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Anxiety severely limits –and often blocks– all logical and rational problem-solving regions of the brain. So, don’t expect to talk someone out of anxiety or rationalize with them. When students don’t respond to verbal coaching, they aren’t being difficult or defiant. The biology of their brain simply makes it impossible for them to think with reason. To help a student break out of an anxiety spell, get them moving! Aerobic activity is the fastest, most effective way to break the virtuous cycle of anxiety. Next, get them talking about the problem. Have them describe what the problem is, why it is bothering them, and how they feel about it using a feeling wheel. To get our SOAR® Feelings Wheel, sign up for our “How Do I Feel?” Curriculum Kit in the blue box on the right of this page. This process does many things, it: draws the problem up to higher regions of the brain, minimizes the sense of “threat,” gives students a great sense of empowerment over the situation, and helps them better identify potential solutions. Finally, build their skills. Build their skills for managing the anxiety and skills for managing the situation that triggered the anxiety. To learn more about skills for overcoming stress and anxiety, check out the SOAR Social-Emotional Learning Curriculum.

while we all experience anxiety, we seldom take the time to engage the emotion and give it the respect it deserves. Ignoring anxiety does not make it go away; it compounds until we fight, flee, or freeze – are we attending to these adaptive responses that tell us something is wrong? Even a persistent low level of anxiety has deleterious effects on our body and mind. If we do not respect anxiety, we virtually guarantee that we will not be performing at our best which can further drive rumination and further deleterious anxiety.

helps us see anxiety as a biological system that has evolved for our protection but is flexibly under our influence. Bringing together an array of up-to-date research, she integrates the neuropsychology of both top-down and bottom-up processes into a set of practices that allow us to take advantage of the neuroplasticity of the system: relaxing the body, calming the mind, redirecting and reappraising, monitoring responses, and learning to tolerate the uncomfortable.

I recommend asking the parent to complete the Spence Preschool Anxiety Scale for a quick, reliable measure of anxiety in young children who can’t necessarily express their feelings.

To help determine whether anxiety is impairing or interfering in children’s lives, I ask the following questions using the acronym FISH. (This can be applied to children of all ages.) Frequency — What is the frequency of the child’s anxious behaviors? Is it every day? Once a week? Once a month? Intensity — How intense is the child’s anxiety on a scale of 1 to 10? Severity — How severe is the child’s anxiety on a scale of 1 to 10? How long — How long have anxious behaviors occurred?

The following tendencies among children should send up red flags: Overestimating a threat: “I’m going to get COVID. I’m going to die.” Difficulty tolerating uncertainty: “I don’t know what’s going to happen if I go to school. What’s going to be there? I don’t know that I can handle it.” Underestimating the ability to control a situation: “I never will be able to handle all this uncertainly. It is going make me really sick to my stomach or feel like I’m going to die.” Feeling increased responsibility: “If I get sick and I get my parents sick, it’s my fault. They will never forgive me.”

To help address test anxiety, researchers recommend setting aside a little time for simple writing or self-talk exercises before the test—they allow students to shore up their confidence, recall their test-taking strategies, and put the exam into perspective.

Students who study moderately should get roughly 70 to 80 percent of the questions correct. 

Don’t start a test with challenging questions; let students ease into a test. Asking difficult questions to probe for deep knowledge is important, but remember that confidence and mindset can dramatically affect outcomes—and therefore muddy the waters of your assessment. 

Only Hoare et al  20 reported on associations with anxiety, and found moderate evidence for a positive association between screentime duration and severity of anxiety symptoms.

adolescents using screens in a moderate way showed the lowest prevalence of depressive symptoms.

HRQOL as a formal measured construct was examined by Wu et al, 22 who reported consistent evidence that greater screentime was associated with lower measured HRQOL in 11/13 cross-sectional and 4/4 longitudinal studies. A meta-analysis of 2 studies found that ≥2–2.5 hours/day of screentime was associated with significantly lower HRQOL (pooled mean difference in HRQOL score 2.71 (95% CI 1.59 to 3.38) points) than those with <2–2.5 hours/day.

the most important factor in determining whether a school is a setting in which children grow and learn is whether the school is a setting in which adults grow and learn.

school buildings were designed to enable the supervision and orderly movement of students. The egg-carton model of school architecture and organization prevails even today. Individual classrooms are adjacent to one another with parallel doors facing a hall (not unlike prison cellblocks).

The major hurdle is the history and ethos of the teaching profession. "Teaching is a very autonomous experience," says Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, author of The Good High School. "But the flip side of autonomy is that teachers experience loneliness and isolation." In too many schools, teachers close their classroom door and spend the majority of their working hours with children, only talking hurriedly with other adults over a break, during lunch, or while standing at the copying machine. This is not terribly surprising since many educators chose to enter the profession to work with students, not with other adults

As time is such a valuable resource its allocation to particular aspects of teaching and learning signifies their value. If we give time to content and memorisation of facts, we signal to our students that this is what we value. Likewise, if we remind our students that time is short and work must be completed quickly we should not be surprised when our students see tasks as work to be done rather than learning to be mastered. A more effective distribution of our time will see students being given time to think deeply and truly engage with the problems they are asked to solve.

The importance of these soft-skills including important aspects of socio-emotional learning, creativity and even critical thinking are often not given the time they deserve.

Ritchhart (2015) quotes research that reveals the power of wait time and thinking time with the quality and quantity of student thinking increasing by 300% to 700% when additional time is given to thinking within class discussion. Wait time or thinking time combined with strategies such as those from ‘Making Thinking Visible’ signify to students that what is wanted is not a speedy response but a well considered one. Wait time and thinking time according to Ritchhart combat the habit many students develop of guessing what the teacher wants as a response.

“While people usually gain power through traits and actions that advance the interests of others, such as empathy, collaboration, openness, fairness, and sharing, when they start to feel powerful or enjoy a position of privilege, those qualities begin to fade.”

Behaviors like these undermine leaders’ effectiveness by depressing the performance of those around them, and are ultimately self-defeating.

power puts us in something like a manic state, making us feel expansive, energized, omnipotent, hungry for rewards, and immune to risk – which opens us up to rash, rude, and unethical actions.” But it turns out that simply being aware of those feelings – “Hey, I’m feeling as if I should rule the world right now” – and monitoring impulses to behave inappropriately helps keep those behaviors in check.

too much praise can convey a sense of low expectation and, as a result, can be demotivating.

Teenagers care a lot about what their peers think of them. Constructive feedback given in front of others, even if it is well-intended, can be read as a public attack on them and their ability. This can lead to students developing a fear of failure and putting up a front.

This is similar to the technique he calls the whisper correction – the feedback technically takes place in public, but the pitch and tone of voice is designed to be heard only by the individual receiving it.

“Improvement [in writing] starts with volume. Volume suffers if I have to grade everything. Grading doesn’t make kids better. Volume, choice, and conferring makes kids better.”

“Give students daily opportunities to leave tracks of their thinking, use those tracks to notice patterns, and adjust instruction on the basis of what kids know and what they need. Repeat cycle.”

“Pre-assessment without associated action is like eating without digestion.”

Every superintendent, or state commissioner, must be able to say, with confidence, ‘Everyone who teaches here is good. Here’s how we know. We have a system.

school-based administrators “don’t always have the skill to differentiate great teaching from that which is merely good, or perhaps even mediocre.” Another problem is the lack of consensus on how we should define “good teaching.”

ProfHacker has written quite a bit about the app and their post “GoogleDocs and Collaboration in the Classroom” is chock-full of links to various tips and useful ideas. Getting Smart’s “6 Powerful Google Docs Features to Support the Collaborative Writing Process” provides an excellent step-by-step guide to using Google Docs especially for collaborative writing. And for a basic overview of Google Docs’ features and potential uses, you can browse through this slideshow:

I have asked my Basic English Skills students to keep a daily journal (which can be on anything they wish to write about and functions to help them build their writing muscles) in Google Docs, which they’ve only shared with me. Besides alleviating any anxiety students might have felt about making their journals public, Google Docs allows me to easily monitor new entries (whenever a Doc is edited, the title turns bold) and to verify when students are completing their entries (by using the revision history feature).

I decided to have the students write in teams of three, with one team member serving as lead editor each week. The lead editor is in charge of each week’s blog post, which includes coming up with a focus question and locating 2-3 sources to help them answer their question, which they share with their team before the week’s first class meeting (I have had the teams indicate each week’s lead editor in a spreadsheet in Google Docs so that I am aware of which students are in charge each week). But it gets really interesting when the teams come together in the week’s first class meeting. The lead editor creates a Google Doc, which they share with their team and me, and type in their focus question and a brief summary of how they plan to answer it. What follows is a 30-40 minute session in which the team discusses the question, the lead editor’s sources, and their plan for answering the question completely in writing in the Google Doc, observing a strict rule of silence (I adapted this activity from Lawrence Weinstein’s “Silent Dialogue” activity in Writing Doesn’t Have to Be Lonely).

In this Education Week article, Connecticut educator Christopher Doyle worries that many educators are not taking very good care of themselves – not balancing the intense challenges of work with family, friends, love, sleep, vacations, exercise, good nutrition, emotional health, and civic engagement. “Like American society at large,” says Doyle, “ many of us are overworked, stretched thin financially, and torn between roles as spouses, parents, and employees… Not unlike other professionals devoted to nurture, such as doctors, teachers are measured – and measure themselves – against an idealized image of excellence that involves incessant work.”

Teachers occupy the middle to lower tiers of the American middle class – whose wages have been stagnant for some time.

Stressed, workaholic educators are not in the best position to help students achieve some kind of balance in their overscheduled lives.

Mindfulness is the awareness that arises through purposefully paying attention to the present moment in a non-judgemental way,

As we practice mindfulness, we begin to understand our mind-body connection better and learn not to be so reactive to thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations.

With mindfulness, we develop a quality of attention that can be present no matter what is happening around us. This helps us feel more peace, ease, and balance in our lives and we develop more empathy, compassion, and love.

The DSM-5 criteria are similar to the 2011 guidelines with two exceptions. Fewer problem behaviors are required for those 17 years or older, and there must be evidence that symptoms began before age 12 years instead of before age 7.

The guidelines also emphasize ruling out other causes of ADHD-like symptoms and identifying comorbid conditions.

The stimulant medications methylphenidate and amphetamines in their various forms generally are the initial treatments.