Bitesize Research: How teacher support impacts students' mental wellbeing, resilience and negative emotions

Each week on the blog I, Jaya Carrier, am going to share a bitesized, canape-style, quick summary of a piece of recent educational research with you. 

I find that trying to do this routinely really helps my own thinking about my own teaching practice, as well as ensuring that we as a school take the best possible evidence based approaches to T&L.

As such, this week, I wanted to share with you a study published in Frontiers in Psychology by Ken To from the The Chinese University of Hong Kong in January 2020. 

Objectives of study: This study looked to explore how teacher support to their students impacted the students' mental wellbeing, resilience and negative emotions. 

Headline findings: Teacher support matters, not only because it can reduce negative emotions, but also because it can improve resilience (which as a quality itself build up the healthy mental wellbeing of adolescents).

Summary of study: 1228 Chinese adolescents participated in this study and completed a questionnaire containing measures for mental wellbeing, teacher support, negative emotions, and resilience. The results showed that: 

• Teacher support can significantly assist adolescents' mental well-being.

• Part of the effect of teacher support on mental wellbeing was through promoting resilience, which accounted for 30% of the total effects.

• Moreover, teacher support also promoted mental wellbeing by reducing negative emotions. Reducing negative emotions had positive impacts on resilience, which in turn promoted mental wellbeing. 

How does this impact me and my practice?:

Some reflections questions arising from this that might be helpful to consider are:

• How have I supported the resilience of my students in the past? How did I know that their resilience has improved?
• How can I ensure that I build up the good relationships with students necessary to support them effectively?
• What are the best strategies to give students support?
• What strategies can I use that explicitly look to build student resilience? 
• How can I encourage students to learn from their experiences (metacognition), to seek help, and to self-regulate?
• How can I have conversations with students that routinely promote resilience?
• How does these findings to challenge? And to the IB learner profile?

If anyone would like to discuss this further - please let Jaya Carrier know or start a discussion below.