(Notes to a presentation given for AJŠ on 18.10.2025 in Prague)
Emotions and group emotional states play a major role in the learning process and they can be harnessed to enhance the learning experience. This is true in the simple sense that creating a positive learning atmosphere among a group is the main key to teaching effectively. I believe this strongly and I also believe that the ability to create a certain atmosphere among a group of people is the most important skill that teachers can learn from actors and other entertainers. In this blog however (and in the workshop I gave at the AJŠ conference in Prague, which this blog is based on) I want to focus on some principles and methods that teachers can use to intentionally harness emotionality in their lessons.
A dynamic way to work with roleplays
Imagine a typical two-person roleplay with Person A and Person B having to work through a problematic situation.
Typically the teacher will set up a roleplay of this kind, the participants will have a fairly lively verbal interaction, and they will probably enjoy doing the roleplay, especially if it is a dynamic situation. What they will nearly never do, however, is move their bodies or act the situation out physically. On the contrary, people who had an open body posture before the activity starts will actually close up and adopt a thinking posture to do the roleplay.
The way I like to deal with roleplays is to ask the pairs or groups doing a roleplay to act the situation out twice. The first time they act it out using exaggerated physical gestures and no words at all, like an old-style melodramatic silent movie. Then I ask them to play it out again, I ask them to keep the large gestures, but tell them that this time they can add words, ideally not too many words.
Doing roleplays this way with an emphasis on physicalizing the communication process really helps to make them realistic and enjoyable. This is because the body movement ensures that the emotions are directly engaged.
Movement and emotion
There is a two-way relationship between movement and emotion. If we are emotionally connected to what we are saying then we will be moving. Think of people having an animated conversation over the phone. They will be gesticulating even though the person they are talking to can not see them, the movement occurs naturally as a result of their emotion. But it also works the other way around. If we act a situation out physically then we become emotionally connected to that situation. That is what we see happening in example of the roleplay above.
When students act out a roleplay without physicalizing the situation first, they treat it like an intellectual problem, they think only of the words that they need to use to describe the situation and they close up their bodies. They will typically speak a lot, but the delivery of the speech will be fairly monotone and robotic, because they are not emotionally connected to what they are saying.
When they have to physicalize silently before being allowed to use words the situation plays out in a very different way. Students use less words, but they tend to speak with a lot better phrasing and intonation. This is because the words are not the focus of an intellectual problem any more, they are part of a more complex act of communication, which is the role that words have in real life.
The version where students play the situation out physically as an exaggerated mime is also a lot of fun, I can not remember ever have done it and not have people laughing. Movement not only engages emotions, it can induce laughter.
Roleplays are are often set up in a way that negates their dramatic side and turns them into a passive talking exercise. This is a shame as they represent a great opportunity to introduce movement and thereby emotion into the classroom. The emotional element of acting out a situation has a positive knock-on effect to other aspects of teaching, pronunciation and intonation are improved and the lesson as a whole will be more dynamic and memorable and fun than it would be otherwise.
Can you teach empathy?
I will keep this big topic short here by giving my personal answer, which is, no, you can not teach empathy, but you can do things to prepare the soil where empathy can grow. Some people have trouble understanding or caring about the feelings of others, one possible reason for this is they may have been brought up in an environment where feelings and emotions were not openly discussed. They may not be familiar with the vocabulary of emotion and may even have trouble recognizing and describing their own emotions. I do not see a quick fix for this, but one thing we can do as teachers is make a point to include discussion of feeling and emotion in our classes. If there is a picture we can ask questions like …. How do these people feel? Or How would you feel in this situation? This helps the language of emotion to become normalized and that is a step in the right direction.
Music and emotion
Nearly all films and even theatre productions have a soundtrack of music and sounds that create atmosphere and support the action. Music is also an immediate and effective way to bring emotion and atmosphere into the classroom.
Most teachers use music and have activities with songs, but it is worth thinking more about how and when you want to use music in the classroom. When I do workshop sessions for teachers I usually have house music to set the tone as people are coming in. You could do this with your class, you could let them choose the music for the next lesson as a reward?
You can do simple activities where you play bits of music and ask the class to name the emotions that they connect with them. This can be a great way to introduce famous classical music. You could turn it around and ask your students to find music from their collections that correspond to certain emotions.
In our workshop I did one of my very favourite activities called Using Music To Create Film Scenarios. I have another blog article dedicated to this activity here.
A note on creativity
I believe that the very best way to motivate students and create a positive atmoshere in the classroom is to encourage them to be creative. I have other articles with activities which encourage creativity, but here I want to point out that the activity Using Music To Create Film Scenarios and the practice of silently acting out roleplay situations both fit this pattern. They leave participants with a satisfying feeling of having been creative and that in itself generates positive emotions.
Just being together generates emotion
Finally, perhaps the most important thing that a teacher does to generate emotion with their students in the classroom is to just be in the same space with them. This is something that happens whether we like it or not. We can not stop it from happening, but we can influence the kind of emotion that is generated and we can decide if we are going to lean into the human relationship side of teaching, or downplay it.
When we spend time with friends it is usually (not always) a positive and affirming experience that makes us feel good. When we spend time with somebody that we feel does not like us, it can have the opposite effect, it can make us closed and defensive, we feel that do not want to be with them. While a teacher is not friends with their students, and should not try to be friends, they can make it clear that they are happy to be with them and that they care about the process of helping them to learn. This should be enough to generate positive emotions in the class and that in turn should make them easier to teach. If your class is the lesson that students actively look forward to when they look at their schedules, then most of the battle is won.
