That’s how some experts say the current national conversation about youth mental health is framed — and counter to its goal, that lens is hurting the ability to find solutions that help adolescents better weather mental health struggles.
They spoke during a media briefing on youth mental health organized by the FrameWorks Institute, a nonprofit that studies how people think about social issues.
One of the biggest challenges to making communities that are overall better for youth mental health is the very way the issue is talked about, says Nat Kendall-Taylor, CEO of the FrameWorks Institute and a psychological anthropologist.
Conversations tend to focus on how individual choices students make can impact their mental health, he says, rather than on how systemic problems and the environments where teens live contribute to stress on adolescents. They also tend to be fatalistic and focus on the crisis nature of the problem, Kendall-Taylor adds, and paint teens as a kind of “other” social group that’s detached from their communities.
These factors form a “toxic trio” that causes people to feel as though the problem is insurmountable, he explains, and then tune out. That creates a challenge in getting people supportive of changes, and use of public resources, for teen mental health support.
“It’s become a culture war issue, it’s become an existential problem,” Kendall-Taylor says, “and the interesting thing is the way in which that crisis- and urgency-focused narrative really gives no space and has no room for solutions.”
What Motivates the Adolescent Brain?
Andrew Fuligni is a psychology professor and leads the Adolescent Development Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Science’s understanding of the adolescent brain is much different than it was 10 years ago, he says, and what the teen mind needs is connection, discovery and exploration. The motivation and rewards system is highly active, pumping out higher levels of dopamine than those seen in earlier childhood or in adulthood.
“It energizes our motivational region so we can explore the world and find not just how we can fit into the family but into the social world, community and so on,” Fuligni says. “We are designed to take risks during the adolescent years so we can learn. It’s important for adolescents to have those risks in safe and supportive ways, whether in school or the community, so they can find out how they can make a good contribution to the world around them.”
Fuligni says the public is still underestimating the importance of sleep, which is critical to the brain’s development, to adolescent mental health. Current evidence suggests there’s a far greater connection between quality sleep and mental health, he explains, than with another factor frequently named the root problem — social media usage.
“Many scientists believe that the focus on social media has led us to not pay attention to these other critical factors that may be driving these kinds of things,” Fuligni says.
But teens don’t necessarily control whether their environment is set up for a good night’s sleep, Fuligni says. How much noise or light pollution is present, or whether there’s tension at home, are all factors that can impact whether adolescents get sufficient rest.
“Sleep also shows very significant inequalities in American society,” he says. “When we look at economic inequalities, ethnic inequalities, sleep will follow every aspect of inequality across the nation. Light pollution, overcrowding, when you look at work schedules of parents, these will all drive poorer sleep within the household.”
Changing the Narrative
Kendall-Taylor says that one solution the FrameWork Institute recommends to address public disengagement around youth mental health is changing the framing from an individual problem to one that focuses on how our environment shapes us.
Educating people on how adolescent development works is key to getting buy-in for addressing issues that will improve teen well-being, he adds. There’s likewise a need to steer conversations around youth mental health from crisis to solutions, with more talking about what positive and resilient mental health experiences look like.
“We need to be careful that the young people in our stories are not passive recipients but active agents in the experiences of mental health,” Kendall-Taylor says, “that we don't fall into this ‘they need to be saved by us’ dynamic, which is a frequent trap that we fall into.”
View From a School District
Kent Pekel has spent a lot of time thinking about how stress on youth mental health gets in the way of students succeeding in class. As the superintendent in Rochester, Minnesota, he supported an overhaul of the district’s transportation system so that high school students could get more sleep with a school day start time of 8:50 a.m.
Before that change, the district tried its hand at convincing high schoolers to go to bed earlier by touting “the benefits of sleep.” The campaign didn’t land.
“The benefits of sleep were not resonating with high school kids,” Pekel says, “but recently as part of our mental health strategy, we’ve started to talk about wellness and being healthy.”
Pekel says he feels like he’s living through a second big paradigm shift in education. The first was the movement to implement early childhood education systemwide, rather than viewing it as a niche practice.
It was the framing around the importance of early childhood education, similar to what Kendall-Taylor describes for youth mental health, that helped it become more widely adopted, Pekel says. With mental health, he adds, the gap between what students need and what the education system can provide is even wider than what families faced at the onset of the early childhood education movement.
While it’s positive that students, parents and educators today are more aware of the importance of mental health, Pekel is also seeing more families that are willing to keep children home if they’re experiencing symptoms of anxiety. Like others around the country, he says his district is managing a chronic absenteeism problem. Educators like him need help differentiating between when students are experiencing true mental health problems versus when they are simply going through the typical challenges that come with being a teen.
“Not being in school has catastrophic implications for your ability to learn, and we are seeing parents using terminology that implies it’s really rooted in a mental health challenge,” Pekel says, “and sometimes our school social workers, school counselors, school psychologists say, ‘No, this is just a kid who needs a lot of support to go to class.’”
Educator wellness is more than buzzwords. Living a well-balanced and fully engaged life is essential for building a safe, supportive and collaborative school culture that positively impacts both student achievement and teacher retention. Learn the 4 dimensions of educator wellness and how they can help strengthen work-life balance and teacher efficacy.
Colleges are adjusting to a lingering impact of COVID-19 shutdowns that kept kids out of physical schools at key points in their social development: It’s harder than it used to be to teach students to adjust to college life when so many are coming to campuses nervous about making social connections.
As a result, many colleges and universities are rethinking their freshman orientation programs, adding new options and doing more to help students forge relationships.
At the University of Colorado at Boulder this summer, for instance, administrators are offering incoming students three orientation options to choose from. One effort lets new students meet classmates in breakout Zoom calls. Another program brings students and families to campus for a day to learn about university traditions and how to get involved on campus. And those looking for an immersive experience can attend ‘Camp Chip’ — they’ll spend two nights on campus connecting with other students, getting to know the campus and seeing what life will be like in college.
Before the pandemic, the university’s summer orientation had been mostly online, with an in person “welcome week” before classes began. But these days there’s a greater interest (and expectation) from students and families in the need to help students feel like they belong on campus, says Joe Thomas, president of Association for Orientation, Transition and Retention in Higher Education, known as NODA.
“In 2019, I probably would have heard from parents and students, ‘It's annoying,’ ‘It's hard to get here,’ ‘How could you possibly require this in-person orientation?” he says. “Now they're like, ‘Oh we get it, we would really love to be there and watch our student get to know other folks.’ There's just more buy-in now.”
Colleges have another reason to try to get orientation right: It’s the first step to building belonging and, hopefully, convincing students to stay. That’s especially important for first-generation students and those transferring from other colleges.
“It is truly the kickoff to retention,” says Katie Murray, director of new student and family programs at Towson University. “If a student has a bad experience that starts at orientation and it continues through their first semester, we are less likely to retain that student.”
Flexibility Is Key
Many institutions are still in the process of “throwing darts at a dartboard” to see what sticks best for orientation, says Thomas, of NODA. This means they need to be adaptable, and offer a range of ways students can prepare to enter college.
Most colleges now have some online component to their orientation process that’s left over from the pandemic, Thomas says. Often the online portions are more “transactional,” he notes. Students learn about registering for classes, connect with their academic advisor and go through required trainings. The number of topics these trainings cover has increased as colleges feel pressure to better regulate artificial intelligence, create stricter free speech regulations or enforce hazing regulations, among other changes.
"It is truly the kickoff to retention. ... If a student has a bad experience that starts at orientation and it continues through their first semester, we are less likely to retain that student.”
—Katie Murray, director of new student and family programs at Towson University.
As a result, orientations are required to cover much more information now than even a few years ago, says Jenny Osborn, associate director of the first year experience at The Ohio State University. In Ohio, for example, state lawmakers passed anti-hazing legislation in 2021 that requires colleges to create an educational program on hazing that students can complete during orientation.
Once students have finished the online portion, colleges bring them into in-person or virtual sessions either during the summer or right before classes start to help students connect with one another.
At Towson University, for instance, students must complete a series of online modules, which typically take a total of about 35 minutes, before they come to orientation, Murray says. Then, they attend a one-day session in the summer, which can be in person or virtual, followed by a four-day program before the first day of classes.
The goal, Murray adds, is to spread information out over time, while also encouraging students to connect with one another.
“We know that sense of belonging ebbs and flows throughout a student's experience,” Murray says. “But if we can start off on the right note, that information piece can happen in a bunch of different ways.”
Creating a range of orientation options also helps colleges assess what students need, says Thomas, who is also the associate vice chancellor for student affairs at Boulder. Much of Boulder’s student population comes from out of state, he says, which makes it difficult to visit the city, where summer is one of the peak tourist times. If students can’t come to Colorado but still want to connect with future classmates, they can attend a virtual session, where they’ll be split into breakout rooms led by orientation leaders.
“We're hyper aware of making sure that our orientation programs are accessible to students, whether you have the financial means or not,” Thomas says. “We're gonna use that information to then say, ‘Ok, [for] future summers, here's what we need to be the balance to meet our first generation students with what they need, what any of our marginalized populations may need that may be different, and the population en masse for our 7,000 plus students at CU Boulder.’”
Changing Social Skills
Colleges have also begun adapting their orientation programs to the ways students’ social skills have changed coming out of the pandemic.
Many students now have a harder time saying goodbye to their families, Osborn says. Before the pandemic, about 70 to 80 percent of students would stay in residence halls during the university’s overnight summer orientation. Now more than half of the students opt to stay with their parents in a hotel. Students also usually turn to their siblings or parents for information about college rather than relying on orientation, she adds.
When it comes to choosing a date for orientation, students used to go for the earliest possible dates. Now, they want to try to coordinate with a future roommate or classmate they met online, Osborn says.
“What we're seeing student-behavior-wise at orientation is a real sense of clinging to safety,” she says.
To help students feel more comfortable meeting other students, Ohio State has begun offering more small-group and “low- risk” activities, Osborn says. Rather than hosting a large scavenger hunt, for example, Osborn says students can do jewelry making, coloring, board games and pick-up volleyball or basketball games. That way, students can connect with one or two people rather than be overwhelmed by a large group.
Other colleges have created small group atmospheres that bring students together based on similar interests or identities. This gives them a leg up when they meet each other because they already have something in common, says Gregory Wolcott, the associate vice president for student success at San Jose State University.
During San Jose State’s two-night orientation, students are split into groups of about 20 based on what they’re studying, Wolcott says. Orientation leaders host interactive activities with their groups.
CU Boulder also splits students up based on commonalities. During the university’s fall welcome program, orientation leaders host about 40 “Buff Meet Ups” for students who all have shared interests, such as gaming or music. The “meet-ups” could also be taking a tour of local restaurants or going on a hike together, which helps them connect in a smaller setting, says Lizzie Brister, director of new student and family programs at Boulder. Some of the events are also identity based, such as one for Latinx students.
Coming out of the pandemic, “there was an indication that [students] wanted to be together, they wanted to do stuff in community, but didn't know how to engage or interact with each other,” Thomas says. “Orientation programs are shifting more toward that — getting to know each other again, which is the classic thing that we try to do, but it can't just be in solely one program type.”
Orientation offices have also changed the way they train their student leaders, often to account for the same issues the pandemic has caused for incoming students.
These days many students are reluctant to sign up as orientation leaders, Osborn says. In the same way that new students don’t want to stay in the dorms, families would rather have their older students spend time at home than stay on campus during the summer, she says.
They’re also coming in with less background knowledge, Brister says. Before the pandemic, orientation leaders typically held leadership positions in high school, as a club president, for example, Brister says. Now students are coming in with less experience public speaking or facilitating a small group. Some also haven’t ever experienced an in-person orientation, but now need to lead most of the activities for the incoming class (though that has become less of an issue as students who experienced the pandemic in college graduate).
Journey leaders, as CU’s orientation leaders are called, now attend an eight-week leadership course to prepare them for orientation. They learn how to run orientation events, leadership skills and ways to engage students who may be more socially anxious, among other things, Brister says. Before the pandemic, that information was all squeezed into just four days of training.
“That's pivotal to build our culture for those student leaders of how we want to share what it means to be a Buff, how we want to present the university and be ambassadors for the university to these new students and why we’re doing what we’re doing,” Brister says. “That's been huge in building that culture for our student leaders and then hopefully communicating that to our whole incoming student population.”
And with high college costs, it’s more important than ever for colleges to offer supports and to make sure students and families know where to find that help, says Wolcott, of San Jose State.
If colleges don’t provide all the support orientation programs need, students may end up transferring to somewhere that does.
“College campuses need to understand that it's a competitive market,” Wolcott says. “If you're not rolling out the red carpet, if everyone's not on board with ‘this is orientation season and it's everybody's job,’ then campuses are really gonna struggle.”
“Are you a boy or a girl?” the 5-year-old asked, staring at me as she waited for my response. I froze. Having worked primarily with middle and high schoolers, I wasn’t yet used to the blunt inquisitiveness of our younger students. I was caught off guard.
It was 2022 and I had recently been hired as the principal of an all-girls elementary school in New York, and it was my first visit to the school to meet students, staff and families.
“I’m a girl,” I said, smiling through my discomfort, before slinking away to chat with another student. The moment was brief, but it stuck in the pit of my belly throughout the day.
When I arrived home, I debriefed the day with my wife. I told her about the exciting moments from my visit — learning about the school culture, seeing teachers in action, and meeting my incredible new students. When I mentioned my experience with the pre-K student, she sensed my unease and asked me how I was feeling about it.
As I reflected, I found myself wondering aloud what it would be like leading an all-girls elementary school as a masculine-presenting queer woman. I was worried that the community would not accept a woman who wears suits and ties to lead their daughters’ school, that I would be too different. My wife reassured me that my individuality was valuable and my students would love and respect me as they always had when I was a teacher.
Since becoming principal of an elementary school, I have been asked the same innocent, yet awkward, question by multiple students and have still not found out the perfect response. But each time I’m asked, it reminds me of the fact that young people are constantly exploring identity and part of my job is to foster a community where curiosity, individuality, and diversity are seen as assets.
To create this kind of inclusive community, I want to develop a thoughtful response that challenges students to cultivate their own worldview — one that gets them thinking about why this question is coming up for them and helps them understand how they can ask questions about identity with care.
Identity exploration is a key element of childhood and adolescence and working with young people requires us to support it. There’s a body of research showing the importance of identity development and a positive self-concept for social and emotional growth. Since our school is an all-girls institution, gender identity is something we think a lot about — and it starts early. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, children typically develop a sense of their gender identity by 4 years old. As children explore, they often express curiosity about aspects of their own identity and the identity of others in their community.
Most of the staff and students at our school identify as girls or women. But none of us is the same. We each show up and represent our identity in unique ways. There’s no singular expression of girlhood or womanhood. How, then, in a space that is organized around a shared gender identity, can we create an environment that embraces diversity and difference?
As a leader, I believe in order to create this type of environment, I have to start with myself.
While considering how to respond when a student asks a question about my identity, I’ve been thinking about where my insecurity stems from and I’ve recently come to realize that it’s fueled by traumatic experiences I had when I was a student. Today, I am a school leader, but I was once a child who was looking for a safe space to become myself. Unfortunately, I didn’t find that at school. Instead, I experienced rejection and bigotry, living through years of racist and homophobic bullying. Clearing the emotional rubble created by those experiences, I now have an important perspective on what our young people are going through in school today.
My own feelings of being misunderstood in my youth, as well as the homophobia I’ve lived through for being open about my identity as a queer educator, inform my passion for creating spaces where our girls can just be, without the fear of having to fit into a specific mold. I feel a great sense of responsibility to lead a school community that expands the definition of what it means to be a girl, supporting whatever identities our students bring to the classroom each day, and empowering our students to become adults who are beacons of our community.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that every student should question their gender. Instead, I’m proposing that all students deserve a safe space to explore their identities, ask questions, discuss identity openly and learn about individuals who are like them — and not like them.
When I model vulnerability and authenticity as a leader, I invite others to do the same. The challenge? Leaders like me are not really encouraged to be vulnerable. As a young Black queer woman in school leadership, embracing vulnerability has felt frightening at times.
Facilitating open conversations about identity is important and can lead to validation and support, but there can also be potential backlash. For example, I’ve worked in schools for nearly a decade and in every space I’ve taught in, we’ve gotten pushback from families about celebrating, or even acknowledging Pride Month in reaction to activities promoting inclusivity for LGBTQ+ people because they feel it is inappropriate. Each time, I assure families that we value an inclusive curriculum and anything we’re teaching is in service of supporting our students.
These sentiments are hurtful personally, but that’s not my main concern. It’s not just about me. It’s about my students and my staff and the kind of environment we cultivate for them. An environment where everyone can bring their full selves to school. Our students deserve to have a school where they’re being challenged to learn about their own identities and the identities of others.
Our school was founded to provide the empowering experience of an all-girls education in a public school environment. The International Coalition of Girls’ Schools, which researches the impact of girls’ schools across the globeargues that girls’ schools are uniquely positioned to develop girls into leaders precisely because we are honest with our students about the real world. Sheltering our girls from exploring conversations about identity, flattens their voices into a two-dimensional box. Girlhood — or womanhood — is not monolithic. The beauty of a space dedicated to women and led by mostly women is in the variety of who we are, how we show up, and how we support our girls.
I want to create a learning environment that nurtures curiosity and promotes diversity, not one that encourages everyone to be the same. To do that, I have to stand in who I am despite the potential backlash, knowing the space I am creating for my students to one day stand in who they are proudly.
Moving forward, if a student asks me if I’m a boy or a girl, or any other question about identity, I will pose a question to open up the conversation before I share my response. I will ask them why they are asking and why this is coming up for them. I will take their curiosity as an opportunity to encourage them to articulate their own ideas about identity because girls’ schools do not teach girls what to think, but how to be critical thinkers and agents of change.
The movement to keep smartphones out of schools is gaining momentum.
Just last week, the nation’s second-largest public school system, Los Angeles Unified School District, voted to ban smartphones starting in January, citing adverse health risks of social media for kids. And the U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, published an op-ed in The New York Times calling for warning labels on social media systems, saying “the mental health crisis among young people is an emergency.”
But some longtime teachers say that while such moves are a step in the right direction, educators need to take a more-active role in countering some negative effects of excessive social media use by students. Essentially, they should redesign assignments and how they instruct to help teach mental focus, modeling how to read, write and research away from the constant interruptions of social media and app notifications.
That’s the view of Lee Underwood, a 12th grade AP English literature and composition teacher at Millikan High School in Long Beach, California, who was the teacher of the year for his public school system in 2022.
He’s been teaching since 2006, so he remembers a time before the invention of the iPhone, Instagram or TikTok. And he says he is concerned by the change in behavior among his students, which has intensified in recent years.
“There is a lethargy that didn't exist before,” he says. “The responses of students were quicker, sharper. There was more of a willingness to engage in our conversations, and we had dynamic conversations.”
He tried to keep up his teaching style, which he feels had been working, but responses from students were different. “The last three years, four years since COVID, my jokes that I tell in my classroom have not been landing,” he says. “And they're the same jokes.”
Underwood has been avidly reading popular books and articles about the impact of smartphones on today’s young people. For instance, he read the much-talked-about book by Jonathan Haidt, “The Anxious Generation,” that has helped spark many recent efforts by schools to do more to counter the consequences of smartphones and social media.
Some have countered Haidt’s arguments, however, by pointing out that while young people face growing mental health challenges, there is little scientific evidence that social media is causing those issues. And just last month on this podcast, Ellen Galinsky, author of a book on what brain science reveals about how best to teach teens, argued that banning social media might backfire, and that kids need to learn how to regulate smartphone use on their own to prepare them for the world beyond school.
“Evidence shows very, very clearly that the ‘just say no’ approach in adolescence — where there's a need for autonomy — does not work,” she said. “In the studies on smoking, it increased smoking.”
Yet Underwood argues that he has felt the impact of social media on his concentration and focus firsthand. And these days he’s changing what he does in the classroom to bring in techniques and strategies that helped him counter the negative impacts of smartphones he experienced.
And he has a strong reaction to Galinsky’s argument.
“We don't let kids smoke in school,” he points out. “Maybe some parts of the ‘just say no campaigns’ broadly didn't work, but then no one's allowing smoking in schools.”
His hope is that the school day can be reserved as a time where students know they can get away from the downsides of smartphone and social media use.
“That's six hours of a school day where you can show a student, bring them to a kind of homeostasis, where they can see what it would be like without having that constant distraction,” he argues.
Hear the full conversation, as well as examples of how he’s redesigned his lessons, on this week’s episode. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, or use the player on this page.
What do parents want from schools when it comes to support for their children’s mental health?
Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.
Mainly, it’s to feel safe.
That’s according to the most recent data from Action for Healthy Kids, a nonprofit that promotes physical and mental well-being for school-aged children. The report results come from a survey of about 1,000 parents with children in K-12 schools in December 2023.
Parents’ concerns about their kids’ mental health ranged from worries about stress — “The pressure that is put on kids to do well on tests is overwhelming sometimes,” one parent wrote — to fears about their children experiencing racism at school.
The goal of collecting data on parental views of mental health is to give them what they want, says Rob Bisceglie, the organization’s executive officer and president. According to the survey responses, that means training and tools on how to talk to their children about issues that affect their well-being. Action for Healthy Kids is using the survey data to develop guides for parents on topics like overall mental health, racism, body positivity, setting body boundaries and suicide prevention.
“Our program is what you call a family-school partnership model, and so what the family thinks — parents and caregivers — that's of particular importance and interest to us,” Bisceglie says.
Strong Support for Services
Parents who were surveyed by and large agreed that having a school where their child feels a sense of belonging is important to supporting students’ mental health. They also wanted mental health services to be available at school.
Nearly 70 percent of parents say their child has “at least one adult at school that they trust or talk to.” Another 88 percent of parents said a welcoming classroom environment would help their child in particular feel safe and supported. Nearly the same percentage wanted teachers to try their best to create positive relationships between students.
Despite recent politicization of K-12 schools, a majority of parents said they want schools to include lessons about topics including “respect, cooperation, perseverance, empathy.”
“I don't think this is surprising, but [the report] reinforced something for me, that what parents really want for their kids in schools is that their kids are safe and feel a sense of love and belonging,” Bisceglie says. “We would love that nurturing relationship to be with a parent or a primary caregiver. The second most likely person to provide that kind of nurturing support for a child is in the school, and that's why this is so important.”
Feeling ‘Fine’
The barrier to accessing mental health services that parents cited most often was their child feeling that nothing is wrong despite a parent feeling otherwise — 38 percent of parents said this was a problem.
Anais Murphy is senior manager of Action for Healthy Kids’ Youth Mental Health and Social and Emotional Learning Program. She says that while parents might worry that kids are saying they feel fine when they don’t, it’s also important for parents to know which behaviors are normal for each age group.
“I think part of the goal of this campaign is to provide parents with the information they need to understand what ‘fine’ means,” Murphy explains. “We're certainly not trying to over-diagnose or to bring alarm bells that are not appropriate, but we absolutely do want parents to have an understanding of, what are the typical markers of development and mental health? A 14-year-old is really irritable. That's totally appropriate and sometimes a cause for concern, but sometimes exactly where they're supposed to be.”
The numbers also point to the fact that parents are paying more attention to youth mental health, Murphy says, and the organization wants to help parents learn where they can go for more help.
“We're in a phase of the reduction of stigma — I'm talking about mental health — at least among the younger generation,” she says. “I think that's a big part of it. It’s not something necessarily that came through in terms of this survey, but certainly something that's [confirmed] in other research.”
Racism at School
In addition to mental health concerns, 58 parents of Black parents and 45 parents of Hispanic parents are worried about their child experiencing racism at school.
Bisceglie says it’s the third year the survey has asked parents about concerns over racism.
Murphy says one of the tools the organization is working on as a result of the survey is a guide for how parents can talk to their children about racism at home and how teachers can do the same at school.
“I think one of the things that happened around the pandemic time and George Floyd was we started talking about racism and institutions like schools a lot more,” she says. “Not that people were not experiencing that before, but we weren’t necessarily bringing attention to it. So it didn't really surprise me, because schools are privy to the same kind of institutional forces that all of our other institutions are, and structural racism and institutional racism are one of those. I think it's really important that it's raised the level of collective consciousness so that we can start talking about it.”
When ChatGPT emerged a year and half ago, many professors immediately worried that their students would use it as a substitute for doing their own written assignments — that they’d click a button on a chatbot instead of doing the thinking involved in responding to an essay prompt themselves.
But two English professors at Carnegie Mellon University had a different first reaction: They saw in this new technology a way to show students how to improve their writing skills.
To be clear, these professors — Suguru Ishizaki and David Kaufer — did also worry that generative AI tools could easily be abused by students. And it’s still a concern.
They had an idea, though, for how they could set up a unique set of guardrails that would make a new kind of teaching tool that could help students get more of their ideas into their assignments and spend less time thinking about formatting sentences.
“When everyone else was afraid that AI was going to hijack writing from students,” remembers Kaufer, “We said, ‘Well if we can restrain AI, then AI can reduce many of the remedial tasks of writing that keep students from really [looking] to see what’s going on with their writing.”
The professors call their approach “restrained generative AI,” and they’ve already built a prototype software tool to try it in classrooms — called myScribe — that is being piloted in 10 courses at the university this semester.
Kaufer and Ishizaki were uniquely positioned. They have been building tools together to help teach writing for decades. A previous system they built, DocuScope, uses algorithms to spot patterns in student writing and visually show those patterns to students.
A key feature of their new tool is called “Notes to Prose,” which can take loose bullet points or stray thoughts typed by a student and turn them into sentences or draft paragraphs, thanks to an interface to ChatGPT.
“A bottleneck of writing is sentence generation — getting ideas into sentences,” Ishizaki says. “That is a big task. That part is really costly in terms of cognitive load.”
"A bottleneck of writing is sentence generation — getting ideas into sentences,” Ishizaki says. “That is a big task. That part is really costly in terms of cognitive load.”
— Suguru Ishizaki
In other words, especially for beginning writers, it’s difficult to both think of new ideas and keep in mind all the rules of crafting a sentence at the same time, just as it’s difficult for a beginning driver to keep track of both the road surroundings and the mechanics of driving.
“We thought, ‘Can we really lighten that load with generative AI?” he says.
Kaufer adds that novice writers often shift too early in the writing process into making fragments of ideas they put down into carefully crafted sentences, when they might just end up later deleting those sentences because the ideas may not fit into their final argument or essay.
“They start really polishing way too early,” Kaufer says. “And so what we’re trying to do is with AI, now you have a tool to rapidly prototype your language when you are prototyping the quality of your thinking.”
He says the concept is based on writing research from the 1980s that shows that experienced writers spend about 80 percent of their early writing time thinking about whole-text plans and organization and not about sentences.
Taming the Chatbot
Building their “notes to prose” feature took some doing, the professors say.
In their early experiments with ChatGPT, when they put in a few fragments and asked it to make sentences, “what we found is it starts to add a lot of new ideas into the text,” says Ishizaki. In other words, the tool tended to go even further in completing an essay by adding in other information from its vast stores of training data.
“So we just came up with a really lengthy set of prompts to make sure that there are no new ideas or new concepts,” Ishizaki adds.
The technique is different from other attempts to focus the use of AI for education, in that the only source the myScribe bot draws from is the student’s notes rather than a wider dataset.
Stacie Rohrbach, an associate professor and director of graduate studies in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon, sees potential in tools like those her colleagues created.
“We’ve long encouraged students to always do a robust outline and say, ‘What are you trying to say in each sentence?” she says, and she hopes that “restrained AI” approaches could help that effort.
And she says she already sees student writers misuse ChatGPT and therefore believes some restraint is needed.
“This is the first year that I saw lots of AI-generated text,” she says. “And the ideas get lost. The sentences are framed correctly, but it ends up being gibberish.”
John Warner, an author and education consultant who is writing a book about AI and writing, says he wondered whether the myScribe tool would be able to fully prevent “hallucinations” by the AI chatbot, or instances where tools insert erroneous information.
“The folks that I talk to think that that’s probably not possible,” he says. “Hallucination is a feature of how large language models work. The large language model is absent judgment. You may not be able to get away from it making something up. Because what does it know?”
"A lot of these tools want to make a process efficient that has no need to be efficient.”
— John Warner
Kaufer says that their tests so far have been working. In an email follow-up interview he wrote: “It's important to note that ‘notes to prose’ operates within the confines of a paragraph unit. This means that if it were to exceed the boundaries of the notes (or 'hallucinate', as you put it), it would be readily apparent and easy to identify. The worry about AI hallucinating would expand if we were talking about larger discourse units.”
Ishizaki, though, acknowledged that it may not be possible to completely eliminate AI hallucinations in their tool. “But we are hoping that we can restrain or guide AI enough to minimize ‘hallucinations’ or inaccurate or unintended information so that writers can correct them during the review/revision process.”
He described their tool as a “vision” for how they hope the technology will develop, not just a one-off system. “We are setting the goal toward where writing technology should progress,” he says. “In other words, the concept of notes to prose is integral to our vision of the future of writing.”
Even as a vision, though, Warner says he has different dreams for the future of writing.
One tech writer, he says, recently noted that ChatGPT is like having 1,000 interns.
“On one hand, ‘Awesome,’” Warner says. “On the other hand, 1,000 interns are going to make a lot of mistakes. Interns early on cost you more time than they save, but the goal is over time that person makes less and less supervision, they learn.” But with AI, he says, “the oversight doesn’t necessarily improve the underlying product.”
In that way, he argues, AI chatbots end up being “a very powerful tool that requires enormous human oversight.”
And he argues that turning notes into text is in fact the important human process of writing that should be preserved.
“A lot of these tools want to make a process efficient that has no need to be efficient,” he says. “A huge thing happens when I go from my notes to a draft. It’s not just a translation — that these are my ideas and I want them on a page. It’s more like — these are my ideas, and my ideas take shape while I’m writing.”
Kaufer is sympathetic to that argument. “The point is, AI is here to stay and it’s not going to disappear,” he says. “There’s going to be a battle over how it’s going to be used. We’re fighting for responsible uses.”
Ellen Galinsky has been on a seven-year quest to understand what brain science says about how to better teach and parent adolescent children. The past few years have seen advancements in our understanding of this time — where the brain is going through almost as much change as during the earliest years of a child’s life.
In the past, Galinsky says, researchers and educators have focused too much on portraying the emotional turmoil and risky decision-making that is typical in adolescence as negative. “The biggest breakthrough,” she argues, “is that we now understand that what we saw as problematic, what we saw as deviant, what we saw as immature, was in fact a developmental necessity.”
For her research, Galinsky, who is co-founder of the nonprofit and nonpartisan Families and Work Institute, also surveyed nearly 2,000 parents and students, and found that a large percentage of parents looked at teenage years as a negative time that would be fraught, while students felt they were unfairly stereotyped and misunderstood. She’s gathered her results in a new book, “The Breakthrough Years: A New Scientific Framework for Raising Thriving Teens.”
What her findings mean for educators, she argues, is that lessons for adolescents should be designed to lean into this period of human development.
“Adolescence is a time when young people are moving out into the world — think of the baby bird as leaving the nest,” she says. “And it's important for them to be exploratory. They react very strongly to experiences because they need to understand what's safe, what's not safe, whom they can trust, whom they can't trust, where they belong, where they don't belong, and who they want to be and who they are in a world that is much extended from their families.”
She hopes to reframe this period of development as what she calls “a time of possibility.”
And the work has led her to strong views on the question of whether or not to ban smartphones in schools.
Hear the full conversation on this week’s episode. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, or use the player on this page. Or read a partial transcript below, lightly edited for clarity.
EdSurge: What's happening in the brain in this phase of human development?
Ellen Galinsky: I love the analogy that Jennifer Silvers from UCLA used. She talked about it as a time when you're laying new roads. And what that means is that the connections among different parts of the brain are being formed and strengthened during adolescence, and she says if it's a stormy day, sometimes the concrete can get wet and mucky and messy, and that's the emotionality of adolescence.
But it is a time when these new connections are being made that help develop particularly what we call executive function skills. And that is a name that I find is pretty misunderstood. If people know it at all, it sounds like, ‘Shut up, sit still, listen to the teacher, be compliant, obey, organize your notebook, remember to bring your homework’ — those kinds of managerial skills. And in part that’s true, these are the brain-based skills that underlie our ability to set goals.
But executive function skills are always driven by goals. It's a time when we can then understand the landscape, the social landscape that we're in. We can understand our own perspective, the perspectives of others and how those differ from our own perspective. It's a time when we learn to communicate. I don't mean just talk, talk, talk. I mean thinking about what we say and better understanding how it's going to be heard by others. It's a time when we can learn to collaborate, which means dealing with the conflict that relationships with people and collaborating can bring.
This country could use a little executive function skills right now and learning how to collaborate. It's a time when we learn how to problem-solve, and that has different components — including making meaning of the situation, thinking creatively in terms of solutions, not just what you've always done, but how might I solve this in a different way? And then understanding what works or what wouldn't work about that solution.
In other words, evaluating solutions, or relational reasoning as it's called in the literature. And then critical thinking, like making a decision on the basis of what you think is valid and accurate information and going forth in implementing that decision. It's also a time when we learn how to take on challenges. Now, there are some core skills, brain-based skills that underlie this, and in addition to people thinking that executive function skills are ‘shut up, you still listen to the teacher, listen to the parents,’ also people think of them as, sometimes, soft skills. These are the most neurocognitive skills we have. They're the part of the brain that coordinates our social, emotional and behavioral capacities in order to achieve goals.
There is this idea that school is mainly for academic content and that's what is usually measured on statewide tests of performance. But it sounds like you're arguing that soft skills are even more important in the teen years than academic skills.
I think they're called soft skills to differentiate them from academic skills, but they're not soft. They're really hard skills. They are pulling together all of our capacities so that we can achieve what we want to achieve and live intentionally. So these are very strongly neurocognitive skills and not something soft and squishy that is beside the point.
We tend to think of learning in the early years as about numbers and letters and math and learning to read. And those sorts of things are critical, but these soft skills are the skills that help us learn those numbers and letters and learning how to do math and learning how to read.
So we have 20 years of research that shows that these soft skills are more predictive of success in school and in life. These skills are more predictive than or as predictive as IQ or socioeconomic status, which are the big things in predicting how well we do in life.
You talk about something I haven’t heard much, which is that schools are often too future-focused, and you quote a 16-year-old who says: “I feel like everything is for the future. In middle school, everyone's pressuring you to be ready for high school. In high school, everyone's pressuring you to be ready for college. In college, everyone's pressuring you to be ready for life.” Can you say more about this?
I can go back historically to 1992 when the first President Bush created educational goals, and the first educational goal was that young children will be ready for school. And that, I think at least in my many years in education, ushered in the period of ‘readiness.’ And we became ready for school and then ready for college and then ready for life. And they work in the sense that people got it that it was a way of understanding the importance of education.
But it has had its downside, I think. Adults have to learn to live in the now. Think about how many books are written to help us as grown-ups be in the present, pay attention to whom we're with. Not always be focusing on our to-do list and what's in the future.
Readiness is important. I'm not throwing the baby out with the bath water. But we need to be in the nowness, too. We need to be able to help children live these years. In that particular group where you just quoted a 16-year-old, another 16-year-old said, ‘My parents are always saying, these are the best years of my life. But why can't I live them? They want to go back to them, but they're not letting me live them now.’
I have to ask you about a big topic in the news these days, about whether to keep smartphones out of schools and keep people younger than 16 off social media. The biggest proponent of this right now is Jonathan Haidt, who has a new book called “The Anxious Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.” Do you agree with Haidt’s argument there, that teens would be far better off without access to social media and smartphones during this developmental time?
I don't have a Yes or No reaction. I think Haidt has raised a very important issue, which is ‘What are cellphones doing in our society?’ I wish that he hadn't called it an anxious generation, though. That's just stereotyping kids. And I wish that he hadn't freaked out parents so that they overreact. Parents are waiting for bad news about their kids. We want to protect our kids. We want them to be safe. We want them to have a good life. Being freaked out about something doesn't always help us do that.
The science is correlational. He does eventually say that, so there isn’t proof that phones and social media are causing anxiety. The National Academies of Sciences put out a report in December of last year that said that the science is correlational. We don't know, particularly for all kids. For some kids there's evidence of harm, but there also is evidence of benefits.
But here's my biggest issue with Haidt. I think he wonderfully understands the importance of play, and he understands the importance of autonomy, but then [he argues for] jumping in and reacting to this without teaching kids the skills to manage it themselves. If we are banning cellphones, first of all, kids will get around it, won't they? It's the kid currency. If we're doing that in a way that doesn't involve them, we're going to repeat the mistakes that we've made with ‘stop smoking.’ Evidence shows very, very clearly that the ‘just say no’ approach in adolescence — where there's a need for autonomy — does not work. In the studies on smoking, it increased smoking.
I wish we would carry out Jon Haidt’s emphasis on autonomy, and if schools would say, look, kids agree, there are bad things about cellphones. They're distracting, they're addictive. You see people who are ‘perfect.’ You see that you weren't invited to the mall with all the girls like Taylor Swift. We can't let the use of it, though, just become negative. So there have to be some rules about it, and the kids could help the adults even come up with the rules. We don't want cellphones in the school, but how would that best work if the kids aren't part of the solution?
One of the most frequent things that young people are asking me is, ‘How am I going to have the skills to fare in the adult world if we fix problems for kids?’
If we fix problems for kids, then they're going to go to college and always be connected with us anytime they have a problem. So we'll continue to fix things for them. They're going to be taking anti-anxiety medication. I mean, I'm exaggerating, but this is the time for them to learn these skills, to begin to deal in constructive ways with society. Young people can be part of the solution, and we'll be developing skills in them. And that's my main beef with the discussion that's going on.
What advice do you have for educators to best embrace this developmental period for teens?
Risk-taking is seen as negative. We have defined it as negative risk-taking, drinking, drugs, bad driving, texting. We say, ‘Why do they make such stupid decisions, kind of risky behavior?’ And we need to understand that this is a period of their lives when they're learning to be brave.
I love the way Ron Dahl at the University of California at Berkeley says it. They have a more of a fear reaction and they are sensation seekers. The highs are higher, the lows are lower. So we need to give them opportunities to take positive risks — positive risks to help those other people who are less fortunate, positive risks to try something that might be hard for them, positive risks to stand up for something that they believe in.
We need to give them opportunities to figure out who they are, to play into their development, which is a time when they are feeling things so strongly, and give them experiences for the benefit of themselves and for the benefits of society.
For example, I think of learning to clean up a pond that is polluted, or giving to kids who don't have toys near their playground or there's just so many things. That's a positive risk. That is so cool. Doing something for the world. Things that young people care about and they're learning the skills that go along with that. They're learning that they can be contributors to society.
Is the same pattern of absenteeism playing out at colleges, too? If so, what’s driving the trend? And what can professors and higher ed leaders do about it?
To find out, EdSurge interviewed Terri Hasseler, a professor in the Department of History, Literature, and the Arts at Bryant University in Rhode Island. She’s also director of the Center for Teaching Excellence there, which provides faculty with support for instruction, edtech, course design, classroom management and grading.
That vantage point gives her insight about what’s keeping students from feeling fully invested in showing up for class ready to truly participate in the learning process. She believes contributing factors may include a lack of ‘academic stamina’ among today’s students, changing parenting practices and inadequate explanations from faculty about why showing up actually matters.
The following interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
EdSurge: Why is student disengagement or absenteeism something that you’re thinking about?
Terri Hasseler: One of the things that I spend a lot of time with faculty on is things that they're seeing in the classroom. And over the last year, as we see things that are happening nationally in other institutions as well, we're seeing higher levels of absenteeism [and] greater elements of disruption and distraction in the classroom that are manifesting in all sorts of different ways. And in my position, I've been working with faculty to find ways to navigate those problems.
Is absenteeism a problem in college as well as at the K-12 level?
In terms of measuring absenteeism in college or university settings, it's harder because most schools don't have university-wide policies on absences. Some schools do, but a lot of schools generally leave absence management up to individual instructors. And so, much of the information that we find about whether people are engaging in classes … is primarily anecdotal — though I will say we hear this pretty broadly across the United States, but in my own institution as well, we hear that students are absent from class.
And then when we talk about absence or distraction — and I would argue that distraction and disengagement is still very much an issue, and we can talk a little bit about why that may continue to be the case post-pandemic — but distraction, absenteeism manifests itself perhaps differently.
So a student may not come to class or a student may come to class and then walk out of class five minutes into class and then be gone for 20 minutes and return sometime within the midst of that. They may disengage by being physically in the classroom, but on their phones or their laptops feigning attention, feigning participation in class, but they're really in their Amazon cart or they're in their email or they're someplace else.
They may disengage by being physically in the classroom, but on their phones or their laptops feigning attention, feigning participation in class, but they're really in their Amazon cart or they're in their email or they're someplace else.
— Terri Hasseler
So this kind of absenteeism may not be just not being physically there. It might be also the disengagement we're talking about, of not being mentally or emotionally available or present in the classroom.
Do you find that professors take attendance? Do they count that as part of a grade or is it more like if you choose not to show up, you're not going to learn?
It depends. I think some professors have very clear absence policies. I have an absence policy in my class. Though I think many people's absence policies are more lenient of late because of what the pandemic did for thoughts about health and well-being in the classroom. We don't want students in the classroom when they're not physically well. We don't want them getting other students unwell or getting us unwell. So the definition of being in the classroom, or the leniency of coming into the classroom because of health, has I think changed a lot. The pandemic did a lot in that way — in some ways in a good way — because I think people dragged themselves to places they didn't belong because they were unwell. And now we have more humane guidelines around that.
To your point though, more broadly, I think one of the issues is that we can no longer assume that it's a shared belief structure that we all think being in the classroom is the thing to do post-pandemic.
I mean, from the pandemic we've learned, ‘Oh, I can get lecture notes, I can get slides, I can get a video of the classroom, I can get all of the content that I need outside of the classroom, so why do I go to class?’ And a lot of that material that you can get outside of the class is really important for lots of reasons. It's good to support learning, it's important for accessibility, it's important to address accommodations for students. So that stuff is really important.
But faculty have to do a much better job of articulating why do you show up in the classroom now? What is the reason that you come to the classroom?
And for me as an educator, I always really subscribe to Paolo Freire's thoughts on the idea that you build knowledge together in the classroom with students. And the idea that 50 percent of the knowledge, 50 percent of the content enters the classroom when the students enter the classroom.
Students may not necessarily see it that way. It has to be articulated to them. They have to learn that a lot of the learning happens in context. A lot of the learning happens in relation to peers, the exchange of ideas, the importance of practicing ideas in a classroom and trying them on with your peers, with your instructor, the immediate access to the instructor that you get in the classroom and hearing ideas articulated in new ways that may be different from the external materials that you might get [from] the lecture slides or the PowerPoints. You can hear those articulated in different ways in the classroom. The iterative process of learning; the fact that you can't just read one thing once and know it, you have to go through it over and over again.
And I think some other things that we need to be better at communicating with students are the intangibles. Just showing up somewhere, practicing being present, practicing being on time, establishing a sense of responsibility to your peers that you are there being with other people.
Can you say more about that?
So I asked my students. I was thinking a lot about this kind of work and related to the question of how does physical absence affect other students in the classroom? If your classmate doesn't show up, how does that affect you?
And some of the things that I was thinking about and observing and seeing in my work and having a lot of faculty talk with me about this too, is that if students are distracted or physically present but not mentally present — they're on their laptop, for instance, and they're shopping in Amazon and you're sitting next to them as a student and you see this other student is clearly not there — that's very distracting. It's hard to focus if the person next to you is distracted, it distracts you. And it takes a while to get yourself back into the conversation. And there may be feelings about that, like ‘this is unfair, and why do I have to be there?’
And there's also a permissiveness about that. If it happens, it gives other students permission to think, ‘Well, maybe I should be on my Amazon account,’ or ‘I should be shopping.’
And I asked my students about that just recently. What do you think about students who don't show up? And it was really interesting because they got into a conversation about it, and they're very aware that others are not there, and they're very aware that some students who show up aren't there either.
And they immediately wanted to write those students off. They were frustrated with them, they wanted nothing to do with them. Some of the phrases were, ‘I'm glad when they don't come because they don't participate, and they just make it worse.’
And as I reflected on that, I thought it was sort of an interesting reaction because it seems to me it's almost a sense of betrayal, that their classmates have betrayed them in the learning environment. And if you're going to betray me, I don't want you here, just go away.
So students recognize this social contract — of the importance of being in space and learning together. But they're still trying to learn to articulate why it's important. And I think that's why faculty need to be better at articulating: You come to class for these reasons. This is why we spend time together in a room.
For students who don’t show up or who don’t engage, do their grades suffer?
My previous position was as an associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, and I will say that our DFW numbers [the percentage of students in a course who get a D or F grade or who withdraw] do increase across areas where students aren't engaging. But I can't put exact numbers on that.
Logically it follows that if you don't come, you're more likely to fail. You're more likely to not do well. You fail to establish your relationship with your instructor that could be your support system. If you're not doing well in the classroom, you lose access to the information that would prepare you.
Presumably higher education is voluntary. You've signed up to go to college. You've paid money to be there. You think there might be an economic prompt, if nothing else, to maximize this experience, but it sounds like that's not the case for everybody?
You would think. Certainly my background, where I came from, a lower-economic, rural farming community, I thought about the money that was invested and involved in the process of going to college. And I think our students do too. I mean, I think they're very aware of the economic reality. They see the student loans and the financial obligation of all of this.
And at the same time, we have students who are still disengaged.
Now, whether this is also something that can be tracked socioeconomically, I think that's an important question to ask.
Is disengagement a product of privilege? Possibly.
People who have more access to wealth, more opportunity to fail because financial support structures are there to help them if they fail, they may be more disengaged because of the product of that privilege. I have no evidence to support that, but it's certainly a reasonable question to ask.
Parenting practices have changed across time, too. … We've talked about helicopter parents for a long time. Now we're in that phase of talking about snowplow parents, too — parents who remove all obstacles for students. And we're talking about that in my own Center for Teaching Excellence right now. We talk about that within the framework of the problem of kindness. How do you build a kind environment but don't interpret kindness as doing the work for them — doing the snowplow that removes all the obstacles — and still keep the necessary stress and discomfort of learning in place in ways that are supportive for students to manage that stress and discomfort? And I think that there's some arguments out there that because there's been so much work to remove some of those obstacles for students, they're less equipped to manage them.
A colleague in the CTE that I work with, Mary Boehmer, she uses the phrase ‘academic stamina.’ They haven't built the academic stamina because of the pandemic, because of, perhaps, parenting structures that move obstacles out of the way of students. And so we've done a disservice to students in not giving them the opportunity to fail. … And I think schools see that at this time of year especially, they really start losing that ability to get themselves through to the end.
Is there also an uptick in people not doing their academic work, not turning in assignments and expecting infinite extensions?
That could be a product of that sort of snowplow conversation we just had. And also the necessary part of teaching during the pandemic, which is giving people multiple opportunities, making space for them to do it at their own pace because who knows what trauma they're dealing with in their family or in their home, and trying to build a space that gives them the time to do what they need to do.
And I would add that, we talk about being outside of the pandemic, but we're not outside of this heightened state of unrest, right? We are dealing with declining enrollments, the precarity of the world, the sense of people questioning the utility of education. So it may be that we're outside of the more formal frameworks of the pandemic, but we're still in discomforting times, and that's a part of the angst that students are in and that faculty are in, and people who work in academic settings are a part of the world, and they're experiencing that too.
So there is definitely noticeable anecdotal evidence to suggest that students are not coming to turn work in.
One of the things we noted in the fall is that we saw students coming back, they were more engaged, they were really excited. We thought, ‘OK, maybe we've turned the tide.’ Students were participating in much more events on campus, so we saw an increase in activity.
But then as the semester went along, that academic stamina issue arose. Less papers coming in. Students not following up. They would disappear. So there was sort of this performance of engagement that diminished as the semester went along because the stamina wasn't there to keep it.
Is Student Absenteeism a Growing Problem at Colleges, Too?
In the two decades that Jennifer Merriman has been in education, she’s seen a tendency in the field to solve problems by piling more tasks onto teachers who are already straining under the weight of their workloads.
That ultimately works against what researchers say is one of the most important pillars of a school’s success: the well-being of its teachers. Findings from the University of Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre are detailed in a new report commissioned by the International Baccalaureate Organization, where Merriman is the global director of research, policy and design.
“If workload is already the burden on teachers, I think schools will have to get creative,” Merriman says, “and hopefully the teachers themselves can help with the innovation of how to focus on well-being without it becoming yet another burdensome activity that they've got to check the box on.”
Researchers say that schools have a vested interest in improving teacher well-being, citing a 2022 Gallup poll that found 44 percent of K-12 workers in the United States “always” or “very often” feel burned out at work. Zooming in on only teachers, they had the highest rate of burnout among all school workers at 52 percent.
A Sparse Research Field
The International Baccalaureate decided to take a closer look at teacher well-being following the toll taken on schools by the COVID-19 pandemic, Merriman says, when it became apparent that little research existed on the topic. The paper is the second in a series of three that the organization commissioned, with the first covering student well-being.
“The pandemic hit, and everybody was suffering: students and their families and guardians and teachers and school administrators,” she says. “[The Wellbeing Research Centre] really are helping us to understand the science behind well-being. How do we define it? What are the drivers or determinants of well-being? And then what might we do at the IB or globally to really try and improve student and teacher well-being?”
Researchers developed what the report calls a framework that divides teacher well-being into three main factors: job satisfaction, individual elements like physical health, and school-level drivers like work-life balance and class size.
While the report cautions that the research field is in its infancy and the teacher well-being drivers it identifies may not be exhaustive, it offers the framework to start conversations at schools that want to better support teachers.
Researchers also identified school climate, salary satisfaction, supportive professional relationships, job security, continuous learning, and workplace recognition as school-level factors that drive teachers’ job satisfaction.
Researchers from the University of Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre developed a framework that divides teacher well-being into three main factors: job satisfaction, individual elements like physical health, and school-level drivers like work-life balance and class size.
Well-being and Student Success
The ultimate goal is for schools to “have these conversations about what's really important to the teachers and to the staff, and for the school to understand the local context and what's driving strong or weaker levels of school satisfaction for those educators,” Merriman says.
Some poll data shows that more than half of teachers have considered quitting, and Merriman says it's important for the education field at large to improve workplace well-being before the declining number of teachers becomes a potential crisis. It may already feel that way in some parts of the country where teacher turnover rates hit as high as 24 percent in 2022.
“I think one thing that we all sort of felt intuitively but came through very clearly in the reports is the through line between teachers and students,” she says. “The most important factor, the thing that contributes the most to students' academic and well-being outcomes, are teachers within a school. There's nothing else in a school that contributes more to their outcomes, both non-academic and academic.”
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