Anxiety and Student Accountability

Anxiety and Student Accountability

With guest star: Procrastination

At a recent staff meeting, it was mentioned by one of our counselling staff that the instances of students missing school due to anxiety, depression, and gaming addiction. There isn't much I can do about gaming addiction, but the anxiety surrounding school I felt was at least partly the responsibility of the teacher. 

Being the consummate scientist (nerd?) that I am, my first step was to do research. My first search brought me to the personality-project.org's PDF on anxiety(1). Interestingly they made the link between Anxiety and procrastination. They state that procrastination is often a result from anxiety which I found fascinating.  Teaching in a computer lab, I have a huge number of students that procrastinate on a daily basis. Perhaps this is because they are anxious about the assignments I have given them? I didn't want to take this one source at face value, so more research was required.

What else causes anxiety? Neuroticism seemed to be the biggest culprit(2). Neuroticism is defined as an over sensitivity to stressors, as well as a higher reactivity to those same stressors. An example may be how an individual experiencing neuroticism would view a deadline vs someone who does not. Both individuals would likely have some level of anxiety around a deadline; however, the individual experiencing neuroticism would have a far larger stress response (release of adrenaline, cortisol etc.) from the same stressor (the deadline). The truly unfair aspect of this is this response can be "learned" or rather the response can be strengthened through repeated experiences just like any other kind of learning(3).

How does this relate to procrastination? It is a re-focusing of the mind. The individual shifts their attention from the "painful" stimuli (the due date), and onto less painful stimuli (snapchat, supersnake.io, etc.) , with the big bad stimuli gone, the mind can relax again (and possibly reward itself with a healthy dose of dopamine for a job well done(4))

Understanding why students procrastinate is one thing, preventing it in class is a bird of another feather. Without going into too much detail on anti-procrastination techniques, the biggest and easiest step seems to be just to start. Once an activity is started (no matter how small the step), it has been shown that anxiety abates if individuals can simply start whatever it is they were anxious about. Something as simple as writing a title page can be enough.(5) The theory behind this technique is the stress of the upcoming task is no longer there when the task is no longer upcoming. It seems odd that the stress of an event approaching would be greater than the actual event itself, but that is the paradoxical nature of anxiety.

What can I do to help students develop OUT of their habits rather than deepen them? Mindfulness seems to be the ticket. Students procrastinate, they know they procrastinate, but rarely can they state WHY they procrastinate. When asked recently, the vast majority of one of my classes stated "It is just who I am, I procrastinate because I am a procrastinator." Boy, was that ever a long conversation after that little informal poll! Mindfulness can help students become more aware of their behaviour, and then eventually the causes behind their behaviour. The argument goes something like this.

1. Many of the issues we see in the classroom (and in life) come from dysfunctional self-regulation. (6)
2. Functional self-regulation requires functional emotional-regulation
3. Mindfulness increases individuals emotional-regulation abilities(7)
   QED
4. Mindfulness can help with issues in the classroom (ta-da!)

One source I have found useful is the "Get Things Done" model developed by David Allen. You can summarise the steps thusly:

Step 1: Mindfulness exerciseStep 2: Capture your ideas- get them down on "paper"Step 3: Clarify- Focus on the ideas that are important and flush them outStep 4: Organise- Which are things I can do now, which soon, which laterStep 5: Do it!

Nothing there is particularly surprising, but I have noticed a significant decrease in "time wasting" activities by my students on the days that I ask them to do this. Below I have an example of how I used this with a grade 8 class.

• Start: Re-Introduce students to mindfulness, state that the purpose is to focus on their personal emotional state, and the things that are on their mind. I provide an example of my own how I wasn't aware that an upcoming family dinner was on my mind so much (and distracting me), until I took to the time to "be still" and relax a bit.
  
• 3 min mindfulness exercise (youtube has a million of them[133,000 to be exact])
  
• Introduce the purpose of the days lesson- problem solving skills - prototype development - ask the students to write down what code they think the will have to put into the sphero (robot) to make it move around a question mark (they have already done it with a square) (3 min)
  
• Ask students to collaborate with their group and make a master copy of their draft code (including why they excluded some ideas and included others)
  
• Show students the project criteria (they have to film their trials, communicate their thinking and their learning in the video) ask them to make a plan on how they are going to get me a final video (listing digital literacy skills they might employ and predicted problems )
  
• I check their plan to make sure it is reasonable (if not, then they get sent back to the drawing board with more direction)
  
• Students film themselves programming and testing the robots, writing down anything that would not be clear through film. 

I don't think I had to tell a single student to stay off their cellphone in this class (compared to previous classes doing similar things where I would have to tell a different student every 4-5 min to stop using their cellphone inappropriately) I have yet to try this type of lesson with Sr. Grades, so stay tuned for more examples in the future. 

What do you think? Questions? Do you have experience with procrastination/mindfulness? Where do you think the problems come from?

References: (it's my blog and I'll cite how I want to ! ) 

1. Procrastination and Anxiety (Dopamine) - Personality-project.orghttps://www.personality-project.org/revelle/syllabi/301/301.anxiety.pdf - taken from:Source: http://www.sh.lsuhsc.edu/fammed/OutpatientManual/Anxiety.htm taken from 5. Gliatto, Michael F. Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Am Fam Physician. 2000;62:1591-600, 1602
   
2. Anxiety and Neuoticisim - https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2016/01/neuroticism-predicts-anxiety-depression-disorders
   
   
3. Anxiety and the relationship to neural connections- "The Neuropsychology of Anxiety" 2nd Edition by Jeffery Alan Gray and Neil McNaughton- Accessed Dec 13 2016- Page 171 - https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=_M4owh-vs-8C&oi=fnd&pg=PR15&dq=are+reactions+strengthened+through+habituation+neural+networks+anxiety&ots=KVOzLqKYn7&sig=JsHjpz4DLAQCWbRx7vqhfMrpT7c#v=onepage&q&f=false
   
4. Dopamine and Procrastination Neurogistics- "Procrastination- Is Dopamine to Blame?" by Emily Roberts
   
5. Tools to treat procrastination - "Procrastination the Time Robber" by Dr. Thomas A. Richards http://anxietynetwork.com/content/procrastination-time-robber
   
6. Importance of Self-Regulation in the classroom- "Motivational and self-regulated learning components of classroom academic performance".
   Pintrich, Paul R.; de Groot, Elisabeth V.
   Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol 82(1), Mar 1990, 33-40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.82.1.33
   Special Section: Motivation and efficacy in education: Research and new directions.
   
   
7. Mindfulness' efect on behaviour- "Feasibility and Preliminary Outcomes of a School-Based Mindfulness Intervention for Urban Youth" Mendelson, T., Greenberg, M.T., Dariotis, J.K. et al. J Abnorm Child Psychol (2010) 38: 985. doi:10.1007/s10802-010-9418-x
   
8. Getting things done- http://gettingthingsdone.com/  and http://lifehacker.com/productivity-101-a-primer-to-the-getting-things-done-1551880955 

Digital Portfolios: Practising What I Preach

Digital Portfolios: Practising What I Preach

When I first began to ask students to reflect, quite often it would look something like this

         "Okay students, reflect. Here are some questions you can answer, go!"

Quite often I would get answers like

         "I found this assignment difficult because the tools I was using were hard."
or
          "This was an easy assignment because I was good at it."

Obviously this wasn't really the detail I was looking for. I wanted to actually get an idea of what the students found hard, and why they found it difficult, or what skills the students came into the assignment with that they leveraged in order to make it easier for themselves.

The root of the problem was obvious, but I couldn't see it because I was so wrapped up in providing feedback and chasing students around for not completing their work. The issue was I wasn't asking the right questions, or rather the questions I asked were to vague. I had also provided no exemplars for the students, good or bad. What is worse (in my opinion at least) is the students only have a vague idea of why were were reflecting in the first place!

Here is an example that I have found more success with:

   "Okay students, lets reflect! Not so fast, I go first."
*open an assignment*
   "So lets take the high road, lets talk about the successes I found in this assignment, who can give         me some things they see that are good about this assignment"
*students provide me a list of good things*
   "If were were to reflect on what went well in this assignment. What would be the purpose of such a    thing?"
*Students hum, haw, and shift awkwardly. Finally one brave soul shyly puts up a hand*
    "To tell you.... to tell you  what we learned?"
*Balloons fall from the sky, lights flash, a band starts up!*
   "That sounds pretty reasonable, so what kinds of things would a teacher like me be interested in    hearing about"


We then proceed to write a basic reflection on one positive thing together. How I made it, what skills allowed me to make it, how I solved problems I encountered etc.

I then ask the students to take 15 min and write one for their own assignment. After 15 min I come around to each student and provide them with verbal formative feedback.

After doing this four or five times with a class, the quality of  their reflections have improved dramatically. It doesn't work for all students, and it might not work for you, but it works for me :)

Digital Portfolios - How

Recently some colleagues and I got together to talk about Digital Portfolios. Here is what we came up with . Stay tuned for a video on all this :)

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We’re here today to talk to you about the “how” of reflections within Digital Portfolios.

Digital Portfolios allows your students to show you their continuum of learning; including what they know going into the lesson, what their progress is mid-way through and at the end of it  what they know now and where they may go next. This communicated through reflections.

From here on out I will be discussing what has worked well for me.

Initial Major Reflection:

This is where we hook them and determine the initial baseline of their knowledge. This includes what they already know, what predictions the can make about the upcoming learning, and potentially some strategies they may use.

Midway Major Reflection

This occurs partway into your project or assignment. This stage is where you provide opportunities for student to reflect on their current learning including: weather their initial predictions have been corroborated or rather their learning has gone off on an unanticipated direction. Students can also highlight any initial successes and discuss current difficulties.

Final Major Reflection:

At this point students will summarize their learning journey [cue don’t stop believing] They will describe what they thought they knew, what they actually knew, and what they learned. Hopefully students will also reflect on  what is yet to be learned as well. [Remember, this is just what has worked well for me]

They will also describe their skill development - The strategies they thought they would deploy, the strategies they DID deploy, and how effective they were. Effective reflection should also include where they struggled, how they coped or how they should have coped.

As the learning facilitator, your role in the reflections is to provide guiding questions, examples of your own reflective practices, as well as formative feedback on their reflective abilities.

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What you as a teacher do:

Before they start:

Give them an outline of what the assignment is about both topic and skill development.

Give them formative feedback on their plans and predictions.

(e.g. So you know romeo and juliet is going to be about teen suicide? Interesting, why do you think that? ~Or~ You are going to try and solve this problem by making a graph? Why do you think that will work? Have you tried that with a similar problem? ~and~ You think we will work on gathering, interpreting, and analyze ideas about the bubonic plague and communicate what you learned and some decisions about that? Do you think your plan addresses all that, or are you missing something?)

Middle:

This is still the realm of formative assessment / feedback. And it should still be on both their acquisition of knowledge, and the development of skills.

(e.g. This sentence in [insert language here] of your story seems like it is missing something. If it were in english, what would you say could make it better? ~OR~ Your hypothesis seems to be missing something, compair it to the examples from your notes and see what is different ~and~ You said you were going to collect information about settlers when discussing the impact of the colonization of canada, but you decided to switch to the Cree in Alberta. You went from a huge topic to a much smaller, totally different topic, that is an interesting choice, what made you make that choice?)

End:

Here is where the forces of formative and summative collide. With the feedback from the middle section, we assume the student has made the best iteration of this assignment that they can. We are saying they have squeezed as much juice out of this apple as possible. Assess their learning, how well have they shown you that they have learned what you wanted them to learn? But help them for the future as well, tell them what they could have done better, where you saw promise etc.

“Everybody has a plan until they are punched in the face” - Mike Tyson

On Digital Portfolios

First!


So the school I work at has been toying around with digital portfolios as a way of communicating student learning (CSL). Typically I teach sciences with a supçon  of Tech, this year it is all Tech all the time! While I miss my precious sciences, teaching all tech is giving me the tools and time needed to really shift my practice. Hence the digital portfolios.


I see the digital portfolio helping in a few important ways.
1) Forces me to force them to reflect.
2) Changes my focus from from the result to the process.
3) Provides me with tools to better communicate students' learning with parents.
4) Allows me to shift from a numbers based marking system to a standards based marking system (mastery?)
5) It shifts the responsibility for learning more to the student (growth mindset)


Details:

1) A portfolio without reflection is really just a collection of assignments and doesn't show learning anymore than a messy 3-ringed binder does. I am hoping asking students to reflect will

• Re-focus them on what they are actually learning
• Improve their problem-solving skills (habits of mind?)
• Give me a better sense of what they actually know, rather then trying to interpret it from an assignment. 

2)  I know that the process is where the learning comes from, but breaking out of 20 years of schooling (don't judge me) is hard, and I often find myself drifting back to "results, results, results". Focusing on the portfolios drags me away from that (kicking and screaming at times)

3) "Your child is getting 75%" doesn't tell parents much, and doesn't give them any way to help the student develop. "Your child is proficient in their critical thinking but still beginning in gathering ideas from group members" is a lot more useful (in my opinion at least)

4) I am not satisfied with how accurate my marking is in terms of understanding. I have had conversations with "A" students where they show very little understanding of the material, but the "C" student next to them can explain what is going on perfectly. I am unjustly penalising students that don't have test taking skills, and unjustly rewarding students that have "figured out" testing.  

5) I feel like a lot of my teaching has been "This is what you need to learn!" followed by "Prove that you learned it!" I much prefer "what have you learned, what else can you learn, what would you like to learn" I think this will help student develop a growth mindset (another new passion of mine).

More to come on digital portfolio fun!