips. Finding uplifting, inspiring video clips. One of my favorite sources is obviously LDS youth videos, but another favorite source is Showing kindness videos. On the Road with Steve Hartman is an excellent source on YouTube. If you do On the Road Steve Hartman, you will literally find two thousand videos. He's an excellent storyteller, and they're all positive and uplifting and inspiring, and I like to talk about-- use them to talk about Jesus Christ and the kindness that we see in the world. All of that kindness was inspired by Jesus Christ, and we can learn what Christ might do if He were here today. Number four: count your blessings. This could be simple. Turn to your neighbor and have them, name five blessings in their life. Number five: three wishes for others. We often hear the example, if you rubbed a magic genie and had three wishes, what would you wish for? One way to expand this and make it a little bit more meaningful is to say, "If you had three wishes, what would you wish for your friends?" No wishing for extra wishes. Number six, recalling helping. If you just share when was a time that you helped somebody and you felt really good inside doing it. What a great way to elicit positive emotion. And one last one is power posing. Before we do this activity, I'd like everybody to stand up and make a superhero pose, whatever you like for ten, 20 seconds, and just get out some laughs and some giggles and some p-positive emotion. Last, perhaps most importantly, is praise. You will always come up with great ideas. You are a great teammate. The positivity statements like you're awesome. Teaching these to your students, teaching them to high-five their teammates elicits positive emotion. And that positive emotion soon becomes contagious. And everybody loves to be in a place where there is positive emotions. And so these are some examples of ways that we could use positive emotion in our classes. It could just take a minute and bring some positivity to the class. That pr- positive energy, that positive vibe would really, we all like to be around and secretly want That's today's message. You guys are awesome. You're heroes. You're doing a great work, and the Lord loves you. Have a great day.