Hello World

Welcome to my newsletter!

My goals for this newsletter are to share my latest tips, recommendations, and thinking on emotions, motivation, neuroscience, and teaching. I plan to use a lot of bullets and links so it will be easily skimmable, and I’ll toss in photos and recipes and fiction recommendations as I come across them.

I’ll organize these by the themes of my four books, and then one “Incidentally” post, which will be new fiction or recipes or other fun random thoughts that don’t fit elsewhere.

BE THE SPARK - Thoughts on Teaching

I’m honored to be speaking at a few different institutions this May—at Lewis & Clark College’s Teaching Excellence Program about emotions and learning, at TLTCon about both learning environments of compassionate challenge, and at Suffolk University’s Symposium on Innovations in Teaching and Learning about energizing motivation in uncertain times.

I love these sort of events in part because I always feel like I take more away from the table than I bring to it. Here is a great example and a teaching tip to boot—last month I was honored to join Texas State University for a book club Q&A based on The Spark of Learning, and in a conversation about test anxiety one of the attendees shared a research study she had published on the topic. Her name was Kristy Daniel and her paper is here.

In her study, she compared two sections of a large introductory biology course. In one section, students would receive their exam and have ten minutes to talk freely (pencils down) with other students about the content and the questions before taking a stab at the exam themselves. In the other section, there was no pre-exam chat. Intriguingly, the opportunity to check in with fellow students didn’t boost exam grades—they were no different than the other section without the chat—but it did reduce student anxiety and elevate their feelings of confidence. Such a small tweak for such a meaningful effect.

HIVEMIND - On Social Neuroscience & Our Synchronous Selves

Best thing I’ve read in a while on these topics is this review article by Leonie Koban, Tor Wager and others called The self in context: brain systems linking mental and physical health. It is a great example of how the study of social, cognitive, and affective neuroscience has really moved beyond planting flags in discrete structures (“here’s the disgust region of the brain!”) to thinking about interacting systems and circuits.

Plus, it’s really pretty:

MONSTERS - Thoughts on Uncertainty, Anxiety, and Mental Health

This month not one but two large, well-conducted studies suggested further skepticism about a link between screen-time/mobile device usage and adolescent mental health. I’ve been beating this drum for a while, but the evidence just keeps piling up.

EMOTION & MOTIVATION - How to Set Goals

I’m delighted to be joining the wonderful Lani Shiota as co-author on her Emotion text going forward. I have used this text in my Motivation & Emotion course for many years and found it to be the best out there—even though it didn’t have any content specifically on motivation. One of my tasks as new co-author is to expand the motivation content of the book and so I’m reading and writing a lot on goal-setting and instincts and drives and all the rest. Stay tuned for tips and tricks from this research, and please reach out and send me anything great you are reading on these topics.

INCIDENTALLY - Rhubarbian Thoughts

It is spring here in New England and that means asparagus and rhubarb season. A few years ago I ran into a beautiful recipe for rhubarb bread pudding with whisky sauce and lamented on my family Slack that I hadn’t seen rhubarb come in at the grocery stores yet and so couldn’t use the recipe for an upcoming dinner swap with our friends. The very next morning I woke to discover that my mother had sent my brother to my doorstep with a rhubarb plant from her patch, next to a big container of peat and compost from her chickens.

A few years later and now that little plant is a huge bush in my garden and so soon I will be baking that pudding - except that when I went searching for this origin story on Twitter I also found that another season I had successfully found rhubarb and made this Rhubarb Custard Cake by Bon Appetit that was delicious and might need to be repeated. Just look at it:

So now I don’t know. Which should I bake? Let me know in the comments.

As always, if you enjoyed this post, feel free to tell a friend. Or keep in touch on Twitter, check out my essays on my website, or give one of my books a whirl!