Jacob is terrified of oral reports he’s expected to give in his 10th-grade history class this school year. A therapist’s note recommends he be excused, and the school agrees. This scenario is playing out nationwide. The individuals and institutions involved are well intentioned and trying to help students feel more comfortable. But as psychologists who’ve studied and treated anxiety for decades, we believe that this approach — eliminating whatever makes students nervous — is making the problem worse. Here’s
why: Anxiety feeds on avoidance.
Anxiety and fear, particularly among young humans, are fed by a debilitating combo-- the belief that 1) the scary things is truly dangerous, so dangerous that 2) you can't possibly handle it.
I've written about this many times before. Students are still trying to grow coping mechanisms for Scary Things, and they are surrounded by adults who may or may not having very good coping mechanisms of their own. Choices for coping with scary, anxiety-inducing things include:
1) Perform a set of behaviors that will magically keep the Scary Thing at bay. This one is popular among adults, and the problem is that in this model, the scary thing is always right outside, just waiting to get you, and you have to keep performing your keep-it-at-bay activities forever. I'm convinced that much of what we're living through right now is a man (and some like-minded sycophants) frantically pursuing the belief that if he acquires enough wealth and fame and power, he doesn't have to be afraid of dying. No human has ever pursued this tactic so fiercely or extensively, and there is a lesson for all of us in the fact that despite the success of his pursuit, it clearly hasn't assuaged his fear in the slightest.
2) Denial and avoidance. The Scary Thing isn't real, isn't happening, isn't a threat. You aren't really here. You will run away and therefor avoid it. You can't lose if you don't play. This is every student who is suddenly too sick to deliver their oral report. It's not really coping so much as delaying. Worse, it reinforces the notion that the Scary Things is too devastating and you are too weak to deal with it.
3) Strength. You are strong-- specifically, strong enough to cope with the Scary Thing. Even if you don't beat it (and by God, you might), you will still be okay afterwards. You might even get stronger by wrestling with it.
2 is the strategy that the authors are talking about, and I agree. Every time we give a student a way to avoid the Scary Thing, we reinforce the idea that it really is a threat, and they really aren't strong enough to cope.
By contrast, when students take on what they’d rather avoid, they learn that worst-case scenarios rarely materialize, that discomfort is survivable, and that anxiety diminishes with practice.
As is always the case in education, there's a lot to balance here. Getting students to face the Scary Thing can mean they need a kick in the ass combined with a forcible closure of all escape routes, or it can mean that they need to have their hand held as they are coaxed and reassured to go forward. It almost always means prepping them for the Scary Thing so that they have the tools they need.
It also means that teachers have to be thoughtful about how they handle failure in a classroom, in things both big and small. Through most of my career, I tried to respond to everything from wrong answers to a question in class to bombed assessments with a message, somehow, of "That's not what we want, but you are still okay." Students, particularly younger ones, are susceptible to the message that failing at school is proof that they are sorry excuses for a human being-- in other words, they are too weak and too incompetent to face the Scary Thing which is, in fact, a Big Scary test of their worth as a human being.
Of course, as a teacher, you have to switch gears with a student who doesn't seem to experience any anxiety at all, and of course you have to try to assess whether the student is actually out of !#@%s to give or if that's just a defensive pose (see 2 above).
Some teachers, it must be said, tend to make mountains out of molehills ("If I have to talk to you one more time it will go on your permanent record and you will never get into college or get a job ever!") which can feed some students' dramatic sense that they are engaged in an epic struggle with apocalyptic forces. This is not helpful.
The messages that students need to hear are--
1) You can do this.
2) If you don't manage it the first, or even the second time, you will be okay.
3) I am here to help you get better at doing this.
They need to hear these messages from teachers and parents and other adults as well.
They can also, Lovett and Jordan point out, be taught explicitly about anxiety-- what it is, where it comes from, how people deal with it, and how it is a feeling that doesn't necessarily reflect reality. I suspect they could also stand to hear tales of anxiety from adults; sometimes, young humans feed their anxiety with the assumption that everyone else, adults especially, has everything completely under control and therefor there must be something wrong with the young human who does not.
Adults might also just generally stop pushing the idea that it is a big scary world, that we are all balanced on the edge of disaster, and that young humans are particularly in danger (and incapable of dealing with that danger).
Schools do not have to be anxiety farms, and teachers do not have to feed the idea that students face Scary Things that those students can't possible deal with or survive. We can believe in our students (and if you teach in one place for a long time, you will see the evidence as they grow and thrive and weather adversity), and we can let that belief color how we treat them. We are all of us stronger than we sometimes imagine; all we have to do is grasp that strength for ourselves and those around us.
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