Managing stress, derailing behaviours and learners

23/07/2008 by nicola.

I’ve been following a series of great posts on Tom Haskin’s blog including stress-induced breakdowns, if stressors could speak, putting learners in danger , immersed in consensual torment , circumstantial or chronic anxiety etc I like his ideas of pro and anti-learning ecologies in the workplace.

I was working with one of my colleagues at Surrey in Health and Social Care today, looking at some redesign of modules for the next semester and we were reviewing experiences of the students over the past year. Often the students that sign up and pay for the modules are mature students, maybe never been to university or completed ‘formal’ education for maybe 20+ years, often not used a computer at all before. So they have a lot to absorb all at once, not just the technology and being in the campus environment, but heightened concerns about how they might be seen to others - then after just a few days, they will go into ‘practice’ settings which will often be a hospice or similar health and social care setting.

So potential for stress increases further at this point too with emotions already potentially running higher than normal - and trying to adjust to a new study routine when they may have family at home to manage or other issues to sort. Sounds like possible alarm bells ringing already.

Not surprisingly in this situation, some students have shown signs of extreme stress and as a result of this particular colleague caring enough to try and help, she also changed her own routine, tried strategies for helping the student but if it didn’t appear to be helping, this resulted in higher level of stress for her too - so no one wins ?

Coincidentally yesterday I was at a breakfast session exploring the dark side of personality at work. Andy McBurnie explained about a number of personality tests then went on to explain the Hogan Development Survey which was developed by a couple of psychology professors in the US. It assesses these eleven tendencies that can cause people under stress to develop ‘derailing’ behavourial tendencies which under less stress, would not be an issue. For whatever reason e.g. change of routine, new ‘things’, increased workload etc can ‘trigger’ these derailing behaviour patterns. With people that care enough to help, it may be that even though the behaviour has been ‘triggered’, the person can still quickly return back to a more healthy behavioural ‘place’ where they feel more comfortable and able to cope.

Where Tom mentions about the ecology and environment, the design plays such an important part - for a long part of our conversation today, we were thinking about the design by looking at the emotional journeys that new learners and the tutors might follow over the sessions and thinking about potential trigger points, e.g. if you are a learner in the setting described above, just simply logging into remote email, using the web for the first time, - looking at windows popping up, getting random error messages - might be enough to ‘tip’ someone over the edge and any healthy excitement about starting the course could very quickly get replaced with something more ‘volatile’.

I love the idea of a healthy learning environment, especially for our learners who are themselves learning about working as healthcare professionals and the importance of having people care - in the design, delivery and then hopefully as a result of those, the community learning alongside them.

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