By Daniel P. Keating Ph.D
Teachers and
educational leaders in particular feel the stress coming from all directions –
teachers are stressed, students are stressed, staff is stressed, and parents are stressed. Added to the
mix are demands for compliance with multiple directives and heightened
accountability from numerous sources. Dealing effectively with this
system-wide stress is critical, and it helps to first understand how it works.
Early
Life Adversity Impacts Mental and Physical Health: A “Vicious Cycle”
We’ve known for
some time that toxic stress arising from early life adversity poses a high risk
for mental as well as physical health, and recent evidence shows that these
risks are long lasting. Excess stress in early life – even in the womb – can
“get under the skin” to affect how the brain is wired as well as how
genes are expressed. “Stress dysregulation” (SDR) is a common consequence of
early adversity. It shows up in most students with a clinical
mental health diagnosis, but many students even without a diagnosis exhibit
behaviors – such as hair trigger anger, inability to self-regulate or calm themselves, sudden withdrawal from learning and social
interaction – that affect not only themselves but everyone in their orbit.
It acts as a silent disruptor in the classroom and in school life
generally.
New research
findings also show that stress is contagious at a physiological level (Palumbo
et al., 2017). More students are arriving at school with SDR and with
difficulties in coping, making it hard to build a positive learning environment. The source of this dynamic
is more obvious in schools that serve a high proportion of students from
families facing major economic and social challenges, but it is also observed
in schools that serve students from advantaged families with highly competitive
expectations, as Denise Pope documented in Doing School.
This “vicious
cycle” of disruption connects the phenomena of more stressed-out students, accelerating stress
contagion at school, and increased societal demands and anxieties. This
cycle poses a difficult but often unrecognized challenge for teachers and
educational leaders. We don’t yet know all the social and cultural forces that contribute
to this stress epidemic, although increasing inequality and decreasing social
mobility surely play a role in provoking the anxiety that is at the heart of the
matter. But even if educational leaders can’t directly change the larger
social dynamic, they can
work at the classroom, school, and system level to counteract its effects.
In doing
background research for my recent book Born Anxious,
I had a conversation with the principal of an alternative secondary school for
high-risk students, many of whom display this SDR pattern. His approach
struck a chord: building a culture of resilience throughout the school.
This notion draws on extensive research on individual resilience, explained in
Ann Masten’s Ordinary Magic, and extends those
findings to considering how any educational organization can build support for
resilience to counteract the negative effects of excess stress for everyone. Here
are the key elements:
Social connections. The single most effective route to providing a more
resilient developmental pathway for students with a history of adversity is
through positive social connections. Schools can provide a crucially unique
setting to support resilience, offering an opportunity for students to connect
with teachers, coaches, and mentors who exhibit caring and concern for
students, communicating to them that they do matter to important adults in
their lives. In addition, schools can create a context for meaningful
engagement and participation in a larger community in which positive social
connections can flourish (Eccles & Roeser, 2013).
The principal I
spoke with described an exemplary scenario. One particularly troubled
student, with an extensive history of early and continuing adversity, seemingly
could not be reached when he arrived. A teacher kept probing to find any
point of connection, and would not give up. Eventually, finding an
interest in popular music that was meaningful to the student, the teacher began
making innovative links, both to the curriculum and to broader social
issues. Taking the time for this kind of “super-nurturing” doesn’t happen
in a vacuum – it requires a culture of resilience as well as committed
teachers. This student became one of the school’s best “turn-around”
successes.
Neither of
these – involved teachers and an engaged community – is automatic. Both
depend predominantly on educational leadership within
the organization to promote a culture of resilience. And a key part of
that culture is that it needs to include not only students but also the whole
organization, which in turn requires a collegial, collaborative leadership
model, such as the one described by Michael Fullan in The Six Secrets of
Change. This emphasis on positive social connections also highlights the
reality that effectively counteracting the ravages of excess stress is critical
not only for students, but also for teachers, staff, and education leaders
themselves.
Mindfulness in
action.
The practice of mindfulness has received increasing attention in
educational practice recently, and for good reasons. Social connections
lead to resilience through social support and socio-emotional learning, but
also biologically, as they counteract the stress hormone cortisol (Keating,
2017). Mindfulness confers benefits similar to social connection, but
using the uniquely powerful part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex,
propelling us toward a habitual focus on the present and the opportunities it
offers, while minimizing rumination about the past or fear of the
future. For organizations, this implies thoughtfully learning the lessons
from past experiences combined with openness to a well-considered, collaborative
process of change. For individuals and for organizations, a mindful approach
provides a valuable “work around” for stressful times, allowing us to avoid
anxiety-driven responses that launch an excessive stress response.
Attention to the physical. A third major approach to supporting
resilience and counteracting toxic stress is to attend to the physical
domain. Although not always seen as central to the educational mission,
there are crucial supports as well as risks that can be identified and implemented.
Physical exercise is a readily available, highly effective method of stress
reduction, and one that can be promoted in school settings as part of the
school day and/or through extra-curricular opportunities that are available to
all, not just to elite high school athletes.
A second major
physical contributor to personal resilience is sufficient sleep. Sleep
deficits are a major risk factor for a range of mental and physical health
problems, as well as depleting the ability to cope with stress. The
challenges to learning arising from early start times, especially for teens,
have been increasingly recognized, but their impact on mental health and the
ability to cope with stress are equally important.
The dangers of
short-term “remedies” for feeling overstressed and being unable to cope with
demands are also essential: comfort food and psychoactive substances can
provide instant relief but are highly likely to lead to long-term
problems. Education that highlights and explains these risks can be
effective, along with the provision of healthy nutritionoptions during
the school day.
It’s important
to emphasize that these supports for resilience and for counteracting excess
stress are just as
important for teachers, staff, and leaders as they are for students.
The pathways to teacher burnout and
student burnout travel the same route, and benefit from the same protective
factors: social connection; mindfulness; and taking care of the physical
dimension. A bonus to this approach is that they can benefit everyone,
even those not at risk from toxic stress or mental health challenges.
Building
a Culture of Resilience for Mental Health, Learning, and Positive
Development
Drawing on what we know about how supporting resilience, it is
clear that a leadership style that integrates collaboration, social connection, and mindful
attention to current challenges offers the best opportunity for moving toward
and sustaining a culture of resilience. Articulating this approach as an
explicit goal, and bringing all the stakeholders – including parents – on board
creates the basis for sustainable progress toward building a culture of
resilience.
The impact of
the stress epidemic and of increasing SDR among students is felt in all areas
of the school experience. It clearly interferes with learning, not only
for the students who struggle with staying in the game while feeling highly
stressed, but for teachers and the rest of class who need to cope with the
resulting disruptions.
When it begins
to manifest as diagnosable mental health issues, which will be true at some
point for about 25% of students (Merikangas et al., 2010), providing
an appropriate blend of services becomes paramount. The need for a
comprehensive approach is acute, pulling together a shift toward a culture of
resilience but also providing a range of prevention and intervention
services. A helpful organizational framework is to think of such services
as existing along a continuum from universal services helpful for everyone
(mindfulness, coping strategies), to targeted services for at-risk students, to
direct clinical or educational services for students with an existing
diagnosis. Although these are often not exclusively
school-based, they are more effective when there is close coordination
between schools and community-based mental health providers.
A hopeful
direction for teachers and educational leaders at all levels is that a better
awareness of the sources of the stress epidemic will enable a broader and more
effective approach to dealing with it. Rather than adding a new stressor,
the path toward a culture of resilience has the potential to be helpful in
coping with these increasing challenges, both personally and
for organizations. This can benefit all students as well as
school professionals, and function as a major support for positive youth
development.
References
REFERENCES
Center on the Developing Child (2007). The Impact of Early
Adversity on Child Development (InBrief). Retrieved
from www.developingchild.harvard.edu.
Eccles, J. S., & Roeser, R. W. (2013). Schools as developmental
contexts during adolescence. In R. M. Lerner et al. (Eds.), Handbook of psychology: Developmental
psychology (pp. 321-337). Hoboken, NJ, US: John Wiley &
Sons Inc.
Keating, D. P., (2016). The transformative role of
epigenetics in child development research. Child Development, 87 (1), 135-142.
Keating, D. P. (2017). Born
Anxious: The Lifelong Impact of Early Life Adversity – and How to Break the
Cycle. New York: St. Martin’s Press. stmartins.com/bornanxious
Merikangas KR, He JP, Brody D, Fisher PW, Bourdon
K, Koretz DS. (2010). Prevalence
and treatment of mental disorders among US children in the 2001-2004 NHANES.
Pediatrics, 125(1):75-81.
Palumbo, R. V., Marraccini, M. E., Weyandt, L. L., Wilder-Smith,
O., McGee, H. A., Liu, S., & Goodwin, M. S. (2017). Interpersonal autonomic physiology: A
systematic review of the literature. Personality and Social
Psychology Review, 21(2):99-141.
Schanzenbach, D. W., Bauer, L., Mumford,
M., & Nunn, R. (2016). Money Lightens the Load. Brookings Institution: The Hamilton
Project. www.hamiltonproject.org
Walker, T. (2016). Educators Look to Parents and
Communities To Help Reduce Student Stress. NEA Today. (Retrieved at
http://neatoday.org/2016/09/16/reducing-student-stress/)
