{"id":2752,"date":"2014-08-04T15:21:15","date_gmt":"2014-08-04T20:21:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cft.vanderbilt.edu\/?p=19621"},"modified":"2014-08-04T15:21:15","modified_gmt":"2014-08-04T20:21:15","slug":"what-can-we-do-about-students%e2%80%99-classroom-based-anxieties-more-than-you-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/gradleaf\/2014\/08\/what-can-we-do-about-students%e2%80%99-classroom-based-anxieties-more-than-you-think\/","title":{"rendered":"What Can Faculty Do about Students\u2019 Classroom-Based Anxieties? More Than You Think."},"content":{"rendered":"

by Nancy Chick<\/a> (CFT Assistant Director)<\/em><\/p>\n

Last week, The\u00a0Princeton Review<\/em> released its annual list of “The Top 10 Colleges for ___,” and Vanderbilt made a big splash by ranking #1 with the Happiest College Students in the US<\/a>.* \u00a0While this is fantastic news for the campus<\/a>, and it’s interesting to speculate about what makes these students so happy<\/a>, I worry about the effect of this news on many others, especially those who experience a range of anxieties and stresses.<\/p>\n

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Anecdotally, most of the Vanderbilt students I come into contact with are among the most stressed I’ve encountered. Less anecdotally, Vanderbilt’s\u00a0Psychological and Counseling Center<\/a> (PCC) sees about 20% of the student body, and the most common reason given for seeking services is anxiety. Put another way,\u00a0anxiety is the most prevalent concern, ahead of other common concerns such as depression, eating disorders, drug and alcohol use, and trauma.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yesterday, David Sacks<\/a> (Associate Director of the PCC and Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at VUMC) and I facilitated a workshop<\/a> at the Center for Teaching on how faculty can reduce students’ classroom-based anxieties, and a common theme in everyone’s comments was how frequently the students think, “I’m the only one struggling” or “Everyone else is doing better than I am.” \u00a0Imagine how students would feel if struggling with test anxiety, imposter syndrome<\/a>, perfectionism, worries about post-graduate plans, stereotype threat<\/a>, and\/or dissertation burnout, etc., and then hearing that their peers here are the happiest in the country.<\/strong><\/p>\n

With these concerns, David and I shared some strategies for how faculty can mitigate some of these stresses that directly affect students’ academic work\u00a0in the forms of illness, requests for extensions, hypervigilance, underperformance, cheating, reductions in studying or valuing course tasks, and altered professional goals<\/strong>. While faculty aren’t therapists, and we can only have a limited impact, we can minimize some of these class-based anxieties by doing the following:<\/p>\n