Anxiety in the Classroom

Anxiety: this overwhelming emotion of worry has gained awareness as an important facet of mental health of all ages. Thankfully, increased transparency and education about anxiety signs and symptoms have brought this once-taboo yet universal experience to the conversation.

Anxiety can undoubtedly hinder student learning and confidence. Anxiety from academic challenges can activate the same fear centers in the brain that are affected by snakes or spiders. This is often tied to the fear of failure, which prevents students from taking risks and working hard to learn something new. Edutopia discusses the right kind of anxiety in the right amounts that can be conducive to learning. While anxiety can debilitate these skills in excess, it has been shown that anxiety can motivate critical thinking and creative problem-solving skills. It is this classroom experience that helps students grow, take control of their learning, and take away new understanding.

So how can teachers create challenging tasks that are out of their student's comfort zones without inducing too much anxiety? A lack of challenge prevents real exploration of a topic. I have been in both scenarios: my academic anxiety was so high that it prevented me from doing my best, or my academic anxiety promoted the creation of something truly special and otherwise inconceivable. 

There are a few ways in which teachers can promote the latter scenario. Dr. Mac, my Educational Technology professor, recommends beginning each class with a class agenda outlining each task set up for the day. This transparency is essential to soothing student anxiety about the unexpected. Edutopia further recommends fostering strong relationships with students, advocating for mistakes, and promoting risk-taking in areas students are passionate about. Project-based learning is another method for allowing students to apply their learning with a healthy dose of anxiety. Before I changed my major, one project in my Engineering Fundamentals class was to build a rudimentary mouse-trap-powered car that could shoot at a target. The team task took nearly all semester, and the entire time my group was motivated by the anxiety that our final product would be a failure. As a result, we were very motivated to start early, meet consistently, and do extensive testing to ensure success on evaluation day. Because the professors offered adequate support throughout the weeks-long process, the project effectively leveraged our anxiety to produce the best learning outcome.

A classroom "worry box": a tissue box 
decorated with pipe cleaners, eyes, and teeth.

Anxiety is often associated with teenagers, but it plays a role in younger students as well. One idea I really like is the use of a classroom worry box, where students can write their worries and feed it to the box to represent coping with that worry. This philosophy is captured in a quote by Ivan Nuru: "If it's out of your hands, it deserves freedom from your mind too."