Although some may argue my current physical build would disagree, I was actually both a track and cross country athlete in college. I have a couple of cross country training memories that stand out the most: interestingly, they both deal with hills. Most weeks, we had at least one day of intentional hill training, and many other workouts included some mildly famous inclines--at least they were famous to our team at the time. One was titled Killer Hill, and the other was simply called The Dip. Killer Hill was a stretch of twisting gravel road that escaped upwards into a forest at a consistently increasing incline. The Dip was a 10-mile loop with a giant U-shaped mile-long dip--hence the name--neatly carved into the middle of it. (The Dip also once included a dead, bloated Hereford cow beached on the side of the road, but that is a story for another time.) Killer Hill is where we will spend our time today.

We worked out at Killer Hill many times, but there was one instance in particular that strikes me: the Tuesday I was late. Due to a scheduled meeting with a professor, I knew I was going to have to play catch-up at practice that day. I knew we were heading to Killer Hill, so I left my meeting, hustled to the locker room, quickly changed, and took off to try to catch the group before they started to attack the upward 1-mile intervals. However, when I approached the starting line, the team was reaching the peak. Soon, they would begin their recovery jog back down the hill, but that would be minutes away. My coach greeted me, and we decided it was better for me to just get going, on my own, rather than wait for the team to come back down--and then be a full rep behind. So I set myself at the start and looked at the winding trail. I felt like the finish line immediately pulled away from me like a Hollywood dolly zoom out (think that famous Jaws zoom scene but only in reverse). The finish line seemed to double. Regardless, my coach gave me the signal, and I raced off. I was able to greet my teammates about halfway up, but after they disappeared into my blindspot, I again was faced with a formidable finish line. But I kept on. Greeted by another coach at the top of the hill, I completed my rep and began my slow descent. The piston-like passing by my teammates continued as we worked up and down Killer Hill, but one thing continued to change: each time I got to the bottom of the hill, the journey to the top looked longer, steeper, and more arduous. Typically, when the team would do this workout, I would grow fatigued, but the task itself would not vary in perception. I finished the workout slightly after the team, and there was one truth: it was not enjoyable when I was alone. Shortly after, I faced The Dip. Solo. In essence, the same experiences occurred: the run seemed longer, the miles more difficult, the hills steeper, and the overall task was less pleasant. I didn’t really think much of either of these events until recently. 
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About a year ago, I ran across some studies from the University of Virginia, and they dealt will--yep--hills. In an early study, they found that if people are looking at a hill they need to climb, and they are in a negative state of mind, they predict the hill to be 30% steeper than it really is. In a second study, researchers discovered that, when alone, a person perceives a hill to be 20% steeper compared to when standing next to a friend. Essentially, a person’s perception is reshaped by the presence of others. When I reflect on Killer Hill and The Dip, this concept was completely accurate. Without the physical and emotional influence of my teammates, the challenges looked--and felt--insurmountable. 

. . . And then I think about our classrooms and our schools. 

As administrators and educators, we can learn a lot from these findings. We can help foster a support system at the figurative “bottom of hills” with these 3 C’s: Connection, Collaboration, and Celebration. Below, I’ve included a few brief ideas in each category.

Increase Social Connection
Staff: 
Do your teachers connect beyond content?
Real strategies you can implement: 

• Connection Spot
  • Shoutout to my admin and staff: we have a room called “The Well” where staff can go to recharge and reconnect. It has places to both conduct work and relax. Staff members have brought in items like puzzles, oil diffusers, and muscle massagers. 
• Hallway Convos
  • Encourage staff to connect with each other in the hallway during passing time as they greet students. 
• 10th Hour
  • Host events out of school for staff to grow healthy relationships while having fun together. Our staff calls these events 10th hour, since we have a 9-period day. 

Students:
Do your students have time to connect within or between classes? 
Real strategies you can implement: 

• Positive Priming 
  • Taking a few minutes at the beginning of class to allow students interact and learn more about each other every day will help them learn better. You can read my full Positive Priming article here. 
• Power Hour
  • Have one longer passing time during the day where students can grab a snack and connect. We call ours Power Hour; it occurs after 2nd hour and is 15 minutes in length. The cafeteria offers snack and drink selections for sale. 

Increase Collaboration
Staff: 
Do your staff members have time to work together? 
Real strategies you can implement: 

• PLCs or Collaborative Teams
  • These are probably obvious strategies here, but they still are very influential. 
• A Googly Mindset
  • Think about how you use time on staff development days. In line with what Google does, allowing time for staff to work together to solve problems or create something new--together--can be very powerful. 

Students:
Do your students have chances to work together on a regular basis? 
Real strategies you can implement: 

• Get them Collaborating
  • Probably obvious here again, but increasing opportunities for students to work with each other will keep them from being “stranded on the bottom of the hill alone.” 
• Virtual Connection
  • This year, I’ve had a number of students learning from home while they have been quarantined. I think this whole situation causes students to feel alone, even if they are synchronously attending online. 
    • Each day, I welcome each virtual student and pan our camera around the room so their classmates can wave and say hello. 
    • In addition, we have students FaceTime in with their classmates during group work, so they can join in conversations. 

Increase Celebration
Staff: 
Does your staff have a way to congratulate each other or express gratitude?
Real strategies you can implement: 

• Shoutouts
  • My high school principal created a weekly Shoutout Google Form for staff to send positive messages of gratitude and congratulations. Each Thursday, he sends out a link to the Google Form, and each Sunday, he shares the results in our weekly staff newsletter. Our staff loves it and it helps breed a positive culture. 

Students:
Do your students have a way to congratulate each other or express gratitude?
Real strategies you can implement: 

• Student Shoutouts
  • This is a very very rare concept. I just created a Google Form for my students to give each other shoutouts similar to our staff ones. I’m going to pilot it with my college prep classes over the next month and I anticipate it will enhance our classroom culture. 

When I think back to Killer Hill and The Dip, I can now appreciate how much my teammates meant to my mindset and success. An intentional support system can yield huge dividends. If we intentionally implement Connection, Collaboration, and Celebration in our schools, we undoubtedly can help our students see challenges through fresh eyes. 

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I think most people can agree that an openly intimidating and demeaning teaching style would be detrimental to your students...and you. (As an aside, it doesn’t work well in coaching either.) Surprisingly enough, I occasionally run into people who disagree. In both teaching and coaching, there are still folks out there who believe the aforementioned negative culture doesn’t impact classroom climate, team climate, or student performance in a negative way. But I’ll be honest--thankfully, I think the number of people riding the negativity train keeps reducing all the time. Realistically, though, there are subtle things we do, or don’t do, in our classroom that can make a huge impact. And the scary thing is that we may not even know we are doing them. My hope is to shed some light on these concepts and benefit everyone involved. The study I’m about to share with you involved students learning to juggle in PE class, but I truly believe that the same results would occur in a core classroom as well...and at all levels. 

The Study
About a year ago, my friend Troy Wineinger at the University of Kansas shared a recent study (2017) with me regarding the impact climate had on student performance at the middle school level. Here is the initial set-up: 

• Students were separated by gender and were randomly assigned to one of two groups: C/TI climate (Caring/Task Involving) or EI climate (Ego-Involving). 
• The C/TI climate would foster a cooperative atmosphere, treat mistakes as part of the learning process, and value effort and personal improvement. 
• The EI climate would promote intragroup rivalry, punish mistakes, and give the majority of praise and recognition to the highest performers.
• Cortisol levels would be measured via participant saliva samples. The samples were to be taken at the following time intervals relative to the start of the juggling session: 0, +30, +45, and +60 minutes. Why is cortisol important? Cortisol is the stress hormone. It reveals a great deal about a person’s psychobiological stress and general functioning. Heightened cortisol is linked to psychological disorders; depression; sleep disturbances; lessoned vigor, cardiovascular, and immune dysfunction; obesity; and behavioral problems. In addition, higher cortisol hinders performance academically and athletically. Yep, that’s right. Cortisol actually blocks the ability to perform at our best. In essence, cortisol is related to mental and physical health--and lower levels of cortisol are better.
• Once students were separated into groups, the trained instructors began teaching them in isolated areas. They were either in the C/TI group or the EI group, and neither group was aware of what was happening with the other. 
• The course took place over multiple weeks

Both the C/TI and EI instructors implemented a unique way to work with the students. 
​C/TI instructors:

• Created a cooperative atmosphere where students were encouraged to support one another 
• Made a genuine effort to get to know each student on an individual level
• Treated mistakes as part of learning
• Identified student strengths and built upon them
• Created a supportive environment where youth were treated with kindness and respect
• Fostered a sense of belonging to the group by promoting student-to-student connections
• Incorporated team building into the sessions
• Emphasized group success and how each individual plays a role in that success
• Promoted individual improvement not based on comparison

EI instructors (Did pretty much the opposite as the C/TI instructors)

• Promoted rivalry among students
• Ranked them based on performance: 1 = best; 10 = worst
• Punished mistakes by lowering a student’s ranking or taking away their juggling balls
• Spent time getting to know each juggler, but then spent more time with the better performers while outwardly praising them much more. 
• Instructional feedback was given by comparing individual students to the best performers

I like the varying instructors of this study because (1) each instructor group was almost the polar opposite, and (2) both instructor groups used techniques that people currently use both in the classroom and in athletics. These are representative of real teachers and coaches!

The Results
The data for the study were gathered in multiple ways: cortisol levels, performance, and student surveys (CCS--the Caring Climate Scale: a 13-item scale that measures to the extent which students feel cared for, valued, and respected). Although the students were separated by gender, results were consistent between both males and females.

• Cortisol Levels
  • C/TI students had 2x lower cortisol levels overall. The worst readings for the EI group came between the 30- and 45-minute marks--right in the heart of the session. Interestingly, the EI groups cortisol levels lowered at the 60-minute mark. I hypothesize this was because they knew it was finally almost all over. 
• Performance
  • C/TI students enjoyed their sessions much more, connected with peers, put forth more effort, showed grit, and achieved progress at a faster rate. Overall, they had more success and had fun while doing it. The EI students didn’t try as hard, gave up more easily, and didn’t enjoy the experience. 
• Caring Climate Scale
  • EI students noted much higher feelings of shame, anxiety, self-consciousness, social evaluation, and lower self-confidence. The levels of anxiety in EI participants were double compared to the C/TI group; students were also 2.5x more stressed. In addition, C/TI students had twice the self-confidence. 

What can we learn from this?
I think the largest takeaway from this study is that we need to pay attention to detail when creating our classroom culture and working with our students. I’ll stick with the positive lessons here. We need to foster a supportive environment between students, really get know each student on an individual level; search for and recognize individual improvement; treat mistakes as a natural part of the process; promote collaboration and cooperation. I know, I know--that’s a lot to keep track of. But if you work to create this environment early, it is self-sustaining, and student performance will go through the roof. 

A caring climate wins...in every category. Better stress levels. Better performance. Better psychological state. Whether a teacher, coach, administrator, or parent, how you interact and what you choose to focus on matters. When students are learning or working to improve, how we interact with them--and how we promote the interaction between them--matters. 
Climate Matters!


____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Hogue, Candice M., et al. "The Differential Impact of Motivational Climate on Adolescents' Psychological and Physiological Stress Responses." Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 21 Feb. 2017, pp. 118-27.

During the 2019-2020 school year (before COVID 19 smacked us in the face) I decided to up my game a bit more regarding positive psychology in education, so I conducted a study in my classroom. I had been implementing a number of positive priming techniques at the beginning of classes, but I wasn’t really measuring anything to gauge impact or level of success. I decided to create a 25-day study and really measure some things. 

Who were the subjects?
I collected data from 56 high school students ranging from 9th to 12th grade. 

We didn’t use any names. I gave each student a random “secret number” that was assigned to their assessments. I didn’t know who had what number; I could only see the trend within each student number. They just had to write their number somewhere so they could put it on their assessments (and yes, a couple of students forgot their number after the first assessment, so we had to do some problem-solving). 

What did they do? 
First, I gave them a baseline test to assess their level of well-being. It is based on concepts created by Margaret L. Kern, Lisbeth Benson, Elizabeth A. Steinberg, and Laurence Steinberg of the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University. The assessment is intended to measure the students’ well-being regarding 5 categories: 

• Engagement
• Perseverance 
• Optimism
• Connectedness
• Happiness

What the students did each day is pretty straightforward--during the first few minutes of class, students would complete the following research-based tasks: 

1. What Went Well (WWW): Students wrote down three things that went well in the last 24 hours...or they could write down 1 thing that went well with three details. 
2. Daily Gratitudes: Students would write down 3 NEW things they were grateful for each day. By the end of the 25 days, students would have a list of 75 unique things, people, ideas, places, etc., that they were grateful for. Additionally, Thursdays were “Thank You Thursdays”--students would send a “thank you” message to someone in their life. (As a side note, this was the favorite day for many of them. Most of them would send a text message to someone and would receive a message back quite quickly. Sometimes it was a parent asking, “okay...do you need money or something?” Haha! --But most of the time it was a heartfelt message of gratitude right back at the student.)

The theory behind these tasks is that they will most likely increase Optimism. Basically, I was encouraging students to think about what was good in their life...what was going well and what they were thankful for. And it did raise Optimism in my students. However, that wasn’t the only positive result. 

What were the results? 
After the 25 days were completed, students took the EPOCH assessment again. All 5 areas increased, but some more than others. 

• Engagement: +6.8%
• Perseverance: +3.4%
• Optimism: +7.8%
• Connectedness: +1.2
• Happiness: +2.6
• Across all categories, there was an average increase of +4.4%. 

Optimism, the target category, grew the most at nearly 8%, but close behind was Engagement almost 7%. Why? Research has shown that putting someone in a positive state can make them up to 10x more engaged in a task. By thinking positively about their life, students were most likely in a positive state to start class. 

I was very pleased with the outcome after just 25 days, and I immediately began to think about how I could modify things to impact the categories that had smaller gains. 

Would I do anything differently? 
I continue to learn more and more pretty much every day. Here are a couple of the tweaks I would make to make things even more impactful: 

• Always include the details. After doing more recent research, the power comes from the details. Just making lists is okay, but if you can add specific details, it helps you relive the experience and cements it in your mind even more. As far as your brain is concerned, it is almost like you are experiencing it again...which is awesome!
• Include social connection every day. By allowing the students to open up to their classmates and potentially share something they wrote down, it will most likely impact their feelings of social connection. 

What did the students say? 
A vast majority of students really enjoyed the daily activities. It became part of their routine, but one that made them feel good. Many students commented on how they were starting to notice things throughout the day that they could write down the next day. They were beginning to change the way their brain was viewing and scanning the world. There were also students that said it seemed like it was positively impacting their extracurriculars--they felt more focused and calm during competition. In essence, the students enjoyed the experience and felt it positively impacted them even beyond the classroom.


*Click here to see the official PDF describing the EPOCH categories. 

**If you are interested in the survey I used, or have any questions, just shoot me an email at [email protected]. 

I finally tried out the video creation software Doodly to share some strategies about overcoming procrastination. (I think I was delaying my use of it).

​Recent studies show that about 70% of college students claim they struggle with procrastination on a regular basis. I think the age groups below and above have similar issues. I know I do! In the video I share 6 techniques that may help. The one that really clicks for me is #1: The 5 Minute Take-Off. I struggle with perfectionism, so sometimes I freeze up rather than start. The 5 Minute Take-Off gets me to just get going. Once I do, I typically get into flow. It is so amazing how a small technique--a small shift in mindset--can help so much.  

Here are the 6 Strategies: 
1. The 5 Minute Take-Off
2. Reward Yourself
3. Go Public
4. Use the Team Approach
5. Write It Down
6. Be Sure to Recover
​
Take a look at the video, try out some of the strategies, and let me know what works for you in the comments.