Coping strategies – strategies that people use in stressful and challenging situations to manage their own stress and anxiety (such as positive self-talk).
In an educational setting, coping strategies refer to the way in which learners predict, prepare, perceive, manage, react and alter their behaviour when stressed. This stress is often caused by failure, the threat of failure or the belief that failure is inevitable. The reactions to these threats are both conscious and sub-conscious; we cannot fully control our behaviour in every respect. Learning is more difficult when students lack the necessary strategies to manage stress and anxiety. As teachers want to make learning as easy as possible, it is logical that coping strategies should be explicitly taught.
For students, failure in front of their peers can be devastating and saving-face techniques are used to avoid potential embarrassment.
Hint: A common buzzword today is resilience, which is the degree to which a student is able to persist in the face of failure and other challenges. Resilience is a measure of stoicism (prolonged and sustained performance under ongoing pressure without complaint).
For students, failure in front of their peers can be devastating and saving-face techniques are used to avoid potential embarrassment. Students who are removed from class on a regular basis usually have alternative motives; they are not ‘bad kids’ per se, even though they regularly lash out at teachers. Their primary goal is to avoid the perceived embarrassment caused by failure and the best way to achieve this (in their mind at least) is to misbehave. Students in this situation lack coping strategies and resilience. If this pattern of behaviour isn’t remediated, there can have severe long-term academic and career consequences for the student.
Fortunately, teachers can improve student resiliency by teaching and encouraging the use of a myriad of coping strategies. Being honest with students by privately letting them know that their behaviour is a ‘task-avoidance and fear-of-failure tactic’ is often a good starting point. Teaching students what to do when they experience failure (or believe they are about to) is essential to building resilience. Students also need to learn that failure is normal, expected, common (even with experts) and a necessary step toward achieving any worthwhile goal.
Other strategies include teaching metacognitive skills to students such as scaffolding, learning processes and concepts instead of worrying about detail, trial and error, planning an approach to a problem, seeking assistance and thinking about what is known and unknown. Encouraging students to recognise the feeling of frustration that is a natural part of the learning process can be achieved with a think-aloud worked example (the teacher pretends to be frustrated with a maths problem and demonstrates how they deal with it). Mental scripting is also useful in some cases – developing a mental script with a student is a positive step toward building resilience. An example of a mental script is as follows:
‘I’m stuck and frustrated with this problem...oh, frustration is normal remember and the feeling will soon pass. I have control and can decide what to do here – getting kicked out is one option but I’m not choosing that option today – what else can I do when frustrated – what options are there? I can write down my options or ask for help. What are the different ways I can try to solve this problem? What do I know and what don’t I know? I’m going to do these easy parts first. See, I can do this!’
Hint: other failure-avoidance techniques include procrastination, excuses such as blaming the teacher, failure to attend, lack of effort and fake effort. Students may rationalise and say things like ‘I don’t need to learn this anyway’ or ‘I’m going to be an {occupation} and have no need for {subject}’ and the infamous ‘why do I need to learn this?’.
Another issue that teachers and parents need to watch out for is self-handicapping. This is a common phenomenon mostly observed in teenagers and girls in particular. Self-handicapping is when a student sets excessively low expectations for their own performance; they expect a low score. As the student can easily meet this low expectation, failure is averted. Unfortunately, however the effect of this strategy is that effort is reduced due to the self-fulfilling prophecy effect. The student puts in no more effort than required to meet the low expectations that they placed on themselves. In their mind, they are not capable of achieving beyond this level, so there is no logical reason to bother trying.
The student has most likely used this same thinking process in the past which naturally resulted in low grades and instilled a sense that low grades are inevitable. This pattern of thought can be broken however with positive self-talk, mental scripting, setting and achieving goals (of any kind, however minor) and developing positive rapport. All these actions gradually build self-esteem and resilience, which are the necessary precursors to full participation.
Hint: all too often, adults inadvertently reinforce negative self-talk by saying things like ‘don’t worry, I was never good at maths either’. This has the effect of permitting and almost encouraging the student to set low expectations for themselves, to engage in task-avoidance behaviour and to avoid challenges with the possibility of failure. You can see where this is headed – less effort means a poorer performance and lower understanding. Less understanding leads to fear of public failure which leads to off-task behaviour. Suddenly, the student is in the principal’s office and the negative self-belief is confirmed. Failure is rationalised and attributed to external forces (such as a belief that maths is universally difficult) rather than a lack of effort on their part.
The following techniques and strategies can be explicitly taught to students to improve their resilience:
Adam Green is an advisor to government, a registered teacher, an instructional designer and a #1 best selling author. He is completing a Doctor of Education and was previously head of department for one of the country’s largest SAER (students at educational risk) schools. Adam is managing director of ITAC, an accredited training provider for thousands of teacher aides every year.
Source: Teaching Skills and Strategies for the Modern Classroom: 100+ research-based strategies for both novice and experienced practitioners. Amazon #1 best seller in the category of Classroom Management.
Disclaimer: While every effort has been made to check his article for accuracy, information may be outdated, inaccurate or not relevant to you and your location/employer/contract. It is not intended as legal or professional advice. Users should seek expert advice such as by contacting the relevant education department, should make their own enquiries, and should not rely on any of the information provided.
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