Dealing with Student Behavioral Health in the Classroom
According to Rachel Goldsmith Turow, incorporating practical skills into academic classes can give students a greater sense of self-efficacy in dealing with difficult thoughts and feelings.
Across the country, campus counselling centres are struggling to meet the mental health needs of college students, the majority of whom report anxiety and depression. To help meet the overwhelming demand for mental health services, many colleges and universities now offer digital tools or peer counselling programmes. In some institutions, the classroom itself provides an additional setting for students to improve their mental health. As a recent Inside Higher Ed article explored, faculty members who frequently encounter students in distress often want to help those students. Nonetheless, they may be hesitant to refer them to counselling centres with long wait lists or to take on the role of counsellor themselves.
Over the last five years, I’ve taught hundreds of students specific mental health strategies in the context of a graded academic class. After reviewing the research on effective mental health interventions on college campuses, I discovered that supervised skills practise is a critical component; that is, students must actually practise new emotional and behavioural skills several times rather than simply learning about them.
My four-week “science and practise” psychology courses (eight sessions or modules) cover topics such as well-being, mindfulness, and compassion (including self-compassion). Each class includes evidence-based approaches to breaking the habit of harsh self-criticism and assigns specific techniques that have been shown to improve well-being, such as cognitive reappraisal, behavioural activation, and loving kindness meditation.
These classes normalise the work of regulating emotions, managing attention, and developing healthy habits as basic human endeavours, rather than as a sign that you’re doing something wrong. They also incorporate academic thinking into the emotional work of students. For example, my students read a study that compares two appropriate approaches for depressed college students and then write about which strategy they prefer and why.
When I see individual patients for psychotherapy, I frequently recommend that they try new approaches. Also when patients agree, introducing a good behaviour outside of the therapy room can take months, if not years. However, when practising new mental health strategies is graded, most students do so consistently, and most of them describe meaningful results.
Students are not obliged to share any feelings or situations that they consider too personal; rather, they are asked to comment on some aspect of their inner experience. Many students, however, choose to open up about their mental health issues and explain how one‘s new cognitive, emotional, and behavioural strategies have helped them.
Some other student says that after a period of depression and isolation, “I gradually opened my closed heart and started to socialise with my classmates and neighbours. This process gradually made me feel as if my body and mind were becoming healthier.” These and other students gave me permission to publish anonymous quotes from their writing. (I only asked for their permission after the courses had ended and the grades were final.)
Reading reflections and practise experiences are the two types of discussion-post assignments I use in my classes. Students respond to a discussion prompt about their responses to research studies for reading reflections. Students share any aspect of their own lived experience trying a particular new mental or behavioural technique for practise experiences. My classes also necessitate a three-page research paper.
I give individualised feedback and suggestions during each four-week class. For example, if a student expresses difficulty incorporating new skills into a normal regimen, I might recommend setting a phone alarm reminder or an Outlook appointment. Other students may become frustrated if their new skills do not work right away, so I remind them that thousands of research studies show benefits after several weeks of consistent practise. Much of my feedback consists of normalising difficult feelings in students and trying to encourage them as they practise new skills. “I admire how you’re going to attend to this internal work and practise your new skills,” I might write. “I encourage you to continue practising.”
When my students discuss mental health issues, I write to see if they want help connecting with other services and support, and I offer additional information about 24-hour crisis hotlines that can be attained by text or phone. However, most of my students do not indicate an urgent crisis, but rather a desire to expand their own repertoire of skills and gain a greater sense of self-efficacy in dealing with difficult thoughts, emotions, and behaviours.
Trying to address mental health in the classroom doesn’t need to be restricted to classes such as mine or Yale University’s “The Science of Well-Being,” which are led by psychologists. Skills-based programmes to improve well-being are frequently just as efficient when delivered by paraprofessionals. Faculty who are not psychologists can also help students with their mental health and well-being in any course.
When the University of Washington’s Resilience Lab asked faculty what they already did in the classroom to promote well-being, many professors mentioned incorporating “micro-practices.” In my favourite example, a professor decided to invite students to turn to a neighbour and wish them good luck correct before the exam, which lasted only a few seconds.
Students frequently dropped out of introductory programming classes, according to Quintin Cutts and his colleagues at the University of Glasgow. His research team discovered that test scores improved after faculty reorganised the class to provide feedback which encouraged a growth mindset and to require assignments that directed students to investigate different ways to solve problems when they got stuck.
Institutions such as the University of Texas have launched campus-wide initiatives to promote well-being in a variety of learning environments. Offering a “mindfulness minute” in the classroom to normalise distraction, recenter, and bring attention back to the room by tuning in to the five senses; modelling a compassionate and growth-oriented perspective when discussing how to learn from mistakes and failures; and concluding class on a positive note, including such asking students to share a related topic that they hope to explore further.
College counselling centres across the country continue to provide critical assistance to students in crisis as well as those who could indeed benefit from talk therapy, medication, and referrals. However, both students and college counsellors describe a desire for mental health services outside of the counselling centre.
Trying to teach psychiatric skills in the classroom is not a cure-all or a panacea for the variety of systemic stressors that affect students’ mental health, such as racism, financial concerns, and sexual violence. Overemphasis on skill development can reinforce the status quo and imply that individuals are solely responsible for their own well-being, even in dangerous situations. I believe that addressing systemic problems individual versus symptoms is a both-and situation. Colleges and our larger culture must continue to reduce system – wide stressors, and students deserve access to evidence-based mental health strategies.
“This training presented a doorway, an opening it in to something bigger, more obvious, and essential than any other study, class, or lesson I have encountered in school and beyond,” one student explained. “None of the homework felt like homework, but a type of mental health service,” another student wrote. In this day and age, when the demand for mental health services on campus frequently exceeds the supply, I am grateful for the opportunity to reach out to a large number of students at once, to normalise mental health issues, and to train students to implement evidence-based practises to improve their well-being.