On normalising discomfort
When the stakes are high, students can either avoid or learn to cope
There’s a lot of resistance in education - often from teachers - to high stakes examinations. Critics often make claims that there are no really similar high stakes events in life, so exams only serve to make students unnecessarily anxious. I’m not convinced that this is true. These attitudes remind me of the issues brought up in Lukianoff and Haidt’s now-iconic article, The Coddling of the American Mind1. The authors argue that parents and learning institutions spend a lot of energy preparing the road for the child instead of preparing the child for the road. They also note that the wealthier the family, the less likely they are to be ‘free range’ parents and encourage unsupervised, adult-free play, and the kinds of risks that develop independence and resilience.
I recently noticed this tweet, which to be fair doesn’t really contain any real value judgement one way of the other about examinations. But it struck me because this was so different to my experience. We ran most examinations in 2021, a COVID-19 year. Granted, we are smaller and we had greater agility and control over the many messy factors of online examinations, but I never had any doubt that my students would be emotionally ready - it was business as usual.
We know that examination coaching can go a long way to enhancing performance. It’s a bit like sport coaching: athletes compete at lower stakes competitions as part of their training for the big event. Like in sports, if students don’t have the knowledge and skill, this kind of strategy will only take them so far. But compare it to the converse, where students enter an unfamiliar testing environment and their performance is hampered by anxiety. Interestingly, this is a known issue in giftedness identification, where coaching students to get a feel for the test itself has been shown to give more accurate indicators of ability, especially in disadvantaged groups like Indigenous students.
At the start of the academic year, I engaged in a kind of exposure therapy program with our students. We implemented a formative assessment schedule of fortnightly examination-style tasks with the explicit aim of replicating the kinds of stresses students might experience in their final high stakes tests. At first, I was too successful at replicating that environment and the stress was real for several of my students. I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly shifted or how we shifted it, but I can say that students began regularly noticing that the world did not stop turning just because they were being asked to write for 40 minutes in silence.
Obviously there are cases where students are unable to function normally due to their anxiety, but I encourage teachers and leaders to engage in dialogue with parents through the lens of anxiety being a treatable condition. Situational examination discomfort is normal. It won’t be surprising to independent school teachers that students in our schools make a disproportionate amount of applications for disability provisions. Thinking about the interaction of these factors, is it really any surprise that public school students perform better at university?
As a teaching culture, I do think that students pick up on our attitudes to stress and discomfort. If we enable them to avoid stress and frame it as something to be feared, we really are sending them into the world underprepared and ultimately fragile.
I highly recommend the book for anyone who is even tangentially involved in wellbeing in education.
Those people who think real life has no high stakes times must be very lucky with job interviews and promotions.
Also they clearly never have to pitch a project, chastise or sack an employee, explain why they made a mistake, complain about a person breaking the law or employment contract, appear in court, ...