By Dane Puterbaugh, School Improvement Representative
If you have ever attended a professional development session with me in the last three years, there is a good chance you have heard me talk about the “stress-as-enhancing” mindset study published in Nature in 2022. I love this study. If my wife found out how often I think about this study, she would probably be jealous.
The study showed that explicitly teaching students a growth mindset, paired with a “stress-as-enhancing” mindset, helped build students who are more resilient in the face of stress. The researchers recognized the mental health crisis building in our adolescents and tried to find an intervention to mitigate it. As it turns out, if you teach students that doing hard things can make them better, their biological reactions to stress improves. You can measure the effects in their hearts, daily cortisol levels, psychological well-being, levels of anxiety, and you can see it in their academic success. The old adage “the best way out is always through” holds true for situations that cause stress and anxiety. Our interventions can help build students that are more willing to take on risks and stop running away from stress. The stress-as-enhancing mindset is the peanut butter to growth mindset’s jelly. Both work on their own, but together form something greater than the sum of their parts.
What I didn’t know before preparing this article is that there was a follow-up study. A year after publication, some of the same researchers wanted to find out if a one-time intervention was enough to address young peoples’ mental health needs at scale, or if supportive environments are needed to prevent the fading effects of the intervention. As you might suspect, creating an environment that supports doing hard things, seeing “stress as enhancing”, better supports students’ risk taking and reaction to stress. An environment that supports and celebrates doing hard things produces students more willing to do hard things.
In the follow-up study, the professors who were tasked with creating a supportive environment only had to message their students four times throughout the semester. This is great news for everyone in the classroom! Think of how many opportunities you have to build a culture of “stress-as-enhancing”, the positive effects it can have on your students, and how easy it is to make sure every student gets this message individually.
Maintaining high expectations for our students is important as we prepare them for an uncertain future. Life after school is stressful, but a student who has been taught in the safety of their classrooms, from a teacher that loves and supports them, that stress is not something to fear, but something that will make them better, will be ready for life after school. That student will be ready for anything.
Now it is up to all of us to create a culture where doing hard things is celebrated. We should all work to create school cultures where students feel supported to take on big, stressful tasks. Stress is something that enhances, not something to avoid. I challenge everyone reading this article to think of something that they have been avoiding because the idea stresses them out and go do it. No one has ever said being an educator is easy, and doing hard things makes us all better.
Works Cited:
Hecht, C. A., Gosling, S. D., Bryan, C. J., Jamieson, J. P., Murray, J. S., & Yeager, D. S. (2023). When do the effects of single-session interventions persist? Testing the mindset + supportive context hypothesis in a longitudinal randomized trial. JCPP advances, 3(4), e12191. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcv2.12191
Yeager, D.S., Bryan, C.J., Gross, J.J. et al. A synergistic mindsets intervention protects adolescents from stress. Nature 607, 512–520 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04907-7