A Look at Improving Learning and Mental Health in the College Classroom | Social Learning Amplified

In this special LIVE episode, Eric Mazur chats with authors, Robert Eaton (Brigham Young University - Idaho) and Bonnie Moon (Brigham Young University - Idaho) to discuss their groundbreaking book, Improving Learning and Mental Health in the College Classroom.

They discuss practical strategies for engaging and motivating students. They emphasize the importance of creating a supportive and inclusive learning environment, promoting intrinsic motivation, and providing opportunities for collaboration and mentorship. They also suggest rethinking grading practices and incorporating more formative assessments to reduce stress and promote learning. Overall, they highlight the connection between improving mental health and enhancing learning outcomes in the college classroom.

This episode was live at Perusall Exchange® 2023, Perusall's annual community conference on trending topics in education.

Improving Learning and Mental Health in the College Classroom by Robert Eaton, Bonnie Moon, and Steven V. Hunsaker is available at: https://wvupressonline.com/improving-learning.

Eric Mazur:

Welcome to the Social Learning Amplified podcast, the podcast that brings us candid conversations with educators. We're finding new ways to engage and motivate their students inside and outside the classroom. Each episode of social learning amplified will give you real life examples and practical strategies you can put into practice in your own courses. Let's meet today's guest. Welcome to a special episode of Social Learning Amplified at the Perusal Exchange. I'm your host, Eric Mazur and our guest on the episode today are Rob Eaton and Bonnie Moon. And the topic of today's conversation is their new book, improving Learning and Mental Health in the College Classroom, which was published just this past April by West Virginia University Press and co-written with Steven Hunsucker, who unfortunately isn't able to join today. Let me start by telling you a bit about our guests. Rob Eaton is a professor of religious education.

Rob graduated with honors from Stanford Law School. He's a former attorney, executive and college administrator, but his real passion is to help students learn at BYU Idaho. He has been the lead developer and teacher of a semester long course for new faculty member members. He also helped create what has become BYU Brigham Young University Pass Worldwide, an online program which now serves over 61,000 students in over 180 countries. As of this fall, he will be a visiting professor at Brigham Young University, which is in Utah rather than Idaho. And Rob has written a number of books on religious themes as well as a biography. But the book that I just mentioned, learning and Mental Health in the college classroom is his first work in the scholarship of learning and teaching. He speaks regularly about the topics from that book, and we're lucky to have him here today.

Bonnie currently teaches mathematics at BYU Idaho. What is particularly interesting about Bonnie's bio is that her undergraduate degree is not in mathematics but in English. So she pivoted to a doctorate in mathematics at Idaho State University. Bonnie is a fervent supporter of education at all levels. She served on her local school board for eight years, including during this tumultuous ride that we've had during the Covid Pandemic. She created and ran summer mass camps for K through 12 students to promote mathematical thinking and exploration. But most importantly, personal experiences led Bonnie to develop an intimate understanding of the faced by students who find themselves battling darkness. And as a result, Bonnie started exploring teaching practices that promote learning while acknowledging mental health challenges. And this exploration culminated in the book that we're discussing today. Rob and Bonnie, thank you so much for joining and welcome to Social Learning Amplified live at the Perusall Exchange.

Robert Eaton:

Eric, thanks so much for having us on. We're delighted to be here. Thank you.

Eric Mazur:

Well, first of all, congratulations on your book. You provided me with a copy and I found it an absolutely fascinating read. I've noticed a steady uptick in students with mental health problems in my class already before the pandemic, but it seems to have been completely exacerbated by the pandemic, and I've always seen it as a problem that was only tangential to the educational mission of my class. But your book has prompted me to actually think that this summer I'd like to actually build in the correct practices to support the growing fraction of students in my class who are struggling with any kind of mental health problem. Now, Bonnie, I understand from things you've provided me with and also from the introduction in the book that you've had your own challenges on this France. How have they changed the way you teach?

Bonnie Moon:

Oh, thank you for that question. I think it might be helpful just to share a little bit about the challenge. I realize that that might minimize it because I don't think anybody can explain depression and anxiety unless you've actually been there. I didn't really understand it before. I went through it myself a few years ago and I've heard of triggers and I didn't really know, well, what's a trigger? What does that mean? I had really little understanding coming, coming into this world of mental health and wellness before fall of 2015. But I think okay, to be brief, I'm not brief already, Erica, you're going to fire me. But I guess I can't really explain it. And that's the whole thing that I think that experience has brought me is that I can't explain depression, I can't explain anxiety. I don't understand why some triggers in my life and some family sadness at the time and some health problems just triggered a whole new different darkness and hopelessness for me. I don't understand.

Robert Eaton:

And you had,

Bonnie Moon:

But I do know.

Robert Eaton:

I know that you haven't had it before, right?

Bonnie Moon:

Yeah. I mean I never saw it at home, at least I don't think my parents went through depression or anxiety. I didn't see it. They hid it from me if they did. And so when it hit me that fall and I ended up having to take a leave from work, I didn't get it until I actually was home on my knees trying to get up, trying to understand what the heck was happening to me because eventually my health problems went away physically. But my mental and emotional state was just so much that I couldn't bear it and I didn't know if I would live until the next day. And yeah, it's really interesting and difficult to explain, but now I understand. And when a student comes to me and says, Sister Moon, I'm just, they don't call me doctor at our school. They call me sister, but they say, Sister Moon, I am struggling.

I can't get out bed. I don't understand what's going on with me. And before 2015, I would've said, well, get out of bed. You just got to get out of bed and take a vitamin. But I mean, I probably wouldn't have said that exactly, but now when students come to me, I get it. I get it. Sometimes life is so overwhelming you can't get out of bed. And I'm want my students to succeed because I also get that purpose. And bringing joy into your life through learning can actually help battle some of this depression and anxiety. If you're being successful at it, if you're not being successful at it, it can actually make it worse. So those kind of understandings and just coming to this from that background, now I understand and I will never tell a student, just get over it. I'll say, let's talk about this. Come to my office. There's some resources on campus. Have you gone to the counseling center? Have you talked to the dean of students? There's just things that I do differently now and that I get to do differently with my course design and with how I actually talk to my students.

Eric Mazur:

Well, thank you so much for sharing that. And you should see the emotions expressed in the chat. People are appreciating your sharing your personal connection here. Now, what I really want to eventually get to in this session is what can we do in the class to better support the students? But in sort of building up to that, in your book, you clearly state in the preface that the goal of the book is not to address the cause of the mental health problems. And what I find kind of striking, and I understand that causes of mental health problem can be incredibly diverse, and plus as faculty members we're not trained professionally to understand the clinical aspects of depression. But what I find very striking is how over the past decade or maybe decades, the incidence of mental health problem has skyrocketed it. I mean, it's just amazing. And then the pandemic has added another factor of two to it. And in general, I think when we try to combat a problem, it's helpful if you understand the causes. So can you perhaps speculate on what the causes of or the increased mental health problems that we face in the classroom?

Robert Eaton:

Bonnie, you want me to take that one?

Bonnie Moon:

Go ahead.

Robert Eaton:

So let me take a stab at it and then explain why we didn't tackle that in the book. In fact, I'll answer that part first. The book was plenty long, so we needed to limit the scope, but we also fear sometimes there is a tendency when we start to look at the root causes then to be dismissive of the problems and think, well just put away your cell phone. Just stop looking at social media and you'll be fine. And frankly, I think most of our students would be better off if they did that. And we went back and forth in the chapter on promoting wellness about whether to include some stuff about technology. I'm convinced that that's part of the root cause, and yet a meta-analysis that came out contradicted what I thought. And so we kind of punted on that. It's, I've seen some interesting graphs showing a tight correlation between loss of sleep and increased use of technology and then a corresponding decline in happiness during this period of time. So it's hard to escape the notion that that's not somehow related to what's plaguing our students. And yet that doesn't mean that it's a simple thing.

What Bonnie described is what many of our students are experiencing and it's real, they would very much like to not have it, and there's no quick fix. So we inherit them as they are. And there's some things we do on our course design decisions, our classroom management decisions, they can either help our students with mental health challenges or hinder their ability to learn. So if we're just intentional about it, if people all came away with what you came away with from the book, I'm going to just stop and think I'm going to step back and kind of look at my courses and my tactics through a new lens. You'll come up with better stuff than we've got in the book, even as you begin to think, wow, how's this work for somebody with high anxiety or one of my students with a lot of depression? So that's really our invitation is to simply be mindful of the reality that mental health challenges really do interfere with the ability of many of our students to learn, and we can do some things to knock off those rough edges,

Eric Mazur:

Which actually brings us, you mentioned with anxiety to the whole concept of stress and removing stressors in life. And I remember hearing Stanford's Robert Polsky, the biologist, talk about the biology stress and its origin as a survival mechanism. Words, if you are a zebra in the Kalahari desert and you're being attacked by a lion and your blood pressure is 180 over one 20, you're not suffering from high blood pressure. You're just saving your life because you need that extra rush of oxygen to your brain and other parts of your body in order to escape the lion.

Robert Eaton:

That very mechanism yesterday saved me from stepping on a snake as I was hiking down a mountain and I was very close to stepping on it. That was a great use of stress. So we're in favor of appropriate uses of stress lifesaving.

Eric Mazur:

Absolutely. Absolutely. On the other hand, if you're stuck in traffic and your blood pressure is 180 over one 20, you're not saving your life. You're suffering from stress induced hypertension. So I think the point that he makes there is that stress has a biological purpose as a survival mechanism, but it's generally detrimental to human health. As we all know, that sudden high blood pressure may be saving you from stepping onto a snake, but the prolonged high blood pressure and other physiological phenomena that are associated with stress and anxiety are detrimental to human health, and that seems to indicate that stress and anxiety are generally bad for students. So one question I have for both of you and that I'd like to resolve in my own mind as I rethink what I'm going to do next year in my class is should we endeavor to eliminate all aspects of a course that cause stress?

Robert Eaton:

Absolutely not. Bonnie, do you want to start with this one or have me go first? Go ahead.

Bonnie Moon:

Yeah, I'll start with this one. No, like Rob said, stress can be helpful to survival. We don't want our students in survival mode all the time though, because you're right over long periods of time, it is not good for us. I think the one thing that I'm learning, and I don't know Eric, I don't think I put this in my bio, but I went back to school two years ago. I took a sabbatical and went back to school and I became a student again. I wanted to see how mathematics works in nuclear engineering. So I'm just doing something fun and it's got a little bit of stress associated, but it's a fun stress. So when I'm thinking about the stress, the stress gets me to work. It gets me up in the morning, it gets me in my car, it gets me to class. I mean, a little bit of stress helps me prepare for a presentation so that I'm motivated to do it, but too much stress can also cause that anxiety that is not helpful and actually can cause a hopelessness As a student.

What I'm noticing, and this is what I've been trying to implement in my classes since I've worked on this project with Rob, is like if the students know that they have someone that has their back and there's resources there, they can handle the challenge. When I knew that my teacher cared enough to meet me on Zoom or in his office when I was struggling learning neutronics or something about physics that I could probably have turned to you for, I was like, it was comforting to know that he had my back. He was going to let me come see him. He wasn't so busy that I wasn't going to be able to ask him some homework questions. So even though I was stressed out the night before about my homework, knowing that I could go to his office the next day and he was going to greet me kindly and want to help me, it was like, oh, well, this is okay. This homework is kind of stressful, but tomorrow's going to be fine. I got my professor, he's got my back, or I've got my team, I've got other students. I've got friends in the class that will help me. And it's been a fun experience. Yeah, so some stress is good, but there's ways we can help students alleviate that stress, especially being approachable. Approachable teachers are so wonderful. I love my approachable teachers.

Robert Eaton:

By the way, that was the most commonly given answer in response to a question, what can our university do to promote student wellness, improve student wellness? In one survey that we cite in our book and it's approachability of professors, that does a whole lot on that front. Let me just add, we love desirable difficulties. I think it's Robert Bjork who coined that term, but even he acknowledges the fact that we've made something difficult doesn't automatically make it a desirable difficulty. If I've got poorly worded instructions to an assignment that's not a desirable difficulty. I've just needlessly added confusion that adds stress to students' lives. And before I tackled this project, I was not very intentional about it. The first question we asked when I interviewed some counselors in our counseling center were What kinds of things trigger stress for students? And they said, well, obviously oral presentations.

And I thought oral presentations. I love requiring oral presentations. I am so embarrassed to admit this. It had not crossed my mind how that would affect my students with high anxiety or even just my students were very introverted. Now, if I were doing a public speaking class, I absolutely would require oral presentations, even if it stressed students out. Even then I might use some scaffolding. The first presentation probably wouldn't be to the whole class. It might be to a partner then to a group of four and a group of eight, and they'd have lots of opportunities to practice and get feedback. But in my classes, there was a simple way around it just to provide an alternative and say, you can do an oral presentation or something else that equally well met my outcomes. And in fact, boosts learning creates better learning for all students, but reduces stress. So we're just saying be intentional about the difficulties we create and the stress we create. Is it what we mean to create or are we accidentally creating it?

Eric Mazur:

So as I'm listening to you, my mind is going wild, thinking all kinds of things. So in essence, it's not about avoiding stress, it's about learning to deal with stress. And I think we certainly do not want to rob our students of developing resilience by removing all stress because after all, we know that our lives and therefore their lives probably too, and careers are full of stress left and there, and how well you succeed in a career is in part dependent on how well you're able to deal and cope with stress. But I want to come back to what you just said about oral presentations.

I think that learning to communicate is an important skill regardless of the course we are teaching, whether it's mathematics or religion or English or chemistry or you name it. And it's one of those skills that should be taught not in a dedicated communication course. It should be taught across the curriculum. It should sort of fuse the entire curriculum. So I was thinking if a student has high anxiety about making a presentation eliminated, presentation may not be on the long-term, the most helpful move for that student. So what kind of, you mentioned the word scaffolding, which I think is very interesting. What kind of scaffolding activities would you do in order to help that student? And I happened to be one of these people.

I was raised bilingually in a country that was very conformist and I spoke a different language at home than in the school, and it made me very introverted and shy. I was also one year younger than most of my classmates in school, and it took a lot of effort to overcome my shyness and to learn to speak in public. But if I look back at my success as an academic and as a physicist to a very large degree that it's determined by my ability to speak in public, but I don't remember exactly how I overcame that,

Robert Eaton:

Right?

Eric Mazur:

What can an instructor do to help a person like I used to be?

Robert Eaton:

Let me tackle that with three suggestions after I left this. So I had required oral presentations in this interdisciplinary course that Steve ER and I and others developed on Pakistan. And after we left, they were converting it a hybrid course. They needed something that students could do online. So they moved the student presentations to recorded video presentations that students watched out of class. They weren't thinking about mental health at all. But an interesting thing happened. The quality of presentations went up because students could do multiple takes. And my hunch is that the stress levels went down for students because they weren't having to present in front of the whole class with no safety net. That's a great bit of scaffolding and a great example of how it's not an either or thing. In that case, that course design adjustment, not some of the rough edges off of oral presentations while preserving the benefit of oral presentations.

My colleagues at BYU Hawaii and linguistics programs say they never do oral presentations to the whole class because it's so inefficient. One person's talking, everybody else is listening. They do 'em in groups of four and you get a lot more reps. So you actually get much more practice, but you get to start with smaller groups. My last one is perusal. I love perusal as scaffolding to help introverted students, students with high anxiety participate in class. They've had a chance to respond to questions that I lace questions throughout the reading, but so they've had a chance to make comments and then I call on them. I'm not cold calling. It's warm calling. And I'm saying, Sarah, I love what you had to say about this. Can you tell me more? Why do you think that's true? And then she's already been validated. Her fear of negative peer evaluations subside some, and she gets to practice articulating things just as you did, but she gets to do it in a less stressful way than if I'm imitating Professor Houseman in the paper chase and cold calling a student and almost looking for opportunities to belittle them.

Eric Mazur:

So I want to shift the topic a little bit. I think that there are a lot of faculty members who think that if you remove stress or help students with mental health challenges, that sort of means lowering the bar. How would you debunk that myth?

Bonnie Moon:

I'll go ahead and start that one. Yeah, and I appreciate that you said that's a myth. When you're stressed out, that stress can actually lead to cognitive overload and you're not able to focus on, I'll say mathematics since that's where my discipline is, but you're not able to focus on the math stressing about the math or other things or the environment or the way that the course is built or things that don't flow nicely. And you're learning management system. When the students are trying to manage all of this and they don't get to focus on the mathematics, there's a lot of things we can do unintentionally to create stress that our students don't need, but this productive stress, the challenge, the fun of learning something new in mathematics, I want to try and free up their minds to focus on the challenge at hand, which is seeing how mathematics works in their world, see how it works in their major, see how ideas interact with each other.

I want to free up their mind for that. That's the kind of stress I want to see is like, oh, I can't quite get this problem. They can get a friend. Let's talk about this together. Or let's see, I've studied all this for all night. I'm back in class system room, I can't figure this out. Let's talk. That's the kind of stress I want to see. Not this other stress like I was on. I couldn't find the due date. The due date popped up out of nowhere. I didn't understand this is out of your pattern. I don't understand why this due date was. Now you're talking about things that you don't want to talk about, but I feel like it's teachers, we can create our courses in such a way intentionally, like Rob keeps saying, so that those things flow smoothly. Students can see patterns about how we structure the course, so they're not worried about due dates. They kind of have a flow to the course after that first or two weeks. So you can focus on what you really want to focus on, which is your discipline, the mathematics, getting them into it. And so anyway, that's where I would start is just being a little bit more intentional about where we want to put their stress. I want to put it on the math.

Robert Eaton:

Lemme just add to that. I think it's really easy. In fact, I'm sure I've done this in the past to mistake intensity for rigor. They're not always synonymous. Something can be enormously intense. But at law school for example, the only assessment, the only assignment the whole semester long was one three hour final. Now, I liked the game. I excelled at the game, so I thought it was a great way to assess. It. Turns out it's not really a very good way to assess. And if I were a consultant to law schools, I'd say break up that final into four preliminary tests and give students more detailed feedback. Literally all I got back was one number. So whether I aced parts of the test and completely bombed other parts, I had no idea. I didn't get any help in knowing what I needed to go back and fix.

You just got that one number and you were done and you went on to the next semester for that matter. The professor had no idea that a good chunk of students didn't understand any particular concepts. Contrast that with my wife's nursing program. She earned a bachelor's in statistics when we were young, but she's gone back to earn a nursing degree and they've got a requirement that you have to get like 80% or something to pass, and if you get less than that, they require you to spend a certain number of hours remediating and then you get to go take the test again. And it's more of a mastery learning approach. Well, which is more rigorous one that just says, well, you got to C minus, we're going to graduate you anyway, but hope you study harder for the next test. Or one that gives you opportunities and requirements to continue learning until you master concepts you didn't initially learn. When helping as students as possible learn as much as possible, we approach teaching and course designing differently than if we're fixated unduly on rigor. I think

Eric Mazur:

This is a very interesting discussion, and what you just said there resonates very strongly with me that people who clinging to rigor don't realize that the minimum standard by which we graduate people actually defines the rigor. And I'm sure that they would be horrified if we taught them this because they see the people will come out at the top of the scale as really being rigorous. That's so true. So thank you for clarifying that. I think that's wonderful. I want to remind people that they can put questions in the q and a box. I see already two questions. I'll turn to them in just a second. You can also upvote questions. So if one of the two questions that's there intrigues you more than the other, hit the little thumb up and the one that is at the top is the first one I'll pick.

So please don't wait until the end of this session to put your question in because there'll be very little time left then. So let me turn now to something else. In the beginning of your book, you have an anecdote from Alexis who if I recall correctly, is a first generation college student and who was a research assistant for your book. And you quote her as saying, I need to pull up my sticky note here and read this off to you. She says, my first semester was rough. I cried almost every day for three months. The anxiety that I had gotten under control during my senior year of high school returned with a vengeance. I struggled to learn what the professors wanted out of their students, and as a result, I spent every day doing homework for about 13 hours. I rarely slept or ate and struggle socially. What emerges from this quote is sort of a dark feeling of isolation, of loneliness.

And in a sense, you mentioned some of this already, Rob, I think we all know that learning is really a social activity. And this passage or this passage sort of highlights to me is the importance of promoting the social aspects of learning. I mean the feeling of isolation that comes out of that paragraph working alone 13 hours and struggling socially. And I think that, and I want to hear your views about this. I think one of the problems we face in education is that almost all of education is focused on the individual, right? I mean, you come to class and yes, you may be sitting next to other people, but you mostly in many classes in a passive role listening to the instructor in front of the class, not interacting with the people to your left and your right. And then you go and work on homework alone sometimes with others, but mostly alone. And then you go and study because you have to cram for an exam, which is a completely individual activity where you are cut off from other people, you're prohibited from even talking to other people. And then we graduate people who have flourished to act and think and do individually. We deliver them to society where they discover we're not working alone, working with other people. And I think if you think about it, most problems in society are due to people not getting along with each other.

Robert Eaton:

Right? Then we're surprised that we've created people who see coworkers as competitors rather than allies.

Eric Mazur:

Exactly. So should we really overhaul all of education from K through whatever, 16 or beyond, and teach people how to work together to move from curriculum aimed at individuals to curriculum aimed at teams? Do any of you teach team-based courses, and have you seen a difference in what it does for students with mental health problems?

Robert Eaton:

Bonnie, do you want to start on that one?

Bonnie Moon:

Sure. Yeah. I love the idea of teams and working together. I remember sitting in one of my first college classes and the teacher looked at us and said, I grade on a curve, and I didn't really know what that meant. I meant, oh, you're going to boost my grade up. No, he really graded on the curve. It doesn't matter how well you did, you just got to do better than the students in your class. And oh, it was a terrible experience. I was pretty much alone. People didn't want to help each other. So teaching, I a agree, Eric, that this team-based teaching has been something I've implemented in my class. I try and be more intentional about it than I was at the beginning. I just thought, oh, you put 'em in groups and they work together. No, they don't have skills yet. They don't really understand that sometimes that can be a terrible experience for a person if we're not teaching them the skills or have the scaffolding or have some kind of instruction to help them become that team player.

So I'm noticing that the more intentional I am about it, giving them roles, giving them certain times and letting them know ahead of time, this is the time you have this, this is your goal. And even sometimes working in a team and still creating an individual piece of output that they have to create individually, but they get to collaborate on has also been helpful. So I think this team base is important, and having it in my classes has helped me reach out to more students because students are actually reaching out to each other and creating assignments that are collaborative where they actually are just challenging enough so they need each other or just creative enough. So if you're stuck creatively, maybe someone in your group can come up with the idea. So it's just recognizing each other's strengths and capitalizing on those and growing together. I think you've hit on something really important, Eric. We can learn more together than alone,

Robert Eaton:

And I like to do it from the outset of the semester. Syllabus day was my least favorite day as a teacher. I hated syllabus day. I hated the questions. I hated starting out with this mundane review of the ground rules and logistical stuff. So I replaced it with an activity and then basically asked who'd read or already taken the syllabus quiz and then said, you need to create groups of four. You need at least one person in your group who's already taken the quiz or at least read the syllabus. And I'll challenge them to find at least one person who's here for their first semester of college or whatever. And then I give 'em a few minutes to get to know each other. I encourage 'em to exchange phone numbers if they're comfortable with it, I encourage them. Then I give 'em a few minutes to walk through what's due this week, what's due next week, and then I take questions if they have any left.

And I've transformed what was the most boring day of the semester into a day when the class is on fire, people are getting to know each other, they're talking with each other. They leave with a phone number of three or four other people whom they can talk to and text. And frankly, I found my workload went down. I got a lot fewer questions about the syllabus once I started teaching in this way. And it freed up some time for me then to get into some substance in an engaging way that inspired them on the first day of class rather than spending the entire day going through the ground rules. But then I tried to use those same teams throughout the semester and create plenty of opportunities for small group conversations. What we found in our focus groups and in other research is as students become comfortable with each other, their fear of negative peer evaluation subsides, and then they can often rehearse a comment they're more willing to make in front of the whole class when they first had a chance to think, pair, and share or to discuss it in a small group.

Eric Mazur:

One person in the audience, Chris Keplinger, wrote, moved the syllabus day to perusal. I heard about that in the first perusal exchange two years ago, and last year I finally implemented that. And it is really interesting because it also provides you as the instructor a record of how the students think about your syllabus, which you can review later and make adjustments to. So I concur with Chris's suggestion there. I want to turn to an audience question, and kin, I hope I pronounced it correctly, is asking, how should we approach students who are only stressing over getting rid of a requirement and who have no intention at all to actually learn?

Bonnie Moon:

Go ahead, Rob.

Robert Eaton:

You start. So two thoughts. Interestingly enough, in our focus group, which wasn't huge, but to a student, they didn't want to be excused from assignments. They did want a little flexibility, a little understanding, a little acknowledgement. Frankly, I would say the kind of flexibility and acknowledgement that any of our real life bosses have given us outside of academia, just a bit of flexibility. But I do not excuse students from assignments altogether. But if they had a meltdown and they froze up for a couple of weeks, I may give 'em some flexibility in going back and finishing that assignment. The other thing is in our chapter, we got one chapter on fostering intrinsic motivation, awakening students' inner desire to learn, and another on developing emotional resilience. We try to do all that we can to inspire students to study because they want to learn rather than because they have to, and we're not perfect at it. But I think as I've gotten better at it and more explicit about it on that very first day, then a student's reasons for studying changes as they can see the relevance to their actual lives, they're less likely to want to get out of doing assignments and to use mental health as an excuse for doing so.

Eric Mazur:

Yeah, you took the words out of my mouth when I read that question. I was thinking intrinsic motivation. And in your book, there are a lot of parallels between actually stimulating intrinsic motivation to learn because when you want to do something, you're the stress almost, not quite melts away, but certainly diminishes significantly. So let me

Robert Eaton:

Take, but Eric, by the way, there are really interesting studies on that. You would just guess that's the case intuitively, and they're not experimental, they're observational. But sure enough, there's a really high correlation between being extrinsically motivated and then having anxiety or depression and being intrinsically motivated and not having as many of those symptoms.

Eric Mazur:

Of course, you can be intrinsically motivated, but the mental health issues can come due to external factors. That's right. Have nothing to do with what you do in your own course, right? I mean, some students deal with mental health problems that are related to, I don't know, family circumstances, other courses, you name it. And

Robert Eaton:

So it doesn't exempt you from those stressors, but it does help you mitigate those, help you cope with those a little bit better.

Eric Mazur:

Let's have one more question here from the audience, and then I want to insert one more of my questions here. Chuck Gobin is asking, how do you help students who sabotage themselves by not turning things in because they're so anxious about how it'll be received? They end up failing because they're afraid of failing. And I think I'm glad that Chuck is asking that question. As I think back over my last two years, I can actually recognize, I didn't realize that that might have been the cause, but I recognize two students who may have actually been struggling with exactly that, and I did not diagnose the course well enough and definitely did not support the students well enough. So I don't know if you have any words of wisdom for this scenario.

Bonnie Moon:

I'll address that real quickly just with a story and then some things that I've been trying to be more aware of and more intentional about. But so at the beginning of this last semester, a student in my differential equations course came up to me after the first day of class and said, how do you do tests in here? I was reading the syllabus that you let us retake for some half credit. How does that work? And I explained to him, yeah, after you take an exam, you can come back and retake and you can get some help on some of the things you didn't understand. You can come to my office, you can go to the ta, you can go to your small group, you can learn from this experience and then turn back in with the little extra work. He wasn't afraid of the extra work.

He just wanted the opportunity to learn and to feel validated that just because he didn't get it the first time he could get it. And I said, yeah, in my class, you have that opportunity. I want you to learn this. And so after that, he looked at me and said, shoot, okay. I failed this class last semester. I think I can do this class with you. And I said, yes, you can. Just even providing little things like that, I mean, it's a chance to master something. That's what I care about. Someone might call me on, you're not rigorous. And I said, the rigor is learning the math. I want them to be competent. The mathematics, they're going to be engineers. I want them to engineer things, understanding these systems that we're studying. And so I care more about that. They're learning it. So I try and set things up on my course so they can, and that relieves a lot of anxiety and stress knowing that, yeah, they're going to try their best the first time, but if it doesn't work out or they have a meltdown, there's like an opportunity to come back and learn from that.

And some of my favorite things have been my students coming to my office, going to my whiteboard and us talking through things that they missed on an exam because sometimes they don't know what they don't know until they take an assessment. We've got to have assessments, we've got to have some deadlines. So I'm all about that. But I also think we need opportunities for hope and to bring them back and say, yeah, you're awesome. You rock this and you didn't do so well on this. This is one thing that you didn't do well on, and I can help you through that. You can help yourself through that. Here's some tools. And it brings a lot of hope. So I hope that addresses what he was asking

Robert Eaton:

By the way, the pivot point for Alexis, according to her, and she was what Carol d Dweck would call a fragile perfectionist, that her perfectionism really was causing the anxiety. And that's not the case with all our students who struggle with mental health challenges. But for it was inspired advice when the professor said, Alexis, it's okay just to do your best. And that was an epiphany for her. That was a revelation. Incidentally, she is just finished her first year as an elementary school teacher and contracted to teach in a tough school district for a second year. The tools that she gained helped her develop the emotional resilience and cope with her mental health challenges in a productive way so that she's able to be a teacher her lifelong dream.

Eric Mazur:

This is very helpful, and as we're heading into the final 15 minutes of this live session, I think it'd be great if we could leave the audience with some concrete ideas. So I have a two part question, and maybe each of you can shed light on that. What are some simple practical ways that people who are listening could do in their course to simultaneously improve student wellness and boost learning for all students? Or maybe a second part of that question or the same, I don't know. How can we just structure a course differently when designing with mental health in mind?

Bonnie Moon:

Yeah, so there's definitely some simple things to do, and I think when we're trying to improve, it's really helpful to grab those simple ones to make change and not get overwhelmed by all the things that we could do. So I'm going to start with a simple one, and then I would like to add something that I did do to restructure. I realize we're all in different places and the autonomy that we get to enjoy at our different universities may be different. So what I am going to talk about may not be doable at all places. It just depends on where you're at. But being creative I think is important. So then the first thing is this natural mentoring. This is where I have tried to spend a lot of my time this last year, is trying to catch my students before class, ask them how they're doing in a way that they have a question, not good, or I won't accept good.

I'm doing well. I'm doing good as an answer. So I try and form my questions. So what did you do yesterday? What kind of mathematics did you do last night? What was the fun thing that you learned for class today? Or where are you struggling? I try and find a way that we can start a conversation before class. So I am going to class a little bit earlier trying to get my overhead set up so that I can actually spend time with my students before class starts. I'll pick somebody out that day and just make sure that I find them and ask them a question or two about the math, or maybe I know something about their interests or what they did that weekend. I also try and start conversations. Well, this is a wellness practice that I've started that I love and I enjoy it because I learned from it.

So one thing I challenge my students to do and invite them to do is to go out in nature once a week, at least once a week, they can go more and get a picture and send that picture to me, and I'll post it on the overhead before class starts. So when students come in, they have some kind of calming picture up front, and I put a growth mindset message on. It says, oh yeah, mistakes are awesome. Did you make a mistake last night? Way to go. Let's learn from that today. Something like that on top of the picture. And then even before class starts, they're talking about the picture. They want to know where that student went. Maybe they could go there this weekend, they're just discussing things. Maybe we'll get to know that student and a little bit about them. I don't take a lot of class time on this because I need class time for mathematics, but that's one thing I've done.

And it's a simple thing, and it's fun. I post things where I've been nearby. So I went to a waterfall the other weekend and I posted that for one of my classes, and that was a fun discussion. And they need to know that you're taking care of yourself too. If you're all stressed out and you bring in the vibe that you're stressed out, you're busy, you got a lot going on, they're going to pick up on that vibe, whether it's intentionally or not, and they're going to get a little stressed. So as we take care of ourselves and we find ways to wind down and just have that balance that we need to be healthy, it will rub off on our students whether or not we know it. And so I invite us to do that, is to find a way to take care of ourselves and invite our students to take a breath. Mathematics is awesome, but it's not all about math.

Robert Eaton:

Along those lines, because mentoring, having a professor you feel like you could turn to if you needed to, makes a big difference in all sorts of things, but especially from a mental health standpoint, even in a suicide prevention standpoint. So we surveyed our students and asked, how likely, on a scale of one to seven, would you be to go talk to a professor who you feel really cared about you? And that got one of the highest, that was a 5.511 of the highest responses in our survey. But if they felt like the professor was really busy, it was like a 2.38, a huge spread. And when I read that result, I thought, oh no, I am really busy. And I fear that's the vibe I send to my students too often. In fact, I do it in an email. A student says, I'm going to have to miss class on Monday.

I've got a funeral over the weekend. How can I make up for the class? Rob goes right to copying and pasting from the syllabus to let them know, yes, you can make this up. Here's what you do, and here's how you do it. Boom. Next email. I got an inbox full of emails to respond to. But literally one day I was preparing for a presentation about being better natural mentors, and the thought kind of occurred to me, did you catch the word funeral there? And so I typed back and said, may I ask who passed away? It was my grandmother. I'm so sorry to hear about that. Tell me, what did you learn from your grandma? How are you like her? What did you inherit from your grandma? Really, it took me about 50 seconds to type up the things that I did, but I transformed what had been a transactional interaction to a human interaction.

The more human interactions we have with our students, just the safer they feel, the more they want to learn, the more willing they're to raise their hand in class and make comments. And one really interesting study out of University of Michigan shows that the less likely they are to attempt suicide. One other suggestion that I would make that's concrete is breaking up high stakes exams with component parts that lead up to it. So at law school, by the way, I would still have a comprehensive final, and it might be worth 50% of their grade rather than a hundred percent, but students would've had a chance to get some formative feedback. Well, no summative feedback, but in a sense, formative, because it's preparatory for a comprehensive final, they'd have some chances still to learn from their mistakes. And incidentally, that helps them reframe the way they see low test scores. If they can never go back and master and get any credit for learning something they didn't initially learn. The message we send is that it's pretty depressing when you get a low test score. But if they have a chance, now we can help them reframe the way they look at a low test score or a low assignment score and think, here's an opportunity to learn. I've got a knowledge gap. I better go get that filled in before the final.

Eric Mazur:

So as I'm listening to the two of you, I'm reminded of having corrected myself quite a few times. Students contact me on Slack, I had a death in the family, or I have covid or whatever. I'm missing this. What do I need to do to immediately answer what they need to do and only later realizing, oh no, they have covid, or, oh no, they had a death in the family. And then adding a sentence in front, that part first. And it's true, we tend to be very transactional and being more human I think is incredibly important. Now, Bonnie, you said something interesting. You said, we should celebrate mistakes. We should probably celebrate failure, but we tend to stigmatize failure in general. There used to be actually a store here in Harvard Square that sold educational toys and above the checkout counter the cashiers, they had this huge

Printout on the wall that said, confused question mark. Good. You're learning something, right? We tend to attach negative feelings to confusion and negative feelings to failure, whereas I would say confusion is a necessary step towards understanding and failure is a necessary step towards innovation and creativity. And I think in part, and this leads me to another question from the audience I would like to address. In part that is because our approaches to assessment stigmatize failure, and since confusion often leads to failure, automatically confusion is seen as a negative feeling rather than one that is positive because you're about to learn something if you manage to resolve that confusion. So Laurie Mook is asking, have you experimented? Where did the question go? It just got voted up and it's got -

Eric Mazur:

Have you experimented with different grading strategies such as mastery or specifications grading?

Bonnie Moon:

You want to take that first?

Robert Eaton:

Sure. I'll take that first. Years ago, I asked Steve Hunts sayer what he'd learned from the scholarship of learning and teaching. That used to be my approach to it, by the way. It was just siphoning knowledge from my friend rather than paying the price myself. And he told me about spaced learning. I realized that I had in my New Testament class a foundational multiple choice 25 question test worth 10% of the overall grade about the second week of the semester. And frankly, my students tended not to do very well on it. Were essentially an open enrollment university, and their grade temporarily showed that they had enough in the class if they bombed it. But we just moved on. That's what you do in higher education. That's what we did in all my classes. But when Steve told me that even my students who got an A on that probably weren't remembering very long what they learned, I went ahead and replaced that with three tests, three months apart.

One were 2%, another were 3%, and the last one worth 5%. And now I say, if you do better on the second or third attempt, I'll bump up your previous grade because I want to incentivize them to learn. I moved on knowing full well, they didn't really understand the difference between Judea and Galilee, and I didn't do anything about it before. So now I've adopted my approach. I do still keep in some structure and incentivize them to try to learn it. Initially, they can't get a hundred percent when they go back on assignments that they resubmit, for example. But I found the possibility of resubmission has allowed my TASS and me to feel more comfortable holding students to higher standards, can give 'em a 50 on that final project with some detailed feedback to say, you kind of missed the vote, and here's what we're looking for. Knowing full well that he can still resubmit it or she can resubmit it for up to 90% credit.

Bonnie Moon:

Do I have time to address that, Eric, or do we need to write Yes, please. Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah, I think if I understood her question right, that was about have I changed the way I look at grading? Will you say the question again, please?

Eric Mazur:

And mastery, do you use any mastery? Yeah, whether any of you have used things like mastery grading or specifications grading.

Bonnie Moon:

Oh yeah, thank you. Yeah. So yeah. So definitely, in fact, I'm doing an experiment in the fall on this. I teach the same class twice and I'm going to do some mastery grading in one class, and I'm going to do some traditional how I've looked at my grading before, even though I do give students opportunities to redo things, I still kind of grade, I would say traditionally for me. But with that said, I'm going to just add that with assessment, because often grading is connected to assessment. And assessment is something that we use to learn of how we're doing as a teacher, how our students are doing and how they can do better. So one thing that I have tried that I have actually really enjoyed is at the end of the semester, they have traditionally a final, you have to pass certain outcomes for this class I teach.

So yeah, so we need to test those. But I give my students a choice. Now they can take the final exam or they can do a project and the project can connect something to their major. One of our topics or the project can dig deep into something that they want to understand. I've changed all of my review to this review that my students do. Everybody does the review, they get to help each other. They're team learning. They're looking at the whole semester for a whole week. So I know that they're getting the review and they're looking at the outcomes in this review. But for the final, they either get to take an exam or they do this project. And one student just came alive. I mean, it was during Covid. So during Covid, we went home. Remember that semester? We all went home and he chose this, I guess I can't remember exactly the topic he picked, but it was something in his discipline and it related to my class.

And he was so bored and so agitated in class when I saw him in person. But when we went to Covid and he started working on this project, he jumped alive. He wanted to meet me at night. He wanted to meet me in the morning. He wanted to show me what he was writing in his app. He wanted to show me all these amazing applications. He was a different student. And just changing that up. I mean, I know that he got the material because of the depth that he went into the project. He did way more than he needed to, and I didn't need to push him. So sometimes when we're thinking about assessment and grading and giving choice, I mean, we have to be able to manage the choice. If everybody picked a project, I probably couldn't manage it, but not everybody does. It's just like a handful. And so it's so fun though, to give them choice and let them pick their way. It just changes their whole mental outlook. And his anxiety went away, at least in my classes. Well, from what I could tell, do I know I'm not an expert. I don't know if he was still anxious. He was just engaged. It was so fun.

Eric Mazur:

Well, Iris Sap Garcia is putting in the chat that she used specifications grading, which incidentally I'm using too in my course. And that students have expressed to her that it does take some stress out of assignments and that they get in a certain sense to where they put in the effort, how they put in the effort. And there's always sort of a safety net because you can resubmit a unit in order to show that you can meet specifications. Well, we are at the top of the hour. I want to end with one observation here because in your book you mentioned that the best practices for improving mental health are usually the best practices for increasing learning. I think that's exactly verbatim what you state. And interestingly enough, yesterday we discussed equity in the live session and the recommendations for a more equity- minded teaching strongly overlap with promoting intrinsic motivation to learn, which is sort of what one of your main recommendations is too. So I find it rather comforting, and this is in a sense sort of my own personal take home message, that increasing learning really addresses a lot of problems in education.

I have to do some thinking about this, but I find it very comforting because I think most of us who teach really want that as our goal. So being perhaps more intentional about us about that will help address many, many problems that we have, mental health equity, you name it. So I would like to conclude by thanking you for listening and thanking our guests, Bonnie Moon and Rob Eaton. Their book, improving Learning and Mental Health in the College Classroom is available. The place where you can obtain it is in the chat, and you can find our Social Learning Amplified podcast and more on perusall.com/SocialLearningAmplified one word. Subscribe to join us on our next episode. And I hope to see you then. Thank you all.

Robert Eaton:

Thank you so much.

Eric Mazur:

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