Improving Learning and Mental Health in the College Classroom

[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today, on episode number 442 of The Teaching In Higher Ed Podcast, Improving Learning and Mental Health in the College Classroom with Bonnie Moon, and Robert Eaton.

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Welcome to this episode of Teaching In Higher Ed Podcast. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

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I have the pleasure of welcoming two of three co-authors of a wonderful book Improving Learning and Mental Health in the College Classroom Bonnie Moon and Rob Eaton. Bonnie is a mother of four, a mathematician, a hard worker, and a dreamer. She dreams that parents from all walks of life, whatever their mathematical background, can be empowered to invite and support their children to foster growth mindsets, develop mathematical thinking, create a vision for their lives, and inspire hope. She joined Rob Eaton and Steve Hunsaker on this writing project with a desire to promote understanding of mental health challenges that so many college students face.

She currently teaches mathematics at BYU-Idaho, where she serves as the chair of BYU-Idaho’s Women in STEM committee for the College of Physical Science and Engineering. Rob Eaton is a professor of Religious Education at BYU-Idaho, where he also teaches a course for all new faculty members. Rob also spent eight years as an Associate Academic Vice President, helping create what has become BYU-Pathway Worldwide, an online program now serving over 57,000 students in over 160 countries.

He also oversaw efforts to improve learning and teaching among the campus-based faculty. Rob has an especially winding career path, which was a little embarrassing to him until he read the book Range. Now he just feels well-rounded.

He’s earned a bachelor’s degree in International Relations from BYU and a law degree from Stanford where he was named the outstanding oralist in the law school’s appellate court competition. Before ditching the legal and corporate world for teaching, Rob practiced law for seven years in Seattle and worked as vice president of a consortium of Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies in the Northwest for three years.

He has written a number of books on religious themes as well as a biography but Improving Learning and Mental Health in the College Classroom is his first work and the scholarship of learning and teaching. Bonnie Moon and Robert Eaton, welcome to Teaching In Higher Ed.

[00:03:07] Robert Eaton: Good to be on the show.

[00:03:09] Bonnie Moon: Thank you.

[00:03:10] Bonni: You begin your book with words from Susan Evans McCloud, “In the quiet heart is hidden sorrow that the eye can’t see.” From the very beginning. I was moved by your book and I’m so thankful for this generous and helpful work. Bonnie, I’d love to hear from you a little bit about why write a book like this.

[00:03:32] Bonnie: Thank you. I was pulled into a team of writers that were already working on this project, and I’m already getting personal, at the very beginning, so if you need to guide me somewhere else, let me know, Bonni. Depression and anxiety were not something that I really understood until a few years ago. I think that I was like my mom, for a while, where she grew up on a farm and you just handled things, and if you are feeling low, you just get over it.

She’s a pretty strong spirit. My father, who’s from Chile, he came into America, and he was just a hard worker and just dealt with things, so I never really understood that there were these other things going on possibly with people that affected how they looked at the world, because I just always saw my parents have strengths and they just moved forward.

When I experienced depression, a few years ago, when I woke up one morning, my heart hurt. I was going to teach school and I was like, “I’ve got to get to school, I can’t be sitting here worrying about how I’m feeling. I think when I get in the car, it’ll just go away.” I got in the car, went up to campus, started my first class, and the pain just became more intense and more intense and then I went to my second class and I got about halfway through and I looked at my class and said, “I’m sorry, I have to leave.”

I left class and I got in my car and I drove myself to urgent care, and then they started me on tests. They checked my heart, they checked my lungs, they sent me to the hospital, I had more tests. Finally, they decided that my lung had partially collapsed. I was breathing through at least half of a lung on one side. After, I finally just calmed down and the doctors had finished looking at the results and they called in a few specialists.

I was given an option, “Do we want to blow this lung up and go into surgery or can you just go home and breathe?” I said, “What? I can just go home and breathe. That sounds great. I don’t want surgery.” The advice from the doctor was, go home and breathe, and so I did.

I went home that night and I took deep breaths all night long and it hurts. I didn’t go to school the next day, I kept breathing. I had friends come over to check on me and I just kept breathing. About after a week, I went back to work and I was just breathing, and I got back to work. After about a week and a half, I started to experience something different. After about a week and a half back at work, I was becoming overwhelmed by my job, I was overwhelmed by breakfast for my kids, I was overwhelmed at trying to do work and be a mom and I just started to get overwhelmed.

Then what really surprising me is that my lung was pretty much better. I could breathe but I couldn’t function, Bonnie. I don’t know how to explain this to anybody who hasn’t been through depression or anxiety. At the same time that all this was going on, my kids were growing up, my oldest had left home and I started to find out that there had been abuse in my family before, and so I was having a hard time handling life.

As I had put that protective shield around my family for years, they started leaving home and I couldn’t handle it. My mindset was in a bad place. Anyway, with long story, now let’s make it shorter. At the end of probably about October, it was the fall semester, I finally went to the chair of my department and said, “I can’t function, I can’t work. I’m going to have to go home.”

That, to me, was devastating because I didn’t understand mental challenges, I didn’t understand depression or anxiety, I didn’t understand that those things were real, and they were real. They were real for me watching my 12-year-old get out of bed by herself, make her own breakfast, get on the bus by herself when I couldn’t get out of bed like literally, and having my mom come over and say, “Bonnie, I just ought to kick into next week. You can get out of this,” and I’m like, “What? I want to.” I wanted to, I wanted to get back to my old life, I wanted this to be normal but I couldn’t. I didn’t understand what it was.

When I found out that Rob was writing this book, that was a miracle because I started to look at my students. I finally did find the resources and the way to get back so I did end up going back to work and I did find ways that we’ll talk about later hopefully today during the podcast. I did find my way back. When he told me that he was going to be writing a book that address this with college students, I was so excited.

I was so excited because, looking back now, I started to see these things in my own students. I couldn’t see them before. I didn’t know when– Maybe we’ll call him John, when John showed up to class and his eyes were bloodshot and he was sleepless. I pulled him out the hall, and I said, “What’s going on? Why aren’t you doing the work?” He told me, “I’m suffering depression.” I wouldn’t have understood it before.

I would have said, “Oh, okay, well go home, get some sleep and come back tomorrow.” You don’t tell someone that has a broken leg, “Why don’t you just step up and come back tomorrow and you can handle this?” We go get them help, we get them a doctor, we call out the fire squad, we call the people that we need to, and say, “This guy needs help, he is suffering.”

Now, having gone through depression and anxiety at very acute, it was defined as acute because I felt really fast. I hadn’t really experienced it before. Going through that, I can see it in my students now and I can see when they’re suffering that it’s not a story they’re making up, it’s not that, “Oh, I just missed the homework. I’m suffering from depression. Can you please help me make this deadline?” It’s not that at all. Someone might fake it being sick. “Yes, I was sick, I had the flu yesterday,” but we don’t question that. We say “Oh, you were sick. Okay.” When someone says I’m suffering from depression or anxiety, do we question that? No, let’s get them to help. Anyway, that’s why I’m here, because I’m hoping to make a difference and be a better teacher. [chuckles] I want to be a better teacher and understand how I can help and not be the hindrance  that sometimes I feel like I was before when I didn’t get it.

[00:10:03] Bonni: Well, Bonnie, through your vulnerability, you not only can become a better teacher yourself, but you’re going to help others become better as well. Thank you for that gift that both shows up in the book. The humanness of all three of you co-authors is so real and so raw. Thank you for bringing that realness and rawness here in a different medium, but in just as powerful as a way of your writing. Thank you. Rob, would you share some of your reflections on why anxiety and depression matter specifically for learning?

[00:10:34] Robert: They’re not all bad. We should be clear about that. In fact, sometimes or some things a little bit can be quite helpful. Years ago, at law school, we had an appellate court competition, and a professor prepped us individually, those who were finalists because there would be alumni and a Supreme Court Justice would be arguing in front of.

I still remember my professor Hank Greeley, when I finished, saying, “Are you one of those people who’s better with stress?” I said, “Maybe, I guess.” He said, “I hope so.” Then I nailed it in the finals. My team won. For me, with speaking and teaching, I actually do better with some stress. With singing, occasionally I’ll sing a solo in church against my better judgment, and I always sing worse than I do in rehearsal, the stress undermines my performance there.

I’ll run faster at the beginning of a race with some stress. I shoot free throws worse. In fact, there’s a fascinating study I think we cite in the book where they examine dart throwers, dart players. I didn’t know the rules of darts this technically, but some throws are worth twice as much as others. They found that your average dart player does much worse on those throws that were worth twice as much, but your professional dart players were unaffected.

For some people, in fact, maybe for many of us who’ve succeeded so much in academics that we’ve become professors, we tend to play this particular game pretty well. High-stakes examinations were maybe even something we looked forward to because we often did well.

As Bonnie said, just like underestimating people with depression, we might not know what it’s like then for people who freeze up on a high-stakes test. What the research tends to show is not that all stress is bad, but that chronic stress and stress in doses that are too high absolutely interferes with learning. Then, on depression, it’s just all bad. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that a little bit of depression might help you. It affects different people differently.

For some of our students, it can affect them quite a bit and especially if it’s chronic, which sounds like the college experience for many students. Then if it’s especially intense, which is what, for example, I encountered in law school when the entire grade was based on one three-hour test, that was the definition of a high-stakes exam. No formative feedback of any kind leading up to that.

That’s a pretty intense situation. Those are the kinds of situations where we see stress and anxiety interfering with learning. Unfortunately, for some students, they’ve got a whole lot of courses that are designed that way, which means we’re assessing them at the very time when they’re at their worst as learners.

[00:123:13] Bonni: I had some guests on the podcast a few months back that were talking about a silly phrase they had made up called the Pandemic Dirty Words. [laughs] It’s funny because, by the way, the dirty words were things like high flex, which for me is not a dirty word, but for them really was. I don’t know. Well, the example I’d like to talk to you now is the word resilience.

That made many people really bristle. What they brought so beautifully to our conversation and that workshop I got to attend with them was the idea of what you’re expecting of human beings, in this case, could you just buck up? Bonnie, you were talking about that as you share your story, that that is both a generational thing but also can be more of a cultural thing or that type of thing where it’s just, “Can’t you just buck up?” It obviously is very biased and becomes quite problematic in so many different contexts.

I’d like to have you talk a little bit, and we’ll start with Rob, about resilience because you did it so wonderfully. Just like you were talking about asking people to be resilient isn’t always bad. Sometimes that would be helpful, but the way that you describe how do we foster emotional resilience, you just did it in such a more nuanced way to appreciate sometimes there really are things for which resilience would not be appropriate, but that there are ways we can begin to help equip people. Would you talk a little bit about that process and what you want to guide us toward?

[00:14:47] Robert: Absolutely. Let me see if I can give this in two parts. One of the most common bits of pushback we get is from people generally saying, “You’re just talking about coddling, and coddling is not going to help anybody.” We want to be clear, we’re opposed to coddling. That’s not what we advocate. We don’t think the solution is, when a student comes up and says, “Wow, I was out of commission last week in bed with depression,” we don’t suggest saying, “Ah, forget about it. No need to do that work that you missed.” That doesn’t really help them.

In the focus groups, really none of the students we talked to were asking for that. All they wanted was a little flexibility. We’re believers in Robert Bjork’s desirable difficulties. We just think that doesn’t mean all difficulties are good, that we should be intentional about the difficulties we create. When Steve and I, years ago in our Pakistan class, were requiring an oral presentation, we had– because we like oral presentations. I’m embarrassed to admit this, had literally not even thought, how does this affect a student with high anxiety, and how central is it to our outcomes, and are there some alternatives?

There’s some things we can do where they’ll learn just as much and maybe even more, but not experience as much stress. We just invite people to be intentional about that. Step one is we’re hoping to reduce the number of undesirable difficulties that professors inadvertently create. That said, we do have a chapter on emotional resilience because we thought, when they graduate, even if they had a whole bunch of enlightened professors, they won’t always have enlightened bosses and we’ll never remove all the stressors in life.

We want them to do some of the things that they can that will help them develop a better capacity to deal with these things. Even in talking about that, we have to be so clear. Just because you have a growth mindset or learn some tools for regulating your emotions doesn’t mean that if you’re in bonding situation, you pop out of bed the next day just fine. We do think, if students will begin to adopt some things like a growth mindset it– we knew that was good generally, but it was fun to do the research and discover studies showing a pretty strong correlation between fixed mindset and depression.

Which actually makes tremendous sense when you think about it. If you’ve got to a fixed mindset and you’re going to take a math class your first semester in Bonnie’s class, that’s a lot of anxiety going into something that’s about to declare just how smart or stupid you are. Then if you get that number and it’s lower than you’d hope for, you ought to be depressed if you think you can’t grow or change or learn.

Students will simply, and it’s easier said than done, develop a growth mindset that’s good in so many of the other ways that we know from Carol Dweck’s wonderful work and her colleagues’ work. It’s especially helpful on the mental health front. Much of the stuff is correlative, but it’s compelling. Students will, and if we can foster some of those things, even in the way we talk, and in the way we design our courses, design them with more of a growth mindset.

I talked to a student I met in the hall who looked depressed. I’d had her in a previous semester. I said, “How’s it going?” We talked for a while and she had just bombed a test. I said, tell me, “What do you think you didn’t understand that led to that, and what could you do differently for the next test?”

There’s some things you could do to go back because I know you’re smart. There’s some things you could do to go back and fill in those holes. She sent me an email about three days later and said that she had approached her next test altogether differently. She had viewed this as an opportunity to improve rather than just as a validation of her being inept, and that had changed her wellness.

[00:18:18] Bonni: Yes. We don’t know, the person’s not here who designed that test. Whether or not there were intentional desirable difficulties in that assessment, we are unable to assess. Having said that, it almost is like you’re creating, rather than trying to fix her, can’t you just get out of bed or can’t you just buck up? You met her where she was, but rather than you trying to come in and act as if there is any kind of a quick fix, you help to foster her emotional resilience through metacognition and other techniques that you talk about so well in the books.

Bonnie, one of the things that can happen is you mentioned when you were telling your powerful story, and thank you again for that, you mentioned about no one could understand this unless you had been through it. I do think that that’s really important for people who haven’t experienced clinical depression to recognize that that’s not– you don’t go and tell someone, “I know exactly how you feel.”

I think that your theory sounds quite true to me, that we will never understand completely, but we can begin to gather clues to what it might be like for us. The other thing I think is important for us to recognize, I met a couple of history professors who used to work at the University of California Irvine when I worked there. They were working with me as subject matter experts, as I designed some online courses for them around mental health. One of the great lessons that they taught me was to stop thinking about mental health in dichotomous ways. It can be scary as you start to learn about it. Like, oh my gosh, I haven’t ever experienced not being able to get out of bed or shower or some of those symptoms that show up for some people,  and that’s, “Oh, my gosh.”

They would try to be like, “No, you’ll have some good days, you’ll have some bad days, they’re not always as bad,” and just to see a spectrum of things. I think this also helps us stop to stigmatize people who experience mental health challenges and to recognize that we all are going to experience some aspects of mental health challenges our entire life. That’s not a part of life that we can escape.

All this to be said, I promise I’m getting to a question here. One of the things that is so important is we want to avoid telling ourselves that this feels so big, there’s nothing I could do to help. That’s not my job. That’s the counseling center. Those are for psychiatrists to help with. I am insufficient here. Bonnie, what are some suggestions that you have? Maybe instill some hope in us that there actually are some things that we can do, and specifically around course design to help to promote and foster greater mental health.

[00:20:58] Bonnie: That’s one thing that I don’t want us to do is get overwhelmed because, in addition to our students suffering from mental health challenges, the professors have been through some things too lately. I think that, as we become healthier and as we start to see things and change our mindsets, that we can help our students see that. One way they can see that is in the course design that we’re talking about.

As we design our courses, they will see things. I’ll mention a couple and then maybe invite Rob to add a few of his ideas. One thing I think is the way we design our syllabus. When we take a look at the syllabi for our courses, we can ask ourselves questions like, “What kind of messages am I sending out when I give the syllabus to them?” I started thinking about even incorporating some of the resources that our campus has.

I’ll just be specific. I specifically now, on my syllabus, say, here’s the health and wellness center. Here’s their address, here’s their contact information, here’s the counseling information. I have links in my syllabus to specific place they can go on campus. We have a great program on our campus called THRIVE that our students can also sign up for to go in and learn some of these tactics to keep their mental health as they go through the semester, and those that are struggling with mental health challenges to overcome things.

I just put that directly in my syllabus. That’s part of the beginning of the semesters. I say it in class when I represent my syllabus. I say to them, “Here’s my syllabus.” Actually, I don’t do that the first day of class. I just invite them to read it. I try and challenge them with some cool stuff on the first day of class.

The second day of class they come back and I say, “Do you have any questions about this?” In the design of the syllabus, I specifically say let’s talk about these things. I invite them. I say do you have any questions about this? Any questions about these resources? I’m here for you too if you need to talk about something and we can help you find where you need to go. I just open up the first day and the second day and say, “Here it is.”

In the design of the syllabus, I think we can be intentional in what we put in there. Also, one other thing I want to mention. This has helped me. I went back to school. I don’t know if you saw that, Bonni, but I’ve been back to school now for the last year, and I am a student now. I had an interest of going back to school so I could understand more about some of the cool applications of mathematics so I could share those with my upper-level students and start to invite them to look at internships and different things that I didn’t have experience with. I went back to school. As a student–

[00:23:26] Robert: Getting a degree in what, Bonnie?

[00:23:28] Bonnie: I went back to school in nuclear engineering… mathematics background. [crosstalk]

[00:23:35] Bonni: Just a little– Who among us hasn’t gone back to school?

[00:23:39] Robert: Right.

[00:23:39] Bonni: Who among us?

[00:23:40] Robert: I was thinking of doing it. Then I thought I’ll watch Netflix instead.

[00:23:44] Bonnie: No making fun of me. Anyway, I decided to go back to school so I could understand and make connections and do things that I wanted to do because I’m feeling healthy now. I’m feeling healthy and strong and I want to grow my mind. Back in school, I had a professor, and he has this exam you take, it’s a quiz every two weeks, and it’s timed for half an hour. He doesn’t care if you get through it or not.

He’s really testing things that– there were cool things that I probably should know, of course. I’m like I stressed, and I stressed about that half an hour because not only did he want us to complete this five-part problem, he wanted us to upload it and put it into our LMS, get all that done, take pictures of it and have everything done in half an hour. I could finish that quiz but all that last five minutes trying to get that uploaded was so stressful for me.

I said, “I am never doing this to my students.” When I think about the design of my courses, I’m thinking about what’s going to stress them unnecessarily. What is not really teaching them the mathematics? What cognitive load can I relieve so that they can focus on the awesome mathematics and the beautiful examples and the connections I’m trying to make?

I want to build a course that does not have an extra cognitive load for them to have to navigate, a learning management system that’s clunky, or to worry about, is our Wi-Fi turning off today or tomorrow, and they’re not going to be able to finish this quiz on time. I think about those things now. I wasn’t so aware of that before I was a student, but as I’m working on this book with Rob and thinking about the deadlines, those are important.

If we just say that’s it, that’s the deadline, it’s over, I didn’t get a chance to show him what I really knew. I went and talked to that teacher. I said, “Maybe you wanted an idea on that.” [crosstalk]

[00:25:27] Bonni: It was such a happy ending. I was hoping you were going to be for real. Did you really go talk to him?

[00:25:35] Bonnie: I did go talk to him. I didn’t talk about the book we’re working on but I went and talked to him and said, “I don’t think this is fair. You’re not really seeing what I understand or what I know.” He did increase the quiz time by 15 minutes to give me time to upload. He did get that.

[00:25:48] Robert: That’s the funny thing. What we measure in that situation is something different than we meant to be measuring. At law school, that timed three-hour test, in my seven years of practicing law, I never did anything like that. It was great preparation for the bar exam, it’s true because it was the same game, but really didn’t match up.

Malcolm Gladwell’s done a podcast about this a couple of episodes and builds on some great research by a guy named Henderson out of Indiana University. Often, our assessments are measuring something different than we meant to be measuring. Similarly with our deadlines, just a couple days ago, I had a conversation with Jake Romney, a friend of mine who’s a dean of online curriculum here.

He said they’ve noticed as we have a global student body, over 50,000 or 60,000 students now, many of them international, that even what seems like a fairly merciful late policy that gives you up to a week late but with gradually declining credit, they’ll have people somewhere in the world who had a power outage for four of those seven days.

What’s happened is they’ve realized when they miss that deadline, students have no incentive to go back and learn what they missed but what they missed in weeks three and four was foundational for what they needed to learn in weeks eight and nine. They’re seriously rethinking some of those policies, still trying to keep some scaffolding in place that helps guard against the natural tendency to procrastinate.

That’s been, for me, one of the biggest changes that I’ve tried to make in terms of course design. I’ve become a big fan of creating incentives and opportunities for students to master material they don’t initially get. It seems really pretty naive to assume they’re going to get it at the level we hope they will the very first time through.

Years ago I heard Sal Khan speak at Stanford University, and he said that the problem with the monolithic speed of American education is, if chapter one is learning to ride a bicycle, even though several students don’t do very well on the test for bike riding, we move on to chapter two riding unicycles. Then we’re surprised when students crash, when we’ve done nothing. Knowing full well they can’t really ride a bike yet, we’re moving on.

We did a survey and one of the factors that created the most anxiety in our students was when they felt like the class was moving on and they still didn’t understand that. Early in my career, frankly, for much of my career, I’ve done very little to help students who didn’t get stuff get it before we move on.

Now whether it’s designing subtler, more flexible late policies or even opportunities for resubmission, not for as much credit, but still for some additional credit, I’ve tried to build in incentives so that students can learn more.

[00:28:27] Bonni: As you were sharing that example from Sal Khan, I was thinking that, in some courses, there is that scaffolding, whether it is intentionally built or it’s just inherent in the type of class. If you’re teaching riding different types of vehicles, then bicycles might go to unicycles and you might be left behind, I’m thinking of a lot of survey courses where there actually isn’t scaffolding.

We never really started with a whole part, whole approach to our course design. We’re just going in seemingly disconnected areas such that if you got left behind, you wouldn’t even really know because then we just moved on to something else, and then it was something else. That isn’t really building disciplinary or interdisciplinary knowledge very well for people.

As you said, we’re not given the opportunity to get feedback and see where those connections might be missing or could be strengthened. That is really, really powerful.

[00:29:25] Robert: May I throw in one of the thoughts-

[00:29:26] Bonni: Yes, please.

[00:29:26] Robert: -to your initial question which is this can be overwhelming. Each time I read the book and I think I’m done, I think after checking for the prudes we’ll never read the book. I loved it but I’m done. It’s overwhelming to me. I think, “Wow, it’s hard to do all those things at once.” What we say in the book is pick something. We can’t really do everything for all of our students but that shouldn’t stop us from doing something for a few of them that could make a huge difference in their life. Last week, I’m meeting with a student individually. He’s got on a windbreaker, and, today, it’s  23 in Rexburg, it’s forecast to get to negative 3 this week. He’s got a windbreaker. I ask him a couple of questions. He doesn’t have gloves, he doesn’t have a jacket. I take him down to a thrift store. We talk about an assignment that he didn’t completely understand. Fill in some of those knowledge gaps on the way to the thrift store. Spend $6 on a jacket and go to another store and get some gloves on sale for $10.

Now, I’m not rich. I can’t afford to buy all my students who don’t have jackets and gloves stuff, but I could do it for one. That’s, I think, our recommendation. We should do what we can, not feel guilty that we can’t do more but rejoice in the ability to make a difference in the lives of some of our students.

[00:30:38] Bonni: You could not have set up this final question of this portion of the show better because we need to do what we can, and that means doing what will equip us to be able to do what we can. I would love to have you share about some practices we can do for our own mental well-being, some suggestions for us. By the way, if anyone listening right now is feeling like, “I want to hear so much more,” I have a secret spoiler alert here now that already Rob and Bonnie have told me that they’ll come back in the new year.

We’ll get to hear more because there’s so much good stuff in this book. Let’s close today’s conversation with this idea around what are some things we can do to promote our own mental well-being?

[00:31:21] Bonnie: I’ll go ahead and start with that. I researched this one pretty intently because I needed this. I needed to know, if I do experience that severe depression or anxiety again, what are the tools? I did find some help, but now I have some research and some theory to back up the things that I found. I will just share a few things that we’ve included in our wellness chapter that I can testify at least helped me, and I’ll explain a couple of them.

The first one is sleep. I think we all need to get enough sleep, and we know what it feels like when we don’t have enough sleep. Sleep was escaping me during this time and that was one of the things I had to get on top of. First of all, I needed help. Finally, I did get some medical help to get me to go to sleep because it was that severe and it was just making the depression and anxiety worse.

After that, I actually got a sleep coach. I’ll just tell you what’s up. The sleep coach helped me get through some things, some mindfulness training, and the sleep finally came. We can also think about our students’ sleep as we improve our own sleep. One thing that I have done is I have let my students know I love them and I want to read their emails, but I won’t be reading them at twelve o’clock at night, at midnight. I’ll be waiting till the next day, and just doing some things for myself, like setting up some boundaries and just letting my students know I’m being fully disclosing what my intent is here.

That’s one thing I think that professors can do is set up their life so they can practice these wellness things like sleep, nourishing our bodies with good food, taking time for good food, and also exercise.

I have a fun story that when I was researching this on campus, I went to one of our wellness directors, Christie Lords. She works with our students and she had some great advice for me. One of the things she said is, “If you don’t exercise now, that’s okay. Just get out there and do something for five minutes.” She just started with a five-minute workout and then she was like, “I do exercise and I’m bad at it.”

Then she got a little bit more, she did a little bit more. She got better and better. As professors, I think, as our students see us taking care of ourselves and we can’t even mention that. This last weekend I went on a hike. Here’s a beautiful picture of where I was, just to let them know we’re working on it too. We may not be a marathon runner.

[00:33:50] Robert: In fact, it may be more accessible to them if you say, “I went running for the first time.”

[00:33:55] Bonnie: Yes, “I just tried it this weekend,” because they all know that we’re not perfect at this, but we’re trying. Then as we get healthier, they can see that, and hopefully, we’re modeling for them but more importantly, we’re taking care of ourselves because we’re not going to be able to really focus on things that are important in the classroom if we’re not healthy.

[00:34:14] Robert: Christie, by the way, is our senior associate dean of students at BYU Il.

[00:34:17] Bonnie: Thank you.

[00:34:18] Robert: For me, one thing that I had to get over as, I suppose, my emotional metabolism changed was the thought that I prided myself in being good at absorbing stress and not bringing it home and not letting it ever affect me. I remember, when it first started to, I thought, “What’s that? That’s a thing.” I’ve discovered that, at least for me personally, I’ve had to humble myself some and become more intentional about what do I do when my body starts telling me I’m getting too stressed.

In 20 minutes, 21 minutes, I’ll be in a yoga class tonight and it will be a wonderful way to wind down as I do each week. I think it was my wife who, 10 years ago, first suggested, “I wonder if we,” meaning me, “could benefit from yoga.” She was right. It’s been great. I do some mindfulness. For me, working out has become– six days a week, I try to work out, and it’s become something I look forward to.

Sometimes I get to do it with the friends and there’s some sociology. Sometimes, like this morning, I actually got to engage in the practice that I’ll mention in my recommendations. I got to use it to help prepare for the podcast today and my first class in the morning. I’ve found that working out is, for me, key to maintaining wellness.

[00:35:37] Bonni: This is a perfect segue into the recommendations segment of the show because I believe I’ve even talked about this on the show, but I cannot say it enough. I experienced Rissa Sorensen-Unruh when I was at a conference. As she started her presentation, she invited us all to take three deep breaths. I shared about this at a conference keynote that I gave virtually and I was watching just bits of the video the other day because I downloaded it to my computer, and I listened to myself tell myself to take three deep breaths and it literally transformed how I felt.

We are going to take three deep breaths, but since some of you I know use podcast catchers that have fancy features that fast forward automatically through silence, we’re not going to be silent. I actually think it’s really powerful to take three deep breaths in silence, but we’re not going to.

I am going to guide us through our first deep breath. Rob has already agreed to guide us through our second deep breath and Bonnie’s going to close us off our breathing exercise for our third deep breath. We encourage you, if you are in a place where you could close your eyes, to do so. If you are not, you could always wait until such a time as you have or just take the breath without closing your eyes.

We are going to take our first deep breath and try to focus on that coming from the lower part of your diaphragm and hold it for just a couple of seconds and then release that second breath. I guess that was our first breath.

[00:37:11] Robert: Now, for your second breath, breathe in through your nose all the things that have been worrying you today. Then hold them there for a moment. Let them bounce around and then open your mouth and let them go. Breathe out and let go of those worries.

[00:37:26] Bonnie: For your third deep breath, go ahead and I’m going to count this one. We’re going to breathe in for five. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and now later all go in 4, 3, 2, 1.

[00:37:46] Bonni: Thank you both for that. What a gift. Rob, you have some recommendations to make today.

[00:37:51] Robert: My first one is completely made up or maybe somebody else has already made it up and I just haven’t read it yet. I love space learning, but I’m also an advocate of spaced preparation. This morning, before going to work out, I stopped to look at what I was teaching in my New Testament class and spaced out that preparation, but for the class, which I prepared for many times before, but rather than just preparing for it immediately before class, teeing it up before I exercise, let it marinate.

I find that some of my best and most innovative ideas come when I prepare for class in that way. Then I’ll slip in one other one if I may.

[00:38:27] Bonni: Please.

[00:38:27] Robert: In our book, we cite a work by Ronald Ferguson and some of his colleagues at Harvard called the Influence of Teaching Beyond Standardized test scores. It may be much more popular in higher ed learning circles than I’m aware of, but I just hadn’t really encountered it before. That might be because it’s a study of 16,000 sixth through ninth-grade classrooms.

I found it wonderfully rigorous and yet very practical, even prescriptive, but not nothing fluffy about it. He’s an economist, and so it’s analytically very rigorous, but full of actionable insights and quite easy to read. If you google Ronald Ferguson and the influence of teaching, it’s the third hit that’s a PDF that you can read for free.

[00:39:11] Bonni: Wonderful. I’ll be linking to those in the recommendations. I remember that one really standing out very much. Even though it is sixth through ninth grade. Just so many things. It’s as if it was done for higher education as far as how much it can apply to us. That one really stood out to me too. Bonnie, what do you have to recommend for us today?

[00:39:30] Bonnie: When I was thinking about a recommendation, I thought back to training that I had as a school board member. I served on a school board for eight years, a little stressful. One of the things that I did is I went to a conference, it was a leadership conference, and the speaker was talking about go and find five people. I thought for sure he was going to say, go find five people and thank them for where you’re at, and so forth. He didn’t. He said, “Go find five people and apologize.”  I was like, “Huh?” When I think about connection, and I think about, even when I think about, I’m probably going to say this badly, but when your intent is to improve productivity in our life so we can have more peace [laughs] and so I love that.

As we increase productivity and we look for that peace, we can be more present for our students. I think about my colleagues at work, I apologized to a colleague at work because there was some tension between us that and I could see my role in that. I went and apologized and it freed me up to be a better teacher, to be present for my students. It was wonderful.

I took that advice and I found it was not hard to find five people to apologize to sincerely. I make mistakes every day. It was freeing just to be able to think about connection. We talk all about that in one of our chapters in our book too. As we connect with people, one way to connect is to recognize when we’re wrong. [laughs]

[00:40:53] Bonni: You both are reminding me so much. I was mentioning before we started recording about the class I’m teaching at present reading through, once again, Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and your recommendation, Rob, was reminding me of that idea that everything gets created twice, all things get created twice first in our minds.

Especially, I think when we have an opportunity to prepare our minds for something, we get to then use that gift of creativity that we’ve been equipped with if we foster that in ourselves and foster in other peoples too. Then the idea of the other book that we’re reading in the class is called Getting Things Done by David Allen. You were talking about peace, Bonnie, and just the peace that it can bring to–

I suppose this covers across both books but living with integrity, not only with other people but also with ourselves. He talks about more related to how we manage our tasks and things like that. When we go into our email, for example, or we go into our task management and it’s just full of things that we’ve committed to but haven’t done, that’s just a cycle of creating disarray and whatever the opposite of peace is for ourselves about how powerful to be intentional.

There’s so much of what we’ve talked about today has to do with intentionality and just the power that intentionality can bring. What great set of recommendations. My friend, by the way, we are recording this episode on November 16th. I do not normally mention the date when these conversations are happening, but my friend just ran for school board and I just saw on Instagram that they haven’t totally finished counting all the votes and I thought, my gosh, this is– she had training, by the way, so it sounds like this is something–

If you’re going to run for school board, you probably are going to need some training for it, but it seemed like someone had really coached her well to not be like, “I won,” even though it’s obvious, “Look how far ahead I am.” It was more like, “It would seem to me, but we’re not done.” Just being really professional and being a person of integrity for that probable win. Yes, I’m excited. It seems like it might be stressful, but I’m grateful to people who are doing that in this day and age for sure.

[00:43:06] Robert: My wife served on a school board and those school board members are the paragons of democracy. That is a thankless critical role.

[00:43:15] Bonnie: I know, thank you.

[00:43:16] Bonni: Well, thank you both for being guests on Teaching In Higher Ed. Thank you for this very generous, as I said previously, practical book. I am excited for people to get it in their hands. As of when people hear this recording, depending on when you listen, it’s available on pre-order. Then as I mentioned earlier, you’re both going to come back when the book’s actually clickable [laughs], so we can have two opportunities, but lots of people listen after when things air, so who knows? Go check out the link in the show notes to get this wonderful resource.

It is not just a book about mental health, it is not just a book about teaching and learning, it is a wonderful blend of a holistic view of our students and of ourselves, and how we can foster those great learning and mental health. Thank you so much for the work and for being here today.

[00:44:03] Robert: Thanks so much for having us, Bonni, it’s been delightful.

[00:44:05] Bonnie: Yes, thank you, Bonni.

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[00:44:09] Bonni: Thanks once again to co-authors Robert Eaton, Steven V. Hunsaker, and Bonnie Moon for your amazing book, and thanks to Rob and Bonni for joining me on today’s episode. Today’s episode of Teaching In Higher Ed was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by Andrew Kroger, and podcast production support was provided by Sierra Smith.

Thanks to each one of you for listening, and if you’ve yet to sign up for the weekly email, head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. You’ll receive the show notes from the most recent episode and some other goodies that don’t show up on the podcast. Thanks so much for listening, and I’ll see you next time on Teaching In Higher Ed.

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[00:45:09] [END OF AUDIO]

The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.