Stress

Every year that goes by, I find myself increasingly worried about the amount of stress that students are under–and the impact of that stress on their health and well-being. A recent New York Times article by Benoit Denizet-Lewis focused on the increasing number of students in high schools and colleges who suffer from severe anxiety. From that article:

In its annual survey of students, the American College Health Association found a significant increase — to 62 percent in 2016 from 50 percent in 2011 — of undergraduates reporting “overwhelming anxiety” in the previous year.

When I first started teaching, I would often blame the parents. And certainly I've heard from plenty of students who feel a lot of (undue) pressure from their parents to succeed. But more and more, the parents I meet are not the primary source of anxiety; rather, the students are putting this pressure on themselves. From that same New York Times article:

It’s tempting to blame helicopter parents with their own anxiety issues for that pressure (and therapists who work with teenagers sometimes do), but several anxiety experts pointed to an important shift in the last few years. “Teenagers used to tell me, ‘I just need to get my parents off my back,’ ” recalls Madeline Levine, a founder of Challenge Success, a Stanford University-affiliated nonprofit that works on school reform and student well-being. “Now so many students have internalized the anxiety. The kids at this point are driving themselves crazy.”

It's not just anxiety or depression–there are many ways in which stress impacts students' physical and emotional wellbeing. From a 2015 article in The Atlantic by Alexandra Ossola:

But too much stress has many effects on the body and mind, [Mary] Alvord says. In the short term it can cause anxiety; over long periods of time, elevated levels of stress hormones can degrade the immune system, cause heart problems, exacerbate respiratory and gastrointestinal issues, and bring on chronic anxiety and depression. That’s bad for anyone, but it can be especially bad for high schoolers... And since everyone has a different psychological capacity for stress, it’s hard to know when a student is pushed to the point of degrading his or her health.

As educators, we can't fix all these issues, but we have to be attentive to them and do what we can to help our students succeed without sacrificing their physical, mental, or emotional health. As writer (and writing teacher) John Warner puts it:

Increasingly, I think there’s a barrier I haven’t previously considered that needs addressing if my students are going to succeed: anxiety... We need to build a pedagogy that removes some measure of that anxiety and that allows students to practice–and see the benefits of–resiliency.

And you don't have to take my word for it. Ask the students, as they're acutely aware of the different stressors in their lives. In 2015, a junior at Palo Alto High School wrote about "the sorrows of young Palo Altans," and much of it sounded very familiar to me. Ms. Walworth may have only been a junior in high school, but I can't say it any better than she: "Effective education does not have to correlate to more stress."

So what do we do?

Earlier this spring, the New York Times covered some attempts to address this issue in Lexington, Mass.:

Elementary school students now learn breathing exercises and study how the brain works and how tension affects it. New rules in the high school limit homework. To decrease competition, there are no class rankings and no valedictorians and salutatorians. In town, there are regular workshops on teen anxiety and college forums designed to convince parents that their children can succeed without the Ivy Leagues.

There's a trend to say that schools should focus on teaching "grit," but to quote John Warner again, "Simply demanding greater resiliency isn’t going to work. We don’t badger people suffering from depression to be happier." I have little patience for teachers who justify policies that exist primarily to cause stress by saying, "I have to teach them a lesson," as if by simply living in a state of anxiety or stress for long enough is enough to help them learn to cope. As Alfie Kohn writes:

But people don’t really get better at coping with unhappiness because they were deliberately made unhappy when they were young. In fact, it is experience with success and unconditional acceptance that helps one deal constructively with later deprivation. Imposing competition or standardized tests or homework on children just because other people will do the same to them when they’re older is about as sensible as saying that, because there are lots of carcinogens in the environment, we should feed kids as many cancer-causing agents as possible while they’re small to get them ready.

So the key is to give students some experiences where they feel challenged, while maintaining an environment that is unconditionally supportive. Alfie Kohn again writes about the importance of "unconditional teaching":

One study found that students who felt unconditionally accepted by their teachers were more likely to be genuinely interested in learning and to enjoy challenging academic tasks—as opposed to just doing things because they had to and preferring easier assignments at which they knew they would be successful (Makri-Botsari, 2001). To provide this unconditional support, we must actively oppose the policies that get in the way, such as those that encourage us to value children on the basis of their academic standing—or, worse, merely on the basis of their test scores.

Mr. Denizet Lewis' piece spends some time discussing the use of exposure therapy, an important piece of cognitive-behavioral therapy for those suffering from anxiety. We teachers are not clinicians, of course, but those same principles could perhaps inform how we aim to challenge students while still supporting them unconditionally. How can we help students have challenging experiences, while still making it clear to them that they are safe?

If teachers are challenging our students, stretching them to try new experiences, learn new skills, and think in new ways, it's not inherently bad that they feel some stress or anxiety about the process; those moments of discomfort can be where the growth happens. At the same time, we teachers can make sure that students feel entirely supported throughout that process. For example, do my classroom policies make students feel stress or anxiety about valuable things, like trying to write the best paper they can, or do I cause them to feel stress about extraneous details like unnecessary deadlines? Many times I worry that the entire process of assigning grades to student work is counter-productive to this unconditional support, but if grades are a necessary evil, how can I minimize the damage? I can say to my students, "Don't worry about grades," but if only the students with the highest GPAs are recognized, what message does that send?

I have my own experiences with anxiety, and my heart goes out for these kids who find themselves feeling overwhelmed and helpless. Life is challenging enough, and if we in schools make it unnecessarily difficult for our students, that's not some kind of vaccine that will protect them later. We can't make their world completely free of stressors, nor should that be the goal. But I do think we have a duty to support them–in many cases, better than we have done.

Imagining a Class without Grades

I have complained before about grading. The thing is, the more I do it (and as an administrator, I am now responsible for tracking the grades of over 700 students each year), the more flaws I see in the entire process.

In a recent article in The Atlantic, Ashley Lamb-Sinclair highlights this issue. I want to quote the entire article, but please just go read it. It begins:

At the beginning of this school year, my colleagues and I decided to avoid giving the sophomores in our English classes any grades for six weeks. Research shows that providing students with a number or letter in addition to quality comments prevents them from authentically reflecting. Quantitative grades also diminish student interest in learning, reduce academic risk taking, and decrease the quality of thinking. But beyond academics, as teachers, we saw the negative impact grades made on our students’ mental and emotional health.

The article is full of links to research that supports her experiment, and I have done my own share of reading on the topic (I'd recommend anything by Alfie Kohn on the topic, starting here). Personally, I would love to rid my classroom of grades, freeing myself and my students for authentic feedback. As it is, I sometimes try and trick students into actually paying attention to my feedback and to their learning, by giving them comments without the grade attached, asking them to assess themselves or their peers, and other strategies. And while these are all fine, they are not much more than Band-Aids. At the end of the day, students often care far more about the letter grade on their report card than the feedback I've provided over the semester.

One way in which this problem manifests begins with forcing students to study topics in which they have no interest, simply because The Curriculum demands it. Then, once that student is sitting in World History or Geometry or Chemistry class, the grades become one way for teachers to compel performance from those uninterested students. Grades become a way to raise the performance floor, to ensure at least a minimum level of achievement (and compliance).

In my environment, the more-noticeable impact of grades is not preventing students from simply sleeping through class or skipping school (they have other extrinsic motivations in their lives to prevent that). No, what I see here is that along with that raising of the performance floor, a lowering of the performance ceiling. Students are absolutely going to do what they need to do to get the A+, they will accept no less. However, many are also less willing to do more. If the rubric lists exactly what to do to get an A+, what's the incentive for going beyond that, for working harder or thinking more creatively than the teacher expected when writing that rubric?

What would my classroom look like without grades? To be honest (don't tell the administrators), I've deemphasized grades a lot in my World History class. It's not just that I'm an "easy" grader, but I've found that the more paths I give students to earn the grade they want, the less energy they'll spend trying to fight over every point. But if I truly got rid of grades? A few possibilities:

• I would have to work harder on creating assignments and giving feedback. Currently in my class, there are some student tasks where the only feedback I provide is a number or letter grade, which essentially says to the student, "Thank you for doing what I asked." Without grades, I would have to spend more time giving thoughtful feedback, but also more time planning those assignments. If the assignment is not worth me providing feedback, is it still worth their time doing it?

• If grades aren't motivating students, then what will be driving them? Maybe their own interests, or a desire to share good work with their peers, or any of the myriad other reasons that adult humans around the world do good work without getting a numerical grade for every task. Students would be preparing for the "real world" much more authentically.

• I would need to work harder to engage with every student. Again, I have a population that is relatively driven. But most of them are in World History simply because it's required rather than out of love for the material. For some, if they don't have the incentive to work for that A+ towards their GPA, they may not be interested in doing much. How would I engage them? I could give them more choice in topics we study, or maybe more freedom to demonstrate what they learned to their peers. Whatever it takes, I couldn't fall back on, "Just do this because I told you to."

• Communication with parents would become very different. Sadly, some parents in my community check their daughter's grades as if they are a stock ticker, either up or down every day. For most parents, the primary way I communicate with them is by the numbers I type in the grade book for their daughter. Without grades, how do I help parents feel connected and informed, while also helping them give their children the space to succeed on their own? Without letter grades and 200 canned comments to choose from for report cards, I would have to proactively give parents meaningful comments about their daughter's progress and what she's been doing. Not only would that take time to do that communication, but it would also require me to have strong relationships with the students to be able to have anything meaningful to say.

I know I've glossed over much of the research (but go read it, really) and potential outcomes. And the issue of grades is wrapped up with many of the consequences of compulsory education. But two things are clear to me: grades are harmful for students, but make things easier for teachers. I know what tends to win out in that scenario most of the time.

→ "Down With Textbooks" →

In an age where information is instantaneous, cheap and easily accessible, history teachers will need to do even more to guide students toward credible sources.

He focuses on history textbooks, but this goes for all subjects. As the distinction blurs between textbooks and apps, all of our resources should change.

→ "There's a Cheaper, More Effective Way to Train Teachers" →

Virtually all beginner teachers, in our experience, meanwhile, agree that what they need more than abstract social and pedagogical lectures are tangible techniques and granular-level coaching. They need Band-Aids, not meditations on hematology.

What made my Masters program so good was that we really did have classes focusing on how to teach high school Latin. Those courses, while still not perfect, are the ones I still refer back to daily, not the generic Education and Educational Psychology courses.

There are some really good ideas here about a less-centralized, apprenticeship model of teacher training. One example:

Fortunately for Will, he teaches at a charter school that does something innovative and different. At Will’s school, the top master teachers are given an additional free period to observe and train new teachers—not in pedagogical theory, but in tools such as how to support individual students (“Elijah’s parents are responsive”); content-specific tricks (“here’s a way to explain how to derive the distance formula from the Pythagorean theorem”); or school-specific techniques (“this is how our school manages half-days”).

My school currently does some of this, but there is probably room for more. There are a a lot of master teachers in the building, and we have to use those resources well.

→ "Lavishing Kids With Praise Can Make Them Feel Worse About Themselves" →

This short article on the Atlantic was going around yesterday, and I think it complements what I wrote yesterday about grade inflation. This study implies that there's a point at which overly-inflated grades have a detrimental effect on students.