It’s spring break on campus. While I’m not sipping margaritas at the beach or traveling to some far-off place, I am taking a bit of a break. This week, I’m offering this rerun from last summer. I’m still working on striking the balance between compassion and challenge, and I thought offering this rerun would help me recenter things. Maybe it can help you, too.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned in a post that I’m reading Sarah Rose Cavanagh’s new book, Mind Over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge (2023). I was a huge fan of her book The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion (2016) and I was anxious to see what new insights she could provide about working with students as they navigate academic environments and their mental health. Over the last few semesters, I’ve worked with a bunch of students who experienced difficult times, and I didn’t always know the best way to support them. I’m hoping that this book will provide some strategies so I’m not just relying on my own pedagogical intuitions.
Early in the book, Cavanagh introduces the concept of “compassionate challenge” as a way to support our students’ mental health in our classrooms. She writes, “the recipe for mental health is not terribly surprising or terribly complex… it involves safety, belongingness, physical vitality, tolerance of uncertainty and discomfort, a sense of purpose, and play.” (pg. 36) While that recipe may not be “surprising or complex,” it’s still a lot to think about as a teacher. In my head, I envision those circus performers who spin plates and they’re running around making sure they attend to all of the plates and keep them spinning so none of them fall. In my darkest moments of self-reflection, I think about the times I’ve left a plate or two fall with a student. But that’s a post for a different day. Instead, I’d like to dig more into the elements of challenge and compassion and what they mean for those of us who work in educational settings.
Before reading the first few chapters of this book, I didn’t really see compassion and challenge as being linked. I saw them as discrete processes. Educators can be compassionate, and they can be challenging. I’m sure each of us has had teachers who were compassionate but not very challenging. Or some who were challenging but not very compassionate. Depending on which students were asked, I bet some of my students would describe me as one or the other. Looking at my Rate My Professors reviews, it’s clear that few students see me as both.
But Cavanagh invites us to embrace both compassion AND challenge to serve our students better but asks us to lean into the compassion part. She writes, “the challenge aspects of the compassionate challenge are all about compassion, about establishing trust and safety” (pg. 47). To be clear, Cavanagh isn’t arguing that we lower expectations, but that we create trusting, supportive learning environments where students can be challenged.
And that’s what I’ll need to work on as an educator. I’ll need to figure out ways to push my students and challenge them academically, while also fostering an environment that is supportive and trusting. I don’t know how to do that yet, but hopefully, the rest of the book will offer some clues. I’ll keep you posted.
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