Foundation for academic achievement and life success
Take a moment to envisage yourself in a ‘normal’, healthy and well- adjusted state of mind.
For some of you this may come easily, others of us may need to use a bit of imagination… Now once you have a vision of ‘healthy and normal’ clearly in your head, try standing up and sitting down in a normal and well-adjusted way.
If you have just carried out the above request, you may well have found yourself feeling and acting anything but ‘normal’. You may have felt a bit awkward or contrived in your behaviour, perhaps even a bit self-conscious or even a bit ‘abnormal’…whatever that might mean. If you did, then you are certainly not alone. Healthy, normal behaviour is, by definition, not something we give much attention to on a day-to-day basis. Ironically, when we do start to ponder on the normality of our behaviour, it immediately seems to lose its normal status.
As problem solving beings, we generally focus our attention on the task of problem solving — on finding solutions for our problems or unwanted thoughts, feelings and behaviours. When things are going well, we are too busy getting on with life to be analysing or reflecting on how we are presenting ourselves.
This means that it is not only difficult to accurately and objectively define ‘normal’ or healthy states of mind, but that it can be incredibly difficult to know how to achieve them when they are not forthcoming. As such, the study of positive psychology and its application to positive education is fraught with early challenges. How can we best support a flourishing education community if we are not totally sure what ‘flourishing’ looks or feels like? Moreover, how do we best support others in their journey to flourish if we are unsure how best to do this or indeed unsure if supporting others is even possible? These are big, important questions that constantly need addressing and challenging. To ignore them is to assume that supporting wellbeing in schools is either unnecessary or, simply, all too hard to do.
In a recent article in the UK Conversation, Professor Katherine Ecclestone from The University of Sheffield proposes that positive education may be a waste of time and resources. She suggests that school-based programmes designed to nurture social and emotional competencies in young people are at best ineffective, and sometimes detrimental to wellbeing.
Katherine cites both a lack of robust research and misconceptions about how best to nurture wellbeing as reasons for her argument. She suggests that we may well be creating unnecessary anxiety in students by relentlessly encouraging them to talk about every unwanted thought or upsetting feeling. She also suggests that contrary to many other research findings, mental health issues may actually not be worse for young people than they were ten or 20 years ago.
When I first read Katherine’s article I was infuriated at her sweeping statements damming school wellbeing initiatives. However, now I have calmed down and am once again feeling relatively ‘normal’ myself, I consider that it is a good, and in fact necessary thing, to challenge what we want to teach kids and how we want to teach them.
I believe that Katherine is right in stating that many studies concerning the effectiveness of wellbeing programmes are based on small samples of kids and are often without matched comparisons. However, the fact that there is a need for more rigorous research does not mean that the research conducted to date is not of great value.
In fact, we could say that wellbeing is such an important topic that it is incredibly hard to be ethical about including control groups in our studies. It can be argued that it is unfair to insist on including comparative groups of kids who do not receive support in any study that offers much-needed benefits. Katherine’s claims about the lack of robust research are also testament to the fact that positive education is still a very new field. We are only just starting to see evidence of effectiveness (or lack of effectiveness) of school-based programmes. This does not mean that these programmes are valueless, but rather that they are still in their infancy.
The professor has also commendably alerted us to the need to question not just whatwedo,buthowwedoit.Itisnot simply enough to adopt a ‘motivation’ programme because we want our classroom to be motivated. We do need to have theoretical evidence that the programme will work or at least make sure we proceed with great caution. For example, there are many rewards-based programmes that claim to increase motivation but in reality decrease it. A great body of solid research tells us that extrinsic rewards de- motivate students because they encourage them to turn their attentions away from the benefits of what they are doing, and instead focus on the judgments of others.
Similarly, we have to be careful not to simplify the components of wellbeing to such a degree that they become something else altogether. For example, it is a great idea to encourage kids to find and embrace their passions in life (rather than focusing all their time on trying to address their weaknesses). However, to simplify our skills and passions to a list of four or five strengths is immediately limiting our potential and taking away our flexibility.
The pursuit of positive education is not simply a matter of caring about wellbeing. Neither is it a matter of simply talking about our feelings more frequently or adopting a five point plan. Just as we would spurn a Readers Digest version of a great novel when studying literature, so too must we be careful not to jump on the ‘Readers Digest’ approach to mental health. Having said that, this does not mean that the potted version of knowledge cannot raise much-needed awareness of the importance of social and emotional learning.
Let’s make sure that we do not throw out the gift with the wrapping paper. All too often, the details of a programme are not the issue, but rather, it is the method of programme delivery that needs consideration. Many established programmes have been found to have good results when delivered by socially and emotionally competent teachers, but not when the teachers were stressed or inexperienced. For example, the social and emotional development program, PATHS which is very popular in the US and now in the UK, has been found to be significantly effective if, and only if, the teachers delivering the programme are socially and emotionally competent themselves.
Katherine is also right in alerting us to regularly consider the overall need for supporting wellbeing in young people. However, here our beliefs diverge significantly. Whether or not wellbeing levels have altered in young people over the past decade seems immaterial to me. The important fact is, we can be confident is stating that an alarming one in five young people in Australia today need help for a significant mental health issue. That means that in an average classroom of 25 kids, four will be unacceptably distressed. It also means that many of the other kids in the class are vulnerable to mental health issues and not doing as well as they could be. As Professor Corey Keyes so eloquently states, “The absence of mental illness does not equate to the presence of mental health”.
Serious mental health issues are chronically disabling and can be life threatening. There is no way that an average Australian parent would let their child participate in something that had a one in five chance of giving them a life threatening disease; yet we seem so content to let them participate in a social and educational system that is associated with alarmingly high rates of distress.
It is also well known that the biggest predictor of adult mental illness is childhood mental illness. I am confident that every adult I know has friends and family members who suffer from mental illness or psychological distress. I would bet that all of us also know many more people, perhaps themselves, who are simply not as happy as they would like to be.
We really do need to be cautious in ensuring that we consider how and what we deliver to nurture wellbeing in our schools and colleges. We also need to ensure that we acknowledge the need to constantly strive to do more. It is vital that we prioritise social and emotional learning as a foundation for academic achievement and for life success. It is simply not enough for kids to be OK or ‘getting by’. All young people deserve every opportunity to learn how to flourish in life. School-based interventions are not a replacement for a healthy home environment but they certainly need to provide the continuation of one. As I stated in my 2004 work on nurturing classroom environments, happy ‘normal’, well-adjusted kids need to be in an environment that fosters emotional safety, a sense of community and unconditional acceptance.