Thank you @DrPamelaCantor, writing for Bright, for bringing up this vitally important issue.

I believe our failure to optimally address the kinds of student anxiety that lead to unmanageable stress is a factor of not having a common and biologically accurate and precise language with which to address and discuss human personality development.

We educators learn 8 to 10 psychological theories of personality, a handful of child development theories, and a handful of behavior theories in our psychology courses. Our psychology textbooks make no secret of the fact that none of these disparate theories having been scientifically verified. There are currently 90 different definitions for the term emotion available to us. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman-Barrett’s research tells us none of the claims psychologists have made about emotions, and there are many, are backed up by valid and replicable research.

With so many disparate definitions, ideas, and psychological theories floating around about the human personality, no two teachers are able to be on the same page with one another. Every couple of years there is a new version of how to manage student behaviors with some new buzz words and phrases and some of the old buzz words and phrases shuffled around to make them sound new. Experts are brought in, workshops are given, new materials are purchased, but results never change.

I have been an observer in many schools in all grade levels across 7 different cities and 3 different states. The percentage of professionals who want to do right by their students is 100. The percentage of educational professionals who use the same definitions, psychological theories, terminology, and strategies for how to talk to and interact with students in our schools is o. There is no uniformity within a single school let alone from city to city or state to state for how to optimally interact with students to facilitate optimal personality development.

Classroom teachers, paraeducators, specialists, school therapists, and staff members all interact with students in confusingly different ways from day to day and year to year because we do not have access to a common language. To have a common language we need a biologically accurate, scientifically verified body of work to rely upon.

The lack of a biologically accurate and common language is evident in so many ways. For one, when students cannot predict how teachers and staff members will treat them moment to moment and year to year, it is one more added stress they are forced to manage. Cognitively flexible children manage this destabilizing situation adequately, albeit uncomfortably, but less cognitively flexible children do not.

In looking for solutions to student anxiety, @DrPamelaCantor presented the idea to spend daily time with students to listen to and support them. This idea is awesome and I support it 100%. But again, when teachers are using such disparate ideas for how to structure their interaction patterns with students, this idea would play out very unevenly.

My next statement will sound blasphemous due to our current vernacular, but I believe we objectify children and put them in a state of high anxiety when we talk to them about their behaviors and emotions in the ways we currently do. I do not believe we have considered how utterly individualized and excruciatingly private emotions and behaviors are to all mammals. For this reason, I believe educators should have jurisdiction over helping students make good decisions, not in helping students ‘improve’ their emotions or behaviors.

If we had a single idea to rally around for how to interact with our students, I believe it would be the idea of predictive decision making. Our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors all integrate in order to help us synthesize internal and external information in order to form predictive decisions for what to do next. This idea is supported by the research of neuroscientist Jeff Hawkins of Numenta.

Our behaviors are simply the outward manifestations of how we are sensing, assessing, and managing information and formulating predictive decisions moment to moment. And every single time we analyze and synthesize information, we will have an emotional accompaniment to that process because emotions take their cues for when and how to engage from our predictions. Emotions are decision-making helpers you might say. We cannot really talk about the decision-making process in separate chunks because it is a highly integrated dynamic. This is why rather than separating out and discussing emotions or behaviors separately, I hypothesize we should instead focus our discussions on optimal decision-making with our students.

What we absolutely should not do is confuse students about their own personal brain mechanics by invalidating the responses they do have and/or teaching them from the point of view of their own wrongness. Students need to be exposed to as much information as possible at school and given the tools to analyze all different kinds of information optimally given their abilities and interests. In terms of rule breaking, we can discuss how students can change their analysis and decision-making in the future, not how they can change their behavior. Addressing behavior instead of decision making is like telling a child to change the size of her feet in order to run faster. It makes no logical sense.

I believe @DrPamelaCantor has eloquently stated a problem with student anxiety that has been nagging us for far too long, and I believe such problems have not been solved not due to lack of trying, but due to lack of accurate information and precise terminology. I believe we need to move away from philosophical, psychological, and scientifically unverified conjecture about the human personality and offer children direct information about what we actually know about the actual mechanics of the structure and function of how their brains and bodies integrate. In this way, we put students in the drivers’ seat of their own lives with concrete information and concrete problem-solving strategies.

In studying evolutionary biology we learn all mammals are biologically equipped to come into the world to face any manner of harsh and traumatic circumstances, and inevitably all mammals will. But we are biologically equipped to be tough. We are biologically equipped to be resilient, regardless of our strengths or weaknesses. We cannot take away harshness or trauma for even the most privileged of students. Students are taught all too often, however, that human emotions are inherently confusing and human behavioral fitness is lacking. We teach children they are unequal to the task of being human unless they go through all sorts of self-improvement. We hide from children the knowledge that they are fully loaded with customized biological cues to help them optimize decision making in terms of how they are uniquely able to sense, think, and move.

We confusingly teach children they need to improve upon variables that are autonomic, like emotions and behaviors when our predictive decisions are the only thing we can actively manipulate as mammals.

When we authorities feed children imprecise information or misinformation, particularly information that has not been scientifically verified, about their own personal emotions and behaviors, we confuse them and undermine their confidence in their own decision-making capacities. We cannot teach a child about his or her personal emotional cues. We can only help children do the best possible job they can of considering and synthesizing all the information they come across in any given situation in order to come up with the best possible conclusions and predictive decisions for how to handle that situation.

We can teach children that when the predictive decisions they make are violated, they will have an anxiety response. As humans, we only have around 7 emotional cues, and our brains want to take such good care of us that even the slightest little violations to our predictions cause anxiety. Our brain doesn’t care if our brother told us Star Wars is a dumb movie or if a meteor is about to fall on us. Brain research shows us that our brain alerts us with the same kind of anxiety response for every violation to our predictions. When we become really anxious, afraid, or angry, we can think about the problem we are facing and figure out how to reassess the problem and readjust our predictions in such a way that can help us calm down.

As teachers, every time we engage our predictive decision-making mechanisms, we will 100% of the time have an emotional accompaniment that goes along with that decision. What I have done as a teacher is I have stopped predicting how my students will respond or behave to my lessons.

When I do predict how students should behave and they behave much differently than I predicted, they violate my predictions and my brain cues for an anxiety response. When I have an anxiety response I am more likely to be harsh with my students because I am a mammal first and foremost. No matter how earnest a teacher I am, I will always have the biological cueing system of a mammal. I cannot transcend my biological cueing system and neither can my students.

I now know how to drive my brain much more efficiently after doing brain research and letting go of inaccurate, imprecise and scientifically unverified ideas about my emotions and behaviors and thinking processes. This information also allows me to minimize student anxiety. Conflict resolution has become much easier and quicker as a result. Students are calm, happy, and confident in this kind of environment.

When a child is very upset, we often try to tell the child why he should not be upset and why his emotional response, (a biologically imprecise term), is inflated. This invalidates the child. It confuses the child. And it teaches the child that his emotional cues are not to be relied upon to help him make decisions but are to be dissociated so they won’t get him into trouble.

I don’t believe children need our help to understand their own emotional cues. They need us not to invalidate their expressions. They need us not to feed them misinformation or imprecise information so they become unable to understand their own emotional cues that are customized precisely for their personal sensory, motor, and nervous systems. And I don’t believe children need to be objectified by being discussed in terms of their behaviors.

I don’t believe students need anything from us to be better at being humans. They just need information and experiences provided to them so they can learn in ways that do not damage the uniquely customized human capacities they each possess for managing and making sense of information.

Evolutionary biology tells us biological diversity optimizes the overall success of social mammal groups. We need to take our cues as teachers for how to interact with our students from the students themselves so as not to damage the biological dynamics within their uniquely customized brains and bodies. I believe we should stop the practice of superimposing upon students prefabricated ideas about emotions and behaviors in ways that erode their confidence in their unique sensory, motor, and nervous system capacities. I hypothesize we erode the mental health of our developing children and the success of our species when we do.