272. Mind Over Monsters

Show Notes

• Cavanagh, S. R. (2016). The Spark of Learning: Energizing the college classroom with the science of emotion. West Virginia University Press.
• Cavanagh, S. R. (2019). Hivemind: The new science of tribalism in our divided world. Grand Central Publishing.
• Cavanagh, S. R. (forthcoming, 2023). Mind Over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge. Beacon Press.
• Elizabeth Romero
• Ryan Glode
• Reacting to the Past
• Jasmin Veerapen
• Gary Senecal
• Miller, L. (2020). Why Fish Don’t Exist: a story of loss, love, and the hidden order of life. Simon & Schuster.
• Robert Sapolsky’s Publications
• Auel, J. M. (2002). The Clan of the Cave Bear. Bantam.
• Kelly Leonard
• Felten, P., & Lambert, L. M. (2020). Relationship-Rich Education: How human connections drive success in college. JHU Press.
• Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan
• Michele Lemons
• James Lang

Transcript

John: During the last few years, college students have been reporting mental health concerns at unprecedented levels, straining the resources provided by college and university counseling centers. In this episode, we discuss the role that faculty can play in addressing these concerns.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Sarah Rose Cavanagh. Sarah is a psychologist, professor and Senior Associate Director for Teaching and Learning at Simmons University. She is the author of The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion and Hivemind: Thinking Alike in a Divided World as well as numerous academic articles and essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lit Hub, Inside Higher Ed, and Vice. Her most recent book, Mind Over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge will be released in spring 2023.

Welcome back, Sarah.

Sarah: Thank you. I’m delighted to be here.

John: Today’s teas are:… Sarah, are you drinking any tea?

Sarah: No, I always disappoint you. I am yet again drinking coffee.

Rebecca: Yet again, such a stable person in our lives with your coffee. [LAUGHTER] I have blue sapphire tea.

Sarah: That’s a pretty name.

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s tasty. And my new favorite.

John: And I am drinking spring cherry green tea here in the midst of winter in upstate New York. We’ve invited you here today to discuss Mind over Monsters. Could you talk a little bit about the origin of this project?

Sarah: For me, I think writing is more organic than it is planned, and so it felt a little bit like the book decided it needed to be written, rather than I decided to write the book. There was just such a groundswell of interest around young adult’s mental health, people talking about it, podcasts, books. And I am a college professor, I’m a psychologist, I am an educational developer. I’m the mom of an adolescent, and so I couldn’t help but be concerned and interested in this topic. And I also felt that, as someone who has struggled with anxiety my entire life, panic disorder in particular, that I had some small bits of wisdom from my lived experiences to share. And so it just all came together.

John: How prevalent are mental health issues among youth today?

Sarah: They’re pretty prevalent, unfortunately. Some people have even labeled it an epidemic. For instance, in 2021, three of the major American organizations dedicated to youth and adolescent mental health joined together and declared a national state of emergency, which was an unprecedented move. And they cited in particular the effects of the pandemic and the fact that already marginalized groups along lines of race and ethnicity, gender, and sexuality and income were bearing the brunt of the psychological effects of the pandemic. But also there’s a lot of complexities surrounding figuring out whether rates have truly changed or whether there’s also changes in stigma surrounding mental health, which are laudatory changes, we want people not to feel stigma, and to come out and reach out for treatment. There’s also changes in the thresholds of the diagnoses themselves, they shift every several years. And there’s also changes in people’s willingness to seek treatment, and also their decisions about the level at which they might need treatment. And so there’s some evidence that a lot of these complexities may be making epidemics seem worse than it is. But what is clear is that more young adults and especially college students are expressing more distress and asking for help with that distress. Counseling centers on campus are absolutely overwhelmed and students are expressing a lot of frustration with not receiving the level and the timing of care that they need in those settings, and so clearly, we need changes.

Rebecca: In a lot of public conversations, we’re hearing debates about needing to show compassion to adolescents who are struggling, but then also others who argue that youth is too coddled. Can you talk a little bit about what you would advocate for?

Sarah: And that’s a delightfully easy setup for me, [LAUGHTER] because in the subtitle of the book is “compassionate challenge and why we need to support youth mental health with compassionate challenge.” And I argue that this debate and tension between compassion and challenge is one of these false dichotomies that we human beings seem to adore. [LAUGHTER] Students clearly need compassion, and I think compassion has to come first. For me, what that looks like is establishing classroom communities and learning environments on campus that are characterized by safety and by a feeling of belongingness. You need to feel safe enough to take risks. And you need to feel that you’re supported not just by your instructor, but also your fellow students and the Student Success Office and all of the people on campus. But once we’ve established that grounding and that safe setting, then I think to truly learn and grow, we do need to take risks, we do need to step outside our comfort zones, and we need to be challenged. And I think that challenge can be very positive. I spend one of the last chapters of the book really digging into the science of play, and how play is all about being vulnerable and taking risks and play can be scary. And you can only play in settings where you, again, feel safe. And I think, finally, what I call compassionate challenge isn’t just important for teaching and learning. As I draw out in two interviews with clinical psychologists Ryan Glode and Elly Romero, compassionate challenge is also really key to addressing anxiety and symptoms of mental health. And I don’t think we’re going to be doing any therapy in the classroom, but learning environments marked by compassionate challenge are ones that are consistent with principles that help address and resolve anxiety, which again, involves facing your fears, and environments where you’re technically safe and there’s a facilitator there to help you manage those risks.

Rebecca: John and I were talking earlier about some of the things that I had observed in my own classroom in the last year with an increase in desire for perfection, like kind of perfectionism or anxiety around not being perfect and not being right and working with students in class and trying to find ways to help students work through that so that they could take risks or could show things in progress to get feedback so that they could continue to improve. Can you talk a little bit more about what that might look like in a classroom?

Sarah: Well, I think that a lot of that brings up assessment and grading. And I think why we see that perfectionism in the classroom is that students are very concerned about their grades, because they believe, to some extent rightly, that their grades are going to translate into future security, and to getting into the right graduate school or getting the right job. And we do this to students. In high school, we train them to be so focused on the grades in order to get into the correct college and I have a high schooler and her grades are constantly just streaming, coming in in real time to her phone. And then we’re surprised when students get to college and they’re too focused on their grades. [LAUGHTER] And so I think that helping students with that need for perfection is probably reforming our grading systems so that there isn’t that need, that that focus on perfectionism isn’t necessarily rewarded in the same way. And instead, we’re rewarding taking risks and doing something creative, and maybe failing and having multiple iterations of something and seeing that work can grow over time, which, I think, amplifies creativity

Rebecca: There’s a lot more focus on process than on the product, then.

Sarah: Yes.

John: You mentioned using play in classrooms, what would be an example of the use of play in the classroom?

Sarah: Well, I think you can directly play through using improv, and especially in the early parts of the semester when you’re all getting to know each other, a lot of icebreakers are very playful. And community building can be very playful. I think there are ways like the whole reacting to the past role playing approach in history. You can easily roleplay in literature classes. So I think you can directly play. I think that what play can also be is almost like a philosophy or a stance that you take, that what we’re doing in the classroom is not dire. And, related to the grading that we were just talking about, there aren’t large stakes, that what we’re doing here is this is kind of a sandbox, where we’re playing with intellectual ideas, we’re testing things out, we’re experimenting. And there’s a sense in which it’s lighthearted, even when the topics are not light hearted, I think that we can take this lighthearted stance with our students. And I think also mixing things up and not getting too into routines, can also be playful. And I feel like I have a lot of tricks in my teaching bag, different discussion techniques and ways of getting us up and moving and things like that. But there’s always a point, kind of through the three-quarter mark of the semester, where they’ve seen it all. And so I try to save one or two things for that point in the semester and kind of throw everything out the window and do something entirely different. And I think that that can be playful as well. And so I don’t think that play in the classroom is all about things that we think of as play proper, like improv and roleplay; it can also be all of these other techniques.

Rebecca: One of the things that I’ve studied in the past is play. And one of the things that’s interesting about play is that there’s rules and there’s structure. And so a lot of times we think that play is just chaos, but actually play almost always has rules. They might not be formal rules, they might be informal rules. But that’s a way that people can feel safe and able to play is that they understand what the structure is and what the rules are.

Sarah: Those are great points.

Rebecca: You think that it’s hard to facilitate because it might seem so foreign, but actually we’re all very familiar with play. And it is actually incredibly structured. We know that structured things can be really inclusive. And so you might be hesitant to try something that seems like it might be unstructured, but I think, lo and behold, play is actually structured.

Sarah: Yeah, and a lot of those classic improv activities have strict rules in fact and one of the rules is that there’s a kindness.So, even when animals play… you know, I watch dogs play a lot at dog parks, and it can get quite vicious looking, but the animals are safe, you don’t harm each other and that is a strict rule of play as well.

John: Some of this book is drawn from research you conducted as part of the Student Voices project. Could you tell us a little bit about that project?

Sarah: Absolutely. So this was a project that grew out of my last grant from the Davis Educational Foundation. I had done a quantitative study that I talked with you all about in the past. And we had some funds left. And I had an honor student, Jasmin Veerapen, who’s now at Columbia, getting her social work degree, and she needed an honors thesis project. And so we collaborated together and ran a qualitative follow up and interviewed students from 35 different very diverse types of institutions across the country. And it was not a project focused explicitly on mental health, but on emotions and learning. So for instance, the first two questions we asked of all of our participants was: What was the best learning experience you have had in college, and tell us all about it?” And the second was, “What was one of the worst learning experiences you had in college?” ..and their insights are all so rich, and I share a number of their wonderful stories in the book. It’s a great pleasure.

John: Would that be something that you’d encourage faculty to do in their own classes?

Sarah: Yes, it was very illustrative, a lot came out of that. And we actually had worked with a consultant, Gary Senecal, because this was my first qualitative research study, and so I didn’t really know what I was doing. And he’s done a lot of qualitative research, and so he was our consultant. And he helped us shape the questions. And I think he had a large role in shaping those first two questions, because they’re just open ended enough that students share very different things, but then they all coalesce, and so it was very informative. And I think many professors could learn a lot asking their students those questions.

Rebecca: You included many narratives throughout your book, some of your own personal stories and some of the stories of student voices from this project. Can you talk about why you decided to include narrative as a part of the book?

Sarah: Yes, when I think about the books that I most like to read, the nonfiction books that I most like to read, they have a really strong narrative component. So I recently read Why Fish Don’t Exist, which was one of my favorite reads out of the last few years. And I love Robert Sapolsky’s books, and I’m a story person. And I mostly read fiction. And so I really enjoy nonfiction that has a strong narrative component. So that was one of my motivations, that I wanted to write a book that was like the books that I like to read. I think that story, though, also is really compelling. I think that there are insights that are embedded in stories that things like quantitative data can’t always tap into in the same way. And I think in particular, for topics like this, and for emotions and for students’ perceptions of their own learning, I think that we need story.

John: In addition to narrative, which is really compelling in your book, you also bring in a number of other disciplinary studies. Could you talk a little bit about some of the other disciplines and some of the other research your book relies on

Sarah: That’s a little, maybe, too far into humanities, I’m a little worried. I am a social scientist by training. And I’m very aware of the fact that there is disciplinary expertise. But I do bring in a lot of humanity’s work, in particular monster theory. So I read quite a bit of monster theory, which wasn’t even something that I knew existed before then, but that’s in there. I do something that I get from my mother. I used to make fun of my mother for always citing literature and stories as evidence for things. I would take an anthropology class and come home from college, and we would talk about it. And she would shake her head at me and say, “Well, that’s not how it happened, in Clan of the Cave Bear. [LAUGHTER] But I do a little bit about that. So I bring in some stories from novels and short stories that I think illustrate the points that I’m trying to make as well. And then I think, most compellingly, I bring in actual experts from their disciplines. So I interview a sociologist about her research on trigger warnings. I interview a Latin American Studies scholar about his work on vocation, which I found so fascinating. And I also interviewed a couple of clinicians, as I said, and Kelly Leonard who is a Second City improv person, and so I bring in those other disciplines through the lens of the people I’m interviewing.

Rebecca: Sometimes it’s really helpful to have these illustrations because statistics can go only so far in helping us understand what that actually looks like and feels like in our classrooms or in the experience that students are having because we can feel really far removed… or I’m feeling farther and farther removed [LAUGHTER] from students and it helps to hear things in their own voices. And we don’t always ask them enough. I wish we asked more.

John: …which is something really troubling to those of us who focus mostly on statistical analyses, and so forth. [LAUGHTER] But it’s true, a compelling story can be much more effective in convincing people of some concept than any number of studies that you might present to them.

Sarah: But we do have lots of citations for people like you, John. But I tried to bring both sources to the table,

Rebecca: …which is good, because you got both of us here.

Sarah: Mm hmm.

Rebecca: So can you talk a little bit about the intended audience of your book?

Sarah: Absolutely. My primary audience, I think, is people who are doing the work of higher education, so college instructors, staff like me who work in teaching centers, and student success offices, administrators, and so it does have a strong higher ed thread throughout. That said, I don’t think there’s a super bright line between especially late high school and early college in some of these concerns. And I think it could be useful for high school educators, especially those who might be advising students about the college selection process. I think that there is some insight and some sections, maybe, that could be of interest to college students themselves, and possibly their parents. But I would want them to know that it’s not a parenting book. I don’t want anyone to pick it up thinking it’s a parenting book. There’s long sections, again, on trigger warnings and institutions needing to actually carry out their DE&I statements. And someone picking it up thinking they’re going to get some pithy advice about parenting is not going to be satisfied.

John: Would this be a good focus for faculty reading groups or book clubs?

Sarah: I think so. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: We think so too. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, it looks like, yeah, it looks like some really wonderful topics that you’re exploring to think about all of higher ed in a lot of ways, and perhaps some reimagining that needs to happen.

Sarah: Oh, thank you.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what we, as educators or people working in higher ed, can do to create a more compassionate and challenging environment for our students? What are some actions we can take?

Sarah: Well, I think you have to do the compassion piece first. And I think that colleges really need to be examining, and I think they are examining, there’s lots of other people sharing this message of compassion and relationship, rich education, thinking of Peter Felton and Leo Lambert’s book. And I think that we need to embed compassion in the atmosphere in the classroom and the dorms. I think that we need to pay a lot of attention to community. I think that we need to shore up resources in counseling centers. I’ve been attending, as part of the research for this book, lots of webinars with people who are looking at this topic from a lot of different frameworks. And there’s a lot of interesting work being done on peer support, which I’m both interested in and also wary of. I think that peers are our natural first source of support. And that peer support could be really life changing for a lot of college students. But just like we shouldn’t be doing therapy in the classroom, I don’t think it’s the responsibility of college students to do counseling for their fellow peers. And they’re trained to spot warning signs and to do the kind of heavy lifting that a lot of counseling involves. And so I think that we’re going to need to dedicate more resources to trained clinicians in our counseling centers. In my interview with Ryan Glode in the book, who is, again, a clinical counseling psychologist, he really feels that counseling centers provide just sort of venting sorts of therapy, and that he’s a strong advocate of cognitive behavioral therapy and exposure therapy, and that students need much more individualized treatment and approaches. And so I think that that’s an interesting thing to explore. And the last thing I would say is, I always say this, but faculty need more support and time, because there’s been a lot of great essays coming out, the last couple of weeks even I’ve seen, about the fact that student success is really faculty success, and faculty are where students get more of their support than anywhere else. And we can try to reach out to them in many different ways, but they land in our classrooms, we know that we’ll see them in their classrooms, even if they’re not leaving their dorm much, they usually come to class. And so it’s an entry point. Mentoring is such a strong part of the college experience and so wonderful for growth and mental health. And so I think that for faculty to really apply all of this and have really close student relationships and really rich classrooms and all of these things, they need more time and more support. And so I think that the two places I would put my support is in the counseling center and then in supporting faculty, giving them the kinds of time and the kinds of support that will allow them to be the teachers that they can be when they have the time to do so.

Rebecca: Are there specific places where you found compassion to be lacking that surprised you in your research? We know that there’s a [LAUGHTER] strain on counseling centers, but were there some other places that really rose to really needing some attention,

Sarah: None of the students we talked to had trouble coming up with either a best or worst learning experience. And the good ones are really, really good. And the poor ones were pretty poor. And so there’s a lot of unevenness, I think, and I think that that, when I talk as I just did about, if you just give faculty more time, then they’ll blossom, and then the students will blossom, and sometimes when I have conversations with administrators about that, or see policies being enacted on different campuses, I can tell that there’s a wariness that if you give faculty time, they’ll just either do more research, or they will check out and that there’s a danger there and we need to work faculty harder. And I do see in talking to the students about their best and worst learning experiences, that the people teaching those worst learning experiences really need to step up their game a little bit. And so I think that there are those pockets out there that still don’t apply themselves to their teaching or look at it as an onerous responsibility. But the good teachers are really fantastic. And so maybe leveling that out a little bit, bringing the worst learning experiences up to the best learning experiences might be somewhere I recommend some attention.

John: One of the areas where people often see a dichotomy between compassion and challenge is in terms of deadlines in courses where material later in the course build on material earlier in the course, it’s really easy for students who are struggling to get further and further behind when they don’t have at least some sort of a deadline. Do you have any strategies for addressing that, besides focusing on the learning rather than on grades? What can we do to help ensure that students make regular progress while still maintaining compassion?

Sarah: Um hmm. I think this is the question of the moment. [LAUGHTER] And I can tell you, I just had a conversation with a reporter at The Chronicle who was writing a whole big piece on just this issue. And we at Simmons just met with our advisory council, who are a group of about 12 faculty who we check in with about what faculty needs are. And this was their number one answer, like clearly. So we’re going to do a panel in the spring at Simmons, where we have some faculty with very different perspectives. We’re hoping to draw out some of these tensions and have this discussion. And so I do think it’s an excellent question. And I think that a deadline is a good example of where compassionate challenge needs to be. I think that all of us need the structure of deadlines. I myself benefit [LAUGHTER] greatly from the structure of deadlines and schedules. And I think especially for college students in the early years, if they’re so-called traditionally aged students, some of the process of those first year or two of college is learning time management and in scaffolding them into good time management. And so I think that structure is very important. As Rebecca was saying earlier, it’s also an inclusive teaching strategy, Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan have written extensively about that. But I think without compassion, deadlines are going to worsen student anxiety, and also it doesn’t make a lot of sense for contemporary life. And so some techniques that I’ve seen are things like using frequent tokens instead of just no deadlines or 100% flexibility with deadlines and things kind of pile up toward the end. You can have tokens where students can have a set number of missed assignments, or dropped assignments, or I need an extra week or two. I think that it’s important in whatever you do, if you are going to be flexible to be transparent with all of the students about it, because I think that some students will ask for flexibility and the other students won’t know that they can ask for flexibility. And a lot of that falls out along the lines where everything falls out and creates inequities. So I think that having some structure, but with some flexibility built in is probably the best way to go. I was interviewing a biology instructor for a different project. And she was telling me what she did is she had pretty close to unlimited flexibility within modules. So she had her whole semester set up in modules, but then you had to submit things within that module, because as you say, especially some fields, the information builds, and if you miss part, you’re going to be in trouble. And so I thought that was another interesting approach. But I agree that in particular when we’re thinking about mental health, that structure is better. And the last thing I’ll say is that at my previous campus, we had a panel of the Dean of first-year students, it was the head of our accessibility office, the head of our counseling center, and then a clinical counseling psychologist from our psychology department about issues surrounding student mental health. And one of the instructors asked about deadlines, and they were all unanimous, they said, deadlines are necessary. The worst thing you can do for a student high in anxiety is allow no deadlines or submissions whenever they like, because that will quickly get them into a negative place, and that they need that structure. So I think it’s a great example of the need for both compassion and challenge.

Rebecca: One of the things that I think about when I hear structure or certain kinds of support is routine. And you talked a little earlier about having some routine, but then disruptions to that routine. Can you talk about why some of the disruptions to the routine might be important, or why not having a routine all the time could be helpful for students?

Sarah: Well, I think the positives of routine are that they’re reassuring, for one thing. I think we all as human beings, it’s relaxing to settle into a routine, and it’s also lower in cognitive load. If you just know, okay, every Thursday, I have a homework assignment, every Tuesday I have a quiz, you don’t have to constantly be scrambling and figuring things out every week. And so I think that routines can be reassuring, and they can also be more transparent and easier to follow along. I think where the disruption is great is it re-energizes. So it’s great to be reassured and calm things down. But then that can get boring and kind of stultifying after a little while. And so once you have established the routine to mix things up once in a while, I think, can be re-energizing. And so I think that’s where a blend of the two can be really powerful.

Rebecca: You mentioned that you do this in your own classes. Can you share an example of one of the ways you mix things up in your own class,

Sarah: it’s not terribly exciting. But the one that I do this most clearly is in my motivation and emotion class. And in that class, we’re covering different topics and we’re reading research articles and doing presentations. And again, I try to mix things up, but I have a set number of things that I mix things up. And then usually right after Thanksgiving, I throw everything out the window and we just spend a week doing something different. And so we used to watch a movie together. And then we would write an essay about the motivation and emotion aspects and the themes that we’ve talked about all semester long, how it played out in those characters lives. And I was showing Lars and the Real Girl, I don’t know if it’s kind of an older movie now and stopped doing that for a while for a number of reasons. But then more recently, in this activity called “making the world a better place.” And I had a selection of psychological science articles, each one that tackled a societal problem, like climate change, or misinformation, and how we could use principles from recent psychological science research and to help improve this societal conundrum. And then we did small group work with snacks. And they would work on little group presentations all together that were very low stakes, and then present them to each other. And we would have a grant competition among them. But it was just this week where the routine was very different.

Rebecca: It sounds like almost a culminating point of the semester, instead of ramping up stress with a big project, it’s ramping down the stress with something that’s applied, but in a more low key way.

John: …but also valuable and fun.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely. To me, it sounds like: “[LOUD EXHALE]”

John: We always end with the question: “What’s next?”

Sarah: Well, I have a new grant. Well, a semi-new grant. And it’s a National Science Foundation Incubator Grant with my co-PI, Michele Lemons of Assumption University. And it is examining assessment, feedback, and grading in undergraduate bio education in particular. And so we had a qualitative portion, we had a survey portion, and we had student interviews, and we’ve just wrapped data collection, So I have a lot of writing and meaning-making and analysis, and then a full proposal grant [LAUGHTER] to write. So on the research side, that’s what’s going on. And on the writing side, I don’t know yet. I have a few possible ideas. I’m in a writers group with Jim Lang, who I know you both know, and his new book, which is going to be fantastic… and you have to have him on the show… is all about how academics can successfully write trade books for a wider audience. And I’ve been enjoying the chapters as he’s been writing them. And I was reading his chapter on where to get your book idea, and I realized that I’ve written a couple of books now from my expertise, but I don’t have to stick with my expertise. I could do something super fun. And so I don’t know.

John: Not that your expertise isn’t fun or interesting. [LAUGHTER]

Sarah: Well, thank you. And anything I write will obviously have a strong psychology component, it’s just like in my bones at this point. But yeah, so stay tuned. We’ll see.

Rebecca: Sounds like some exciting things down the pike for sure.

John: We look forward to hearing more about that when you’re ready to share that.

Sarah: Oh, thanks.

John: Well, thank you. It’s great talking to you.

Sarah: Thank you. Always a pleasure.

Rebecca: Yeah, I always learn stuff from our conversations, so I’m looking forward to having you on again in the future.

Sarah: Oh, thanks. Same.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

[MUSIC]