Becoming Buoyant: Helping Teachers and Students Cope with the Day to Day

Marc Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000081473
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Becoming Buoyant shows teachers how they can help students to bounce back from daily setbacks and challenges. Drawing on the five main principles of academic buoyancy – confidence, coordination, control, composure and commitment – it investigates the evidence base from which the techniques are drawn and offers practical guidance on applying them in the classroom.

Emphasising the role played by internal and external factors, as well as wider school and community influences, the book offers practical guidance on:

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• Choosing and pursuing personal goals

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• Overcoming procrastination

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• Recognising and dealing with anxiety

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• How to use motivation, anxiety and stress management as ways to encourage and nurture self-efficacy.

Written by an experienced teacher and chartered psychologist, Becoming Buoyant is essential reading for all teachers that want their students to be resilient and flourish in the classroom.

CHAPTER 1

Staying afloat

As a species, human beings are extremely resilient. The very fact that we still exist and thrive is testament to our ability to adapt to changing circumstances and come back even stronger. Despite this, however, conversations and debates over the past few years indicate a view of humans as somehow lacking in resilience. These notions may be associated with a number of complex issues, including the increase in people seeking help for mental health problems or conversations around the implementation of trigger warnings and safe spaces. These views are generally, and inevitably, directed towards young people, resulting in labels such as ‘snowflake’ and as somehow less resilient than their more mature accusers. Unsurprisingly, this implied deficit has been used as a way of explaining academic achievement in both directions. While some arguments insist that to assist young people there is a need to reduce the number of high-stakes exams and general academic related pressure, others are suggesting the need to raise resilience by testing more or by placing young people into situations where failure is more likely, a kind of ‘tough love’ approach.

This implied resilience deficit, therefore, is used as an explanation for everything from poor mental health to academic failure and even knife crime – a go-to for all the worlds ills, especially in respect to children and teenagers. However, there are many factors that lead to academic underachievement (and poor mental health and criminality) and there is no single solution that will ensure that all young people thrive in school and reach their full potential. More importantly, certainly for the purpose of this book, it’s unlikely that resilience has very much to do with it, even if we do manage to agree on what we actually mean by the term. Once we adopt a broader stance we begin to realise that our definitions and general understanding of what resilience is and how it can (or cannot) be nurtured, encouraged or taught are so disparate that there are doubts over whether resilience as a construct is even useful. This problem not only arises within general views of resilience, but can also be seen in the academic research literature. This is not to completely disregard those carefully tailored and implemented programs that already aim to increase young people’s capacity to thrive in difficult circumstances, only to advise caution.

█ Resilience is evolutionary

Traditional views of resilience adopt an evolutionary position, in that resilience is related to a person’s ability to successfully adapt and alter their behaviour as a result of changes in the environment. Change leads to stress and this stress is neither positive nor negative, it simply leads to necessary adaptations. How individuals react to these changes is, however, related to their ability to adapt. In other words, some people may be more resilient than others; they may display lower levels of anxiety or a higher degree of conscientiousness, for example. This is fairly obvious and uncontentious – humans beings differ in innumerable ways and their capacity to adapt to change is no different. However, research into these differences has generally concentrated on incidents of extreme adversity, such as how young children cope with challenges raging from extreme poverty, neglect and mental illness. Those young people who thrive are said to be resilient, but factors that encourage this resilience are both internal (such as innate dispositions like personality) and external (including factors in the wider environment such as strong family ties and support from other institutions like church and community groups and schools). Unfortunately, we all too often take the evidence gleaned from studies of resilience to extreme adversity and attempt to apply it to the daily trials and tribulations of school life.

The challenges young people face at school simply aren’t comparable with those faced by children raised in poverty or suffering from parental neglect, even though academic achievement is certainly influenced by these circumstances. The average student will face many challenges, including competing deadlines, disappointing grades and dips in motivation. Many will also experience anxiety over impending tests and exams and fears surrounding failure, status and perceived ability. Even those raised within stable and supportive families will experience these challenges, while those attempting to cope with non-school related adversity will be faced with a great deal more.

Often these aspects of learning are termed non-cognitive because they appear to be separate from those directly related to the learning process (that is, retaining learned information) and directly measurable components (such as intelligence). However, cognitive components are challenging in their own right, specifically in relation to pressure (or load) placed upon limited mental resources, particularly memory. These cognitive aspects of learning have been encapsulated within a model known as Cognitive Load Theory (Sweller, 1988) and advanced in recent years through Load Reduction Instruction (Martin & Evans, 2018), a process by which students learn in a manner that places less strain on cognitive processes. Through these interrelated theories, it becomes possible to employ both cognitive and non-cognitive techniques to decrease the burden or, quite literally, to lighten the load. Indeed, the process may further cast doubt on the strict cognitive–non-cognitive dichotomy as a whole as well as debates around so-called progressive versus traditionalist modes of teaching (Martin & Evans, 2018, p. 204).

█ Resilience as academic buoyancy

While accepting the similarities between different factors within the learning process, it is also useful to highlight differences between types of resilience (differences that will be discussed in Chapter 2). On the one hand, we have resilience in respect to extreme adversity, while on the other, we have resilience that is academic centred and involves day-to-day setbacks, general hassles and cognitive limitations. This latter type of resilience has been termed academic buoyancy by Australian educational psychologist Andrew Martin and provides a distinction that allows interventions to become highly focussed upon skills building, rather than on building general resilience (Martin, 2013). While attempts to build general resilience are somewhat problematic, especially if there is no agreed definition or means by which resilience can be measured, academic buoyancy allows for the identification of certain factors that have been found to contribute to a greater capacity to cope with and reflect on setbacks. These factors (identified by Martin and subsequent researchers working within educational psychology) have become known as the 5Cs (confidence, coordination, control, composure and commitment). Becoming Buoyant, however, adds a sixth C to the mix that recognises the role of wider aspects within the environment in the form of community.

The academic buoyancy model, therefore, has a number of advantages over more generalised models of resilience. First of all it is specific to academic performance. This means that teachers can be confident that the interventions that arise from it are directly applicable to their students. Second, the breaking down of the model into five distinct components allows for more targeted approaches. Confidence, for example, equates to self-efficacy – one’s faith in the ability to complete a given task. Coordination, on the other hand, is about planning, goal setting and time management, while control is related to the way people attribute the causes of success and failure; composure is the ability to remain calm and regulate emotional responses, and commitment the ability to keep going even when things are challenging (we may also refer to this as conscientiousness or grit).

█ Buoyancy and wellbeing

Because of its emphasis on academic achievement, the buoyancy model doesn’t approach the issues related to mental health and wellbeing specifically. Often resilience interventions have attempted a dual purpose, that of raising academic achievement and improving student wellbeing (or they have presumed that raising wellbeing will automatically result in improved educational outcomes). Academic buoyancy does not purport to tackle this latter issue, despite 5C composure being related to anxiety and emotional stability. This is not to say that improving academic buoyancy won’t indirectly impact wellbeing through related techniques and strategies. For example, anxiety has been found to negatively impact test scores and while the aim of academic buoyancy would be to tackle anxiety to improve academic outcomes, these aims could also improve general wellbeing by helping students to better cope with anxiety. In addition, explicitly teaching techniques related to time management and goal setting reduces worry and limits procrastination, itself linked to lower levels of wellbeing and a greater susceptibility to depression (Sirois & Pychyl, 2016, p. 6).

Similarly, changes to instructional design (how new information is taught), can lead to better retention of learned information, higher academic confidence (because learning becomes less problematic) and, consequently, less worry and feelings of anxiety. This means that while anxiety coping techniques can be taught (non-cognitive), anxiety can also be reduced through an understanding of how memory systems best retain information (cognitive). Students, therefore, become less anxious because they aren’t being presented with information in such a way that makes them feel overwhelmed or unable to cope with competing instructions and multiple sensory inputs.

█ An emphasis on evidence

One of the major strengths of the academic buoyancy model is that it incorporates aspects of psychology and related disciplines that already have a strong evidence base. Some of these areas have been part of the research literature for several decades, such as personality (Chapter 4), self-efficacy and self-concept (Chapter 11). Others are more recent additions from disciplines allied to psychology. Goal setting (Chapter 6), for example, draws much of its support from behavioural economics, an area that (unsurprisingly) combines elements of behavioural and cognitive psychology with economics. At the heart of behavioural economics is behaviour change and the way behaviour can be nudged in particular directions. Behavioural economists often work on projects related to health or financial behaviours, such as nudging people towards a healthier lifestyle or encouraging them to save more for their retirement. The same principles can be utilised to nurture adaptive learning habits and to jettison unhelpful ones (Chapter 5). Personality (Chapter 4) is often associated with another relatively recent discipline known as behavioural genetics – the investigation of the heritability of certain human dispositions. These dispositions include traits such as conscientiousness and emotional stability.

There is also a respectful nod towards a specific movement in psychology often referred to as positive psychology. Positive psychologists investigate those elements of the human condition that lead to flourishing and increase wellbeing. It has been called happiness studies, but this term underplays the central tenets of the movement. The notion of positive psychological capital underscores both human flourishing and academic buoyancy. Those individuals who are able to build stores of hope, self-efficacy, optimism and resilience are better equipped to deal with life’s challenges (Luthans, Luthans & Luthans, 2004).

Support for academic buoyancy, therefore, originates from some of the most robust and reliable research studies that have been conducted over the past 50 years or more. Drawing on such a vast repertoire of research means that studies aren’t confined to the same methodology but, rather, include laboratory, longitudinal and comparative studies (amongst others) as well as both qualitative and quantitative data.

█ All models are (potentially) wrong

Even though these studies are reliable and draw on established research methodologies, no study is perfect and where weaknesses exist they should be fully acknowledged. Scientific models are just that, explanations of complex phenomenon that help to explain research findings. Models of resilience generally, and buoyancy specifically, produce a workable narrative on which interventions can be built. Robust models explain both research findings and intervention outcomes but remain flexible, taking into account more recent findings and conclusions. Or, as the statistician George Box noted, ‘All models are wrong, but some are useful’ (Box, 1979). Nowhere is this more relevant than in psychology, where even established theories are overturned as the fledgling science incorporates increasingly sophisticated techniques, including advanced statistical analysis and brain scanning technology. Indeed, the rapid expansion of neuroscience and cognitive neuropsychology has led to the re-thinking of many theories and models once considered sacrosanct.

█ A buoyancy blueprint

Martin’s 5Cs of academic buoyancy provide a useful blueprint upon which effective, evidence-based interventions can be created. In an extension to the 5C model, Becoming Buoyant supplements these with a sense of community (a sixth C) that places the emphasis on feelings of belonging and support. Young people raised within tightly knit communities not only flourish on a personal level, they also do better at school. Similarly, those schools with a strong ethos, sense of community and effective support mechanisms represent some of the most successful (see Chapters 2 and 3).

The community aspect of academic buoyancy implies that the ability to cope, thrive and flourish depends also on the culture of the wider environment, that is, the school. There is, therefore, a top-down element to academic specific resilience, one that involves a culture of high expectations, valuing effort and hard work, an emphasis on routine and good habit formation and successful and consistent reward systems. While Becoming Buoyant emphasises the importance of individual components (in the form of the 5Cs) it doesn’t do this in absence of school culture and the support people receive from external sources (the sixth C, community). However, this is not a book about behaviour management and any mention of behaviour should be considered in general terms – the behaviours that encourage buoyancy rather than the management of disruptive behaviour.

Becoming Buoyant, therefore, spans a number of interconnected disciplines that together help to untangle the complex web of human behaviour, specifically academic coping and flourishing. It then incorporates these into workable strategies that can be implemented on a personal, classroom or school-wide level. While teachers and other educational professionals can use these techniques with their ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Staying afloat
• Chapter 2. The many faces of resilience
• Chapter 3. Taking care of the small stuff
• Chapter 4. Personality and the 5Cs
• Chapter 5. Creating good habits
• Chapter 6. Setting and pursuing goals
• Chapter 7. Getting stuff done
• Chapter 8. Composure and emotional stability
• Chapter 9. Dealing with anxiety
• Chapter 10. Control
• Chapter 11. Becoming confident
• Chapter 12. Springing forwards
• Index