09.15.25TLAC’s Own Back to School, Part 1: How Much “Stress” in Learning
We recently had our own bit of “back to school” on team TLAC. We have Content Development Meeting every Monday as a way of building our own knowledge and understanding of what makes great teaching and also so that we can build our capacity as facilitators. TLAC CAO and President Erica Woolway offered this reflection.
In last Monday’s session, we discussed the Yerkes-Dodson Curve (pictured below), which describes the relationship between learning and “stress.” Stress is a dirty word for many of us that can mean different things to different people, so as you’ll see in the graphic below, we sometimes to use the words “pressure” or “challenge.”
The graphic captures the phenomenon in the classroom that when there is very low challenge (or stress)–that’s the red on the far left on the graph–student performance, or learning is also quite low.
As we increase the level of challenge and stress in the classroom the level of learning also increases. A bit of pressure causes you to work harder, to think harder, to talk about your ideas.
While too much stress can be detrimental (as we see on the far right in red), if there is not enough stress, student learning also is not optimized.
This reminds us that when we increase challenge in the classroom, we must do so carefully and with intentionality in a warm and supportive atmosphere – because if we incorporate too much challenge, too fast, and without support, then we could create a learning environment that is unproductive.
But we do need to be attentive to creating just the right amount of benign, productive stress because it focuses attention and supports learning. (“Stress* increases general alertness and promotes attentional control in selective attention processes,” Qi and Gao 2020).
We have a responsibility as educators to create a kind of learning tension, a benign and caring version of stress that will help young people focus, grow and thrive.
Side note: If you want to hear about this and a lot more of the science behind learning stright from the horse’s (i.e. Doug’s) mouth, join us in NYC on Nov 7 for a full day Science of Learning workshop!
What our team reflected on and practiced was how to share this graphic with teachers as framing and to guide them in how to use some of our techniques that optimize student learning like Cold Call, Culture of Error, FASE reading and Means of Participation optimally. For example by letting students prepare before a Cold Call perhaps with a Turn and Talk, and smiling as you ask your question, and framing the question in a low stakes way: “Can you get us started thinking about the first steps in solving, Kevin.” Just the right amount of caring and thoughtful pressure…or “stress.”
As we discussed this, I was reminded of a clip that I showed in a training this summer that seemed to change the hearts and minds of teachers who were initially reluctant to use Cold Call. This clip is of Casey Clementson, a 6th grade music teacher at Rosemount Middle School in Rosemount, MN.
In it, she rolls out Cold Call and Means of Participation to her students with clear rationale as to why she uses it. First, she is clear about raising hands on the first day of school “So if I ask a question, I don’t want you to shout out the answer because your first answer might not be your best answer or you might talk faster than somebody else who needs a little bit more time to think through the answer and you don’t want to take that thinking time away from somebody else.” She then transitions to what it will look like to use Cold Call in her classroom. She frames it as “just a way to make sure that we’re hearing all of the voices of the students in the room because sometimes the person who raises their hand first is just a really fast processor and sometimes we need a little bit more time to think.” She then gives students the chance to practice what it’s like to be Cold Called.
Casey does a beautiful job of briefly sharing why she Cold Calls in the classroom. In doing so, she lowers the stakes (and stress) for students and then gives them an immediate chance to practice what it’s like to be Cold Called. As soon as students experience it, they realize how positive it feels to have your voice included in the classroom (the stress is taken down another notch). With her brief rollout using universal language (“we’re hearing all the voices in the room”), she clearly introduces how she will use Cold Call to build a culture of loving accountability in the classroom – helping her to optimize student performance by increasing the amount of pressure that students might feel in order to increase learning.
Stay tuned for our next post in which we share additional research on why this is so incredibly important….