Authors: Glenn Whitman and Dr. Ian Kelleher.
When we first encountered Dan Willingham’s simple model of learning in Why Students Don’t Like School?, it was transformative. Here was something every teacher desperately needed: a clear, research-based framework that helped demystify how learning actually happens. It helped us understand the need to reduce cognitive load, eliminate attention contagions, and embed retrieval practice, thinking hard, and metacognition in our classes. It helped us identify and address ‘choke points’ that obstruct student learning and success. Since then, there has been an explosion of models that rework the core idea to make it even more user-friendly for teachers (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Various common models of how learning happens
But that model—rooted in the groundbreaking 1968 Atkinson-Shiffrin work (see Figure 2)—was created in an era before fMRI machines, before decades of research on how the brain learns and works, and, crucially, before we understood one of the most important discoveries in learning science: emotion and cognition systems in the brain are inseparably intertwined.
Figure 2: The Atkinson-Shiffrin Multi-Store Model (1968)
The Traditional Model: Still Powerful, But Incomplete
The traditional simple model of learning remains elegant in its simplicity. Students’ senses are constantly bombarded by incoming information from the environment—taste, touch, smell, sight, hearing. It’s way more than any brain can process. We selectively attend to what seems worthy or relevant, moving it into our limited active working memory—this is the role of our attention system. Our active working memory is a crucial “mixing bowl” where sensory inputs combine with retrieved long-term memories—experiences, skills, and knowledge which have been stored for future use. Through thinking and processing, some information gets encoded back into our changed long-term memory. That’s learning.
Teachers have always known this process doesn’t happen in a cognitive vacuum isolated from where a student is, physically and emotionally, right now. We’ve instinctively understood that how students feel affects how their brains work. Now neuroscience has caught up with teacher wisdom.
The Game-Changing Insight: Emotion and Cognition are Inseparable
Modern brain imaging reveals what teachers have long suspected: emotional and cognitive systems aren’t separate—they’re physiologically intertwined. Emotion directly affects attention, memory recall and storage, decision-making, and executive functions. How we feel affects how our brain works and how we learn. This isn’t a fluffy “nice to have” consideration—it’s a hardwired part of our brain that is essential to learning itself.
We wanted to convey the vital importance of this insight to our St. Andrew’s colleagues and to the teachers, schools, districts, and even students with whom the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning works around the world. It led us to develop what we call the Enhanced Simple Model of Learning—one that honors the cognitive psychology foundation while integrating what we now know about how the brain actually works (see Figure 3).
Figure 3: The CTTL’s Enhanced Simple Model of Learning (2026)
Three Layers That Change Everything
We’ve encircled the traditional Simple Model of Learning with three dynamic, interconnected layers:
Layer 1: Academic and Social Belonging A student’s sense of belonging has some of the largest effect sizes in education research. This isn’t about being “nice”—it’s about brain chemistry. When students feel they belong academically and socially, their brains are optimized for the attention, memory, decision making, and executive functions that learning requires.
Layer 2: Physical and Emotional Safety Safety isn’t just about school security, it’s about the neurological state that allows learning to occur—it’s about brain chemistry that affects whether learning happens. When students feel emotionally and physically safe, their brains can dedicate resources to higher-order thinking rather than threat detection.
Layer 3: Lived Experiences Every student enters our classrooms carrying their unique story in their metaphorical backpack. These lived experiences don’t just provide context—they literally shape how the brain processes new information and forms memories.
We designed these as wavy, flexible rings that encircle the traditional Simple Model of Learning because they’re dynamic, interconnected, and—most importantly—within our influence as educators.
Why This Matters for Your Practice
Understanding this Enhanced Simple Model of Learning transforms how we create classroom environments, design instruction, create assessments, deliver feedback, and build relationships. When we greet students by name, provide what David Yeager calls “wise feedback,” or thoughtfully scaffold learning, we’re not just being caring teachers—we’re optimizing our students’ brain chemistry for learning. Belonging interventions have some of the largest effect sizes and most durable impact of any strategy a teacher or school could try. This shouldn’t surprise us!
And here’s the good news: as teachers, we’re uniquely positioned to influence all three layers. We can increase students’ sense of social and academic belonging, feelings of emotional and physical safety, and belief in how much their lived experiences and unique story matter by being intentional in how we design instruction, build relationships, and create our learning environments. By making the decision to do this with intention or leave it to chance, we shape whether students’ brains are primed for learning—or not.
From Insight to Action
We love teaching, supporting, and challenging students. The role of the human teacher is critical to setting these conditions for learning—and always will be. The research from Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, David Yeager, Zaretta Hammond, John Krownapple, Floyd Cobb, Nicole Furlonge, Greg Walton, Pamela Cantor, Geoffrey Cohen, Claude Steele and others has shown us that the enhanced model isn’t just theoretically sound—it has the potential to be powerful in practice.
When we started teaching History and Science in the 1990s, we certainly weren’t thinking about the emotion-cognition connection. But integrating this understanding has been transformative—for our instructional design, our relationships with students, and most importantly, for the learning well-being, and mindset outcomes of the students we love working with every day.
This is what the CTTL’s Enhanced Simple Model of Learning has done for us. We look forward to hearing what it does for you.
What resonates most with your teaching experience? How might understanding these three layers change your approach to lesson design or classroom culture? Share your thoughts and questions—we learn best in community.