Making Classrooms More Inclusive with Dr Pippa and Bradley Busch, Mind the Gap, Ep.69 (S4,E6)
Mind the Gap: Making Education Work Across the Globe
Teaching Resilience vs. Providing Comfort in the Classroom
Teachers often impose their own anxieties onto students, leading to a conflict between promoting resilience and providing comfort. Some believe students should cope and manage their emotions to overcome challenges, while others argue that students should be provided with comfort and support. A study comparing comfort-based support with strategy-oriented support showed that the comfort response from teachers was found to be more demotivating and lowered students' self-expectations. However, the nature of research is quite binary, and there is room for both comfort and strategy, but there is concern that the pendulum has swung too much towards providing comfort, thereby insulating students from failure and hindering their opportunities to learn and improve.
