Stress fractures, Danuta Tomasz

Stress fractures Danuta Tomasz warns against taking ‘no pain, no gain’ too far

Our performance-obsessed culture often requires a trade-off between work ethic and wellbeing. If schools or parents force children to sacrifice one in pursuit of the other they are likely to end up with neither successful students nor fulfilled ones

Student stress has become such an acute issue in recent years that several schools and universities have taken to employing ‘therapy pets’ to calm nerves. Last year, one companion dog was in such demand at a university that it had to be retired early because its handlers realised it was suffering from overwork.

As metaphors go, it’s hard to think of a more apt one to describe our attitude to student wellbeing. Our children’s lives are more structured and more intensely calibrated to maximise academic and career performance than ours ever were when we were young. The pressure to succeed has never been greater. Umpteen surveys and polls confirm that too many of our children say they are unhappy. But the response has often been inadequate. And if the solution is to rely solely on the involuntary services of a therapy dog at the end of a young person’s educational career, then arguably we need to rethink the issue.

The problem isn’t going to go away and, indeed, in some ways it is intensifying. Suicide rates among teenagers in the UK have risen substantially in recent years and we have the dubious distinction of having the highest self-harm rate of any country in Europe. Of course, it’s too easy – and misleading – to exclusively blame exam pressure and the rigours of the curriculum for this decline in mental health, but these are undoubtedly contributing factors for many adolescents.

That immediately presents us with a dilemma, because we as educators cannot eliminate stress entirely. A certain amount of pressure is integral to learning. Children are frequently told that ‘there is no gain without pain’, and while the language of suffering isn’t exactly helpful, teachers would be failing in their duty if they did not prepare students for what can be a challenging journey.

The latest scientific research, for instance, suggests that knowledge only penetrates into long-term memory after something like 14 repetitions. Deep learning requires deliberate practice, however boring and inconvenient that can be. Students improve when they master the elements of the curriculum they struggle with, rather than reproduce the bits they find easy.

All of those challenges can at times be stressful for children, and we won’t help them or their parents by pretending otherwise. It is our job as educators to help students to understand that if they want to work successfully they have to learn to work deeply. It is a question of teaching students how to manage and channel pressure, of learning from frustration and failure and harnessing those lessons in order to ultimately succeed.

Yet if inculcating a work ethic in students is essential, so is a recognition that one of the biggest impediments to academic performance is too much stress. Study after academic study only confirms what common sense supposes – happy students make for better students. We will not help our students academically if we make unreasonable demands on their time, weigh them down with too much revision and homework, or narrow the curriculum to concentrate on passing exams.

The vast majority of teachers instinctively understand this. But inflated expectations, whether held by parents or increasingly by students themselves, can be cruel taskmasters. Today’s youngsters have to cope with an online environment that can distract and diminish in equal measure, as well as academic pathways that have rarely been more competitive. It’s not surprising if many buckle under the strain. What teachers cannot do is let them sacrifice their wellbeing in pursuit of a goal that will only become more elusive the more anxious they become.

How then can we balance our duty to teach a rigorous, challenging curriculum while at the same time ensuring that our students are stretched rather than overly stressed by its demands? I believe that there are several things schools and parents can do.

The first is teaching children to understand the power of the word ‘yet’. As Carol Dweck argues, when students begin to understand that they may not be able to accomplish a task ‘yet’, but that they will someday, it immediately reduces the pressure to perform. If children know that they are not expected to get an answer right straight away, they instinctively feel less stressed and more confident in their ability to ponder and reflect. This is particularly effective at junior and prep school. Once the habit is embedded, children should be much better able to handle the pressures of their later school career.

Limiting exposure to social media is essential, too. I appreciate that this isn’t always easy, but there is increasing scientific evidence that prolonged immersion in social media is making teenagers more anxious and depressed. Too many of the influences young people are subjected to online are negative and guaranteed to undermine their confidence and reinforce a sense of isolation. Rationing social media use can only be good for the welfare of youngsters and, ultimately, their learning.

Finally, schools should offer students as many opportunities as possible to do activities that aren’t purely academic. They should be encouraged to play, dance, act, run, jump, lead, swim, sing, kick a ball and participate in all the other activities good schools pride themselves on providing. This not only has the advantage of weaning children from their phones, it builds character and aids academic performance rather than detracting from it.

We will never eliminate stress in education – pressure is intrinsic to the practice of learning. Nor can we sacrifice student wellbeing in the pursuit of academic success – stressed students make poor scholars. Instead, we have to accept that performance and wellbeing are intrinsically linked and that if we pursue one at the expense of the other we will end up with neither successful students nor fulfilled ones. Danuta Tomasz is Director of Education, UK, for the global schools group Cognita.

Mark my words Matthew Jenkinson apostrophises

Like many teachers, I am currently very much enjoying reading Carl Hendrick and Robin Macpherson’s What Does This Look Like in the Classroom? – a practically useful antidote to sometimes cold and distant educational research. As someone who spends a significant proportion of his life marking (English and History – lots of words in those) or asking others to mark effectively, I have been particularly taken by the chapter on assessment and feedback.

There has been quite a lot of head-nodding going on.

‘It’s very difficult to be excellent if you don’t know what excellent looks like.’ ‘Uhuh’.

‘Don’t ever give feedback to students unless you make the time … for them to respond to that feedback.’ ‘Sure’.

‘It has to be specific, very precise, and making sure that it’s expressed in such a way and that it’s dealing with something that the people already have some ownership of.’ ‘Absolutely’.

There have been some nuggets that have made me think about my own classroom practice and the fundamental rationale behind it.

‘Feedback that is given too frequently can lead learners to overly depend on it as an aid during practice, a reliance that is no longer afforded during later assessments.’ ‘Yup, that’s what I feared’.

‘Students will only act on feedback if they believe they can get better, so motivating students to believe in improvement itself becomes a key part of the challenge.’ ‘I agree but do I always focus on it?’

‘Make feedback into detective work.’ ‘Hmmm, interesting’.

‘The best person to mark a test is the person who just took it.’ ‘Ah, that’s what I kind of stumbled towards while left to my own devices revising for A-Levels all those years ago’.

Prompted by all this sage advice – model what you’re looking for; get pupils hungry for feedback that they can comprehend and have ownership of; give whole-class feedback on common misconceptions; harness the power of the self-quiz or the expertly-controlled peer assessment – I have been thinking about why we tick, correct spellings, write nice things, and give areas for further improvement. I’ve been wondering why we bother if so many of our suggestions go unheeded straightaway. If little Bobby doesn’t use apostrophes for ownership after the thirtieth time of asking, should I just give up? Should I radically overhaul expectations of myself and my colleagues, after all that apparently ineffectively spilt ink?

And the answer is … no. When discussing the power of marking and feedback, we can too often focus on little Bobby’s apostrophes. We can get frustrated that we told the pupil to do something, they smiled and nodded, then totally forgot, or didn’t actually listen. Even when we get little Bobby to initial next to our comment that they’d read it, or if we ask them to write a little note, against which we can write a little note if we wish, it’s

usually the case that that pesky apostrophe won’t appear next time. It’s frustrating – sure – but only if we misunderstand what marking is about.

I would argue it is not about the quick fix or the immediate improvement. Most pupils, as we all know, do not follow an upwardly linear path. Rather, marking and feedback is about creating a culture, and it is this culture that will have positive impacts in the long term, beyond the apostrophe.

When I think back to the marking in my own schoolbooks, I can remember four or five instances of corrosive feedback. I know, it’s a bit odd, but I dwell on these things. The first was in a piece of Year 7 Science homework where the teacher scribbled ‘3/10’ and left it at that. For years I had no idea how to get the extra seven marks: in fact I think the answer came to me about fifteen years later while I was still mulling it over (yes, I know) on some interminable train journey.

The second was some marginalia in a Year 9 History essay where the teacher had made the annotation next to one of my arguments, ‘I said that’, and wrote virtually nothing else. Well, yes, you did – but is it a huge problem if I am adding ideas that have come up in the lesson? I’ll never know.

Or how about the Year 12 Politics essay when I was told ‘… and repetition is dull’ because I’d twice written ‘knowledge is power’? What have I learned from that snarky comment? That I shouldn’t repeat myself? That I shouldn’t repeat myself?

Or, finally, my first year undergraduate tutor (I use the term loosely – I was quite unsure which century of French history we’d been studying after a year of this person’s lectures) who sneered ‘Oh, you’re one of those are you?’ after I’d asked how I might improve my middlingly 2:1 essay.

It’s alright. I’m over it.

All of these examples speak to a culture in which the educational process was undermined because of the cursory, the snarky, the dismissive, the vague. If our marking is quick and messy – an impatient tick and turn, a scribbled grade – then our pupils notice that we have not taken care over what they have written. And, quite often, they have put in an enormous amount of effort into that writing. We correct spelling and punctuation to model the correct way of writing, effective communication skills, attention to detail, and so on. But we also do it because it says to the pupil, ‘I’ve read your work carefully enough to notice where the errors are, and I care enough about you and your work to show you how to get better’.

Once that relationship is built and enhanced between pupil and teacher then the culture is one in which there is sufficient trust and care for improvement to occur over the long term. The missing apostrophe might not appear tomorrow or next week, but if little Bobby knows that I care enough about his education and progress, he will be more likely to engage with my teaching and his learning, and improvement will occur in so many different areas – apostrophe or no apostrophe. If little Bobby clocks that

Teachers I’m only marking because I have to or because I’ve been told to, that I don’t really enjoy what I’m doing or care about what they’ve written, then it is a corrosive factor in the classroom. It’s a hard one from which to recover.

Also, it’s nice to write nice things about people and their work. I’ve marked thousands and thousands of scripts, but it’s still a joy to point out when someone has done something well, or where they’ve made improvement. It’s great to be able to reward them. I know it’s hard work and it’s time consuming – which is why comments should be specific and precise – but I’d rather front-load the culture in my classroom by showing that I care, which will save time later on from not having to claw back pupils I’ve lost because they think, rightly or wrongly, I don’t have any time for their work. And, call me a sadist or a pedant, but it’s enjoyable to be able to find something to improve on next time, no matter how ‘perfect’ the piece of work in front of me might be. There’s always something, and as often as not it’s a missing apostrophe. Matthew Jenkinson is Deputy Head Academic of New College School, Oxford

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Target topped

Bryanston School’s annual Charities Day, organised by the Heads of School, and the prefects, took place on 3rd March with a host of fundraising events aiming to raise an ambitious target of £29,000 to enable United World Schools (UWS) to build a school for 200 children in Cambodia.

Astonishingly they raised more than £54,000, an achievement which far exceeds any other fundraising event in the school’s history. This proved to be enough to fund a second school in Myanmar and to cover the first year running costs for both. The new schools will be run by UWS as part of its programme to improve the life opportunities of some of the world’s poorest children through education.

Speaking after the event, Sara Furness, Associate Director for Partnerships at United World Schools, said: ‘We are, quite simply, blown away by the support, enthusiasm and generosity of the pupils and staff of Bryanston School. The passion and planning for the fundraising drive was truly inspirational. The impact of this project will be felt for generations to come.’

Across the weekend, pupils and staff were involved in a range of events from a Dance Show to a Dog Show, with a silent auction and a photography exhibition. The Whole School Challenge involved over 500 pupils, as well as teaching and support staff, undertaking a wide range of ambitious challenges that included rowing the Atlantic on an indoor rowing machine, swimming the equivalent distance to crossing the English Channel and climbing Mt Snowdon.

Head, Sarah Thomas, commented: ‘The success of the event is an enormous testament to the leadership of the Heads of School. They have set the bar exceptionally high and delivered a wonderful and diverse weekend. It was also incredibly heartening to see the support from the rest of the school. Everyone contributed to the weekend, whether it was taking part in a challenge, sponsoring a fellow pupil or simply supporting their peers behind the scenes.

Thanks must also go to our teaching and support staff who gave their time generously, and our parents who helped by donating or bidding on items in the silent auction or supported the various events throughout the weekend.’