Attachment-Based Teaching
Builds secure classrooms using attachment theory and social neuroscience.
Cozolino applies social neuroscience and attachment research to the classroom, arguing that teaching is a relationship before it is a transfer of content. He reads the human brain as a social organ shaped for small-group belonging, and treats the modern schoolroom as a setting that often works against that inheritance. Learning depends on the regulation, motivation, and plasticity that follow from feeling safely connected to a teacher and to peers.
From that premise he sets out how educators can build classrooms organised around belonging, group cohesion, and the repair of ruptured connection, drawing on studies of stress, memory, and emotional regulation rather than on curriculum theory.
For a clinician who works with young people, or who thinks about how learning and relationship intertwine, it offers a neurobiological account of why attuned adults change developmental outcomes, and a vocabulary linking what happens in a consulting room to what happens in a school. First published in 2014, it belongs to Norton's social neuroscience of education series.
About the author
Louis Cozolino
Louis Cozolino is an American clinical psychologist and Professor of Psychology at Pepperdine University's Graduate School of Education and Psychology in Los Angeles, where he has taught since 1986. He holds a PhD in clinical psychology from UCLA and a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard. His work connects neuroscience with psychotherapy, attachment and human relationships, and he is the author of The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy. Alongside teaching, he maintains a clinical and consulting practice in Los Angeles.
Details
- 2014
- W. W. Norton
- W. W. Norton
- 288
- 9780393709049