by Todd Rose
This is just one example of the principle I introduced in chapter 4—that there is no such thing as an objective threat. The sensation of being threatened is an emotional and subjective reaction. For some students, such as those who’ve had several bad experiences in the classroom, the mere possibility of a teacher calling on them at random may raise their blood levels of stress hormones by just as much as if they had heard a lion roar from within their bedroom closet.
As scientists offer increasingly powerful evidence about how debilitating excessive and prolonged stress can be for students, both in terms of their learning potential and their mental health, teachers and parents will have to rethink some of the rules that have governed classrooms for so long. After the microphone test, for instance, one of my students, who’d been teaching for several years, said he would no longer call on students without warning. Looking more closely, however, how can we get better at spotting that critical threshold at which healthy stress rises to the point of a threat? For each student, this will depend on a unique balance of demands and resources.
This model of evaluating behavior under pressure was first articulated in 1996 by psychologists Jim Blascovich and Joe Tomaka, who reviewed scores of research studies involving people obliged to perform various tasks—from taking a test, to giving a speech, to trying to sell someone something. They concluded that individuals generally feel challenged to a healthy degree when they evaluate—often unconsciously—that their resources are at least roughly equal to the demands of a given situation. If demands exceed a person’s resources, however, he or she is likely to feel threatened.
Now, both demands and resources can include concrete and highly subjective factors. The demands involved in a given task will include not only the level of sheer effort required but also an individual’s perceptions of the danger and uncertainty involved. Resources can include anything from skills, equipment, knowledge, familiarity, and experience to whether a person slept well the previous night. Resources can also include a person’s disposition: On the afternoon of the microphone test, one particularly sanguine student in my class asked, “What do I care if I stand up and make a fool out of myself?”
Blascovich and Tomaka and the many researchers who followed them have carefully described the contrasting physiologies of perceived challenge versus threat. Both emotional states involve a slightly accelerated heart rate, as if a person were engaged in mild aerobic exercise. Yet when someone is threatened, as opposed to challenged, his or her arteries will constrict, increasing blood pressure. This is the physiological state best suited for running away from a predator, but not for performing well on cognitive tasks; the limbs are energized at the expense of the brain. In the worst-case scenario, the perception of threat leads to the classic fight-or-flight response, where panic overrides rationality. It can be triggered by a real-life danger (like that lion), or even by memories—like a student who has been humiliated once before—that lead to the anticipation of danger. For your average grade-school child, a few brushes with a bully combined with some charged encounters with a principal or teacher can make school feel like such a hostile place that simply thinking about it can trigger a threat response. And remember, even though you—as the parent or teacher—might “know” that the student is not in any danger, it doesn’t matter. It literally doesn’t matter. If the student perceives threat, the consequences are the same. The child walks into the classroom prepared, at best, to survive, but not to learn.
The implications of all this for parents, teachers, and students, are huge. To help kids do their best in school, we have to get smarter about analyzing the challenge-versus-threat dynamic and how it breaks down in such a varied way for each individual. The good news is that there are many efforts in progress to do just that.
One promising field of study involves examining the enormous degree to which perceptions of social support—or lack thereof—can influence this balance of demands and resources. Do a student’s teachers or classmates believe he’ll do well? If you remember the Rosenthal effect (from chapter 1), it won’t surprise you that this will have a lot to do with whether he actually will. The phenomenon has been particularly elegantly illustrated by an experiment at San Francisco’s Exploratorium, one of the best science museums in this country. Visitors stand in a booth where they are instructed to speak into a microphone, while a sound track plays applause. It’s enough to make anyone more confident.
Interestingly enough, researchers have recently discovered that even as simple an intervention as having students write a brief essay about their worries before taking a test can significantly boost their scores. This sort of technique has proven to be especially helpful with members of minorities, women, and particularly anxious students. One project found that asking African-American students to reaffirm their values throughout the school year can reduce the normal race-related achievement gap by the end of the year. These are all compelling illustrations of how what we think we know isn’t static, or simply dependent on how much we’ve studied, but changes according to circumstances.
Context can also have a powerfully negative influence on learning, however, which is how it more often works with kids like me. In particular, there’s a dynamic known as stereotype threat, first described in the mid-1990s by the social psychologist Claude Steele, which refers to the way someone can internalize what he or she feels are other people’s negative expectations and proceed to fulfill that prophecy. In other words, if someone tells you before you take a math test that people like you—troublemakers, kids diagnosed with ADHD, but also frazzled moms, women, African-Americans, senior citizens, or other specifically defined groups—don’t usually do well on math tests, you will likely perform more poorly than if he or she hadn’t said it.
The “stereotype threat” research provides one of the most clear-cut examples of how emotions are intimately woven together with thinking and learning. It also lays bare how amazingly important it is to never lose sight of the fact that behavior and learning are the results of complex systems—always dependent on the unique way in which each child interacts with his environment.
As people become more aware of the tremendous variability in how people learn, on top of other types of diversity such as race, culture, and income, schools are gradually paying more attention to the danger of negative expectations. So far, however, consider ably more attention has been focused on a more immediate and tangible campus threat: the surprisingly widespread problem of bullying.
Bullying Bans and Other Emotional Support
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As I mentioned in chapter 4, there has been a notable recent increase in public concern about bullying: the most obvious way that students are emotionally sabotaged at school. Many school administrators have jumped on the antibullying bandwagon, instituting a wide range of educational and disciplinary tactics. Some of these are promising, but many others have been well-intentioned flops. While at this writing, there’s relatively little research on the most effective programs, the work that has been done suggests schools have considerable power to prevent children from being systematically intimidated, and given all we know about the effects of the threat response on learning, it behooves us to step up to the challenge. Some recent studies suggest that the most successful programs have decreased bullying by up to 23 percent.
At this writing, the strategy that has won the most kudos is the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program, a multicomponent, school-wide model first implemented in Norway in 1970 by the Swedish research psychologist Dan Olweus, and since copied in schools in the United States and elsewhere throughout the world. Among its most effective tools are outreach to families, including parent-education sessions, teacher training, and attentive supervision during recess hours.
Unfortunately, some antibullying programs end up doing more harm than good. Typically these failures will hand off too much power to the kids involved, such as with so-called peer-mentoring or peer-led conflict resolution. Cambridge University criminologists Da
vid Farrington and Maria Ttofi have published the most comprehensive studies to date examining antibullying programs and have found that grouping kids together in attempts to combat bullying and other oppositional behavior often makes the bad behavior more widespread through contagion.
Other researchers have criticized programs focused on conflict resolution, even when adults are in charge, since when a bully is involved, such efforts mistakenly frame the problem as between two peers of equal power, rather than between a more powerful student who is mistreating someone who is weaker.
Simply jawboning about bad behavior at school—be it bullying or a range of other offenses—tends to do little good, researchers have found, with the “Just Say No” so-called drug prevention programs being a leading example. And least useful of all, in general, and often downright counterproductive, are the zero-tolerance policies now common at many schools, which automatically suspend children who break rules having to do with bullying or other forbidden behaviors. These draconian policies have yet to prove their effectiveness and may actually tend to reduce reporting of bullying, since victims and witnesses may be reluctant to take responsibility for ending the school career of a young person who may be just as emotionally troubled as his victim.
It’s not exactly rocket science to figure out that being chronically teased or bullied, or socially isolated, can kill a student’s interest in school. Beyond targeting bullying, many schools are wisely trying to help improve students’ lives with a flood of new programs that emphasize social and emotional skills. In 2011, the first major analysis of these programs showed that in general they have not only helped many children improve their relationships, but they have also had a significant impact on academic achievement. The study, which appeared in the January/February 2011 issue of the journal Child Development, was conducted by scientists at two universities based in Chicago, and looked at more than two hundred school-based social and emotional learning programs, involving approximately 270,000 K–12 students. The programs included classroom instruction by teachers and visiting experts, mostly focused on managing emotions and relationships and setting and achieving smart goals. When managed well, these programs can significantly help adjust that key balance of demands and resources for kids. Researchers have discovered several benefits, including a decline in students’ misbehavior and anxiety, and, most surprisingly, an average 11 percent gain in performance on achievement tests.
To be sure, the efforts aren’t always graceful. For some schools, “social-emotional learning” has become a catchphrase for overindulging in political correctness. Some schools have gone so far as to eliminate competitive sports so that no child has to experience the pain of losing—a move I think is misdirected, at best. (There is nothing wrong with learning to compete fairly, and there is a lot to gain by learning to “lose well.”) Others, however, have carefully built school cultures that shore up students’ emotional resources with understanding and respect.
High School Havens
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The best example I’ve encountered to date of a school culture that provides this key support can be found at High Tech High, which is in fact a group of (at last count) eleven charter schools in Southern California. The schools are so popular that admissions are determined by an annual lottery. At last count, there were ten applications for every student enrolled.
Founded in 2000, the network at this writing includes two elementary schools, four middle schools, and five high schools. Its main campus, a former U.S. Navy engineering training center near the San Diego airport, is a light and airy showcase of the modernity that inspires both its tactics and curriculum. Students have ample room to stretch out, mentally and physically, with thirty-nine thousand square feet for four hundred teenagers. Beneath high ceilings with exposed steel beams, classrooms are set off with fifteen-foot glass walls. Visitors walk through halls lined with prize-winning science projects—a set of bicycle wheels that illustrates physics principles; there, a wall-hanging demonstrating the mechanics of how music is made, by showing the inside of a piano.
The school’s original backers were local business leaders who shared dismay over the failure of public education to guarantee a well-prepared workforce. Early on, they attracted the pivotal support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They also recruited education reformer Larry Rosenstock, who became its founding principal, CEO, chief advocate, and charismatic guru.
Rosenstock is a lean, balding man who talks like he’s trying to catch a bus and even then seems to have trouble keeping up with his own thoughts. Nearly every inch of wall space in his large office is filled with posters and photographs and students’ work, including portraits of Albert Einstein (whom Rosenstock refers to as “Albie”), Mao, Muhammad Ali, and a chimpanzee. A warning sign says: “No Snivelling.”
Before Rosenstock moved to San Diego, he lectured at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, taught high school carpentry, and directed the New Urban High School Project, funded by the U.S. Department of Education. In his first year at High Tech High, he told an interviewer that his main goal was to change the relationship between teachers and students, “with teachers becoming more like guides and mentors and students more like active learners who can develop their interests and passions and pursue them.” By all appearances, he has done just that.
When you walk through the halls at High Tech High schools, you see teenagers who look startlingly unlike those you might encounter at most other high schools in this country. They are, for the most part, truly animated, smiling and chatting. The charter school status has given Rosenstock extraordinary power to challenge top-down traditions that leave so many U.S. students alienated at best and victimized at worst. Hands-on, collaborative work is the norm rather than the exception. Teachers are paid at above-average rates for California, but aren’t eligible for tenure, and as part of the hiring process must audition in front of real classes, after which students are asked for their impressions.
“A lot of our secret is made up of what we don’t do,” says Rosenstock. There is no public-address system, nor bells to signal the start and end of class. Teachers and students use the same bathrooms. And there’s none of the danger of anonymity that pervades so many high schools. A basic rule is that every student knows there is at least one adult on campus who feels personally responsible for his or her success and well-being. Beyond their time in the classroom, teachers are expected to make meaningful connections with students and their families, visiting each of their homes once a year, and serving as advisors to the same students throughout their four years in school.
These strategies have produced exceptional success, both in the schools’ strong sense of community and the students’ academic achievement. High Tech High’s graduation rates are dramatically higher than other California schools, while Rosenstock says that a remarkable 70 percent of their students go on to four-year colleges. This is despite the fact that, as news of the school’s success has spread, parents of kids who have struggled in traditional schools have flocked to apply, raising the rate of such students well beyond the local norm.
The schools are so unusually supportive of kids with all kinds of learning variability that High Tech High’s contract psychologist, Mark Katz, once led a tour of the campus for fellow mental health professionals who’d been asking to learn more. He dubbed the field trip “Beyond the Pill,” signaling his belief, which I strongly share, that a great deal of the psychotropic medications now in use today would become much less necessary if we adults could just learn to manage our kids’ environments more intelligently.
One of the best things about High Tech High, to my mind, is that Rosenstock and other administrators don’t waste time talking very much about “social-emotional” learning. Instead they simply provide a radically different learning context that nurtures all kinds of children. And when I say “nurture,” I don’t mean “coddle.” Rather, it’s a matter of making kids feel better understood, and more valued and supported, while allo
wing their strengths to emerge. No student is penalized for lacking skills that are all but impossible for some to master. As an example, support for note-taking is offered in all classes. As a rule, the teacher will assign and pay one particularly proficient student to take notes that will then be available to others who might need them.
Luckily for an increasing number of U.S. kids, High Tech High’s focus on building more supportive environments isn’t unique. More and more school directors, particularly at charter and private schools, are starting to see the light, and working to engineer more effective ways for students to get an education than to sit numbly, hour after hour, at their desks.
Of course, some schools have been rebelling against conventional education for many years. On the East Coast, the private Sudbury Valley School, founded in 1968 in Framingham, Massachusetts, retains that era’s antiestablishment philosophy, updated with an emphasis on computer technology’s power to liberate kids from their desks. The school, housed in an old stone mansion and converted barn on a mid-nineteenth-century estate, gives students exceptional autonomy in making decisions that affect them. It also maintains a policy of intermingling kids of all ages, from preschool to high school, a tactic that researchers who’ve studied the school say has encouraged older students to behave more responsibly, as nurturers and mentors. Maybe it didn’t work out this well in Lord of the Flies, but researchers say the approach of schooling big kids with little kids has virtually eliminated bullying.