Developing Rigor AND Mental Health Support in the College Classroom

An essential and ongoing discussion about post-pandemic education with first-year college students... 

In February and March (2024), I'll be leading an interactive book review with local community college instructors and professors in different disciplines. The topic is rigorous learning and mental health in the college classroom. The book is Improving Learning and Mental Health in The College Classroom by Robert Eaton, Steven V. Hunsaker, and Bonnie Moon. I've been reading, rereading, side-researching, and discussing the book with others since I stumbled across it in our local library last fall. The book is a timely, humble, and helpful contribution to discussing an elephant in the room: How do we maintain expectations for what rightly should be college-level learning while recognizing and realistically responding to the mental health challenges of our first-year students?

I especially appreciate how the authors have collected, curated, and tried out many of the most important theories, research-based insights, and practices related to bringing these two areas of concern together. Likewise, I appreciate their humility as well as their helpfulness because they frequently remind readers that they have not perfected the best practices or found any silver-bullet solutions, and they help readers realize that much of the relevant, existing research has many instances of correlation that are not necessarily clear in revealing important causal relationships. (In other words, when researchers observe two or more significant things happening together, one thing doesn't necessarily cause the other.) 

As I'm working through my final round of my analytical notes and starting to develop essential and guiding questions for our upcoming book talk, I've landed on three of my own essential questions that help me reflectively process the book and my relevant experiences in both high school and (now) college settings. 

Here are my essential questions about rigorous learning and mental health support in the classroom:

1. What is rightly difficult for students about learning in your courses? (Why is that difficulty right and important?)

2. What is unnecessarily difficult about learning in your courses?

3. What unnecessarily difficult parts of learning might you be able to change or somewhat influence for the better?
   

No doubt, there is more to come. Time and resources permitting, I might share more here in the near future. July 2024 Update: It did go well. Additionally, those three questions have related well to discussions about AI in our courses and what sort of appropriate "friction" (a.k.a. difficulty or struggle) students should encounter when learning at the college level in order to flourish academically, socially, and personally. All sorts of discussions have connected to this book and issues of growth, challenge, grit, motivation, purpose, and more.