Purpose

Improving Mental Health from Within The Classroom

By Aatash Parikh

This school has wasted my time for three and half years! Alex shouted to me as she was leaving class
on a Friday afternoon, in reference to her experience at the high school at which Im working. Alex has
never been one to hold back her opinion. While I knew not to take her words totally at face valueI
know how great of an experience our high school provides to so many of our studentsI couldnt help
but get stirred up by her statement. I felt for Alex. And the optimistic teacher in me wanted to do
something about it.

So lets make sure we dont waste your last semester! I said back to her.

Alex was part of a class of 12th graders I had just been given the opportunity to co-teach for the final
semester of their senior year at High Tech High Chula Vista. While my co-teacher Tere and I planned for
this semester, I was excited to test out some of my theories around student engagement and
motivation. One of those theories was around the importance of sense of purpose in a classroom setting.
In psychology literature, sense of purpose is defined as having a goal that is at once meaningful to the
self and of consequence to the world beyond the self (Damon et al., 2003). Creating purposeful work
for students requires educators to not only create authentic learning experiences that have real world
significancea feat in and of itselfbut also really get to know what each student cares about on a
personal level. Ideally, this happens in every classroom, but because of my co-teaching opportunity in a
12th grade classroom, I found the perfect medium through which to test these ideas: senior project.

The senior project is a High Tech High graduation requirement in which students turn their own passions
into individual projectswhether a film, art piece, or event, for examplethat they can showcase to their
community. We felt we could use our class to expand the scope of what Senior Project has traditionally
involved. Since students work on their Senior Projects often took place outside of normal class time and
with varying levels of support from faculty, our plan was to change that up and create a semester-long
in-class process that supported our students in doing a project that was not just about their passions,
which students often have a difficult time pinpointing, but one that was deeply connected to an
individual sense of purpose. The quality of products coming out of Senior Project in past years has
greatly varied, and our hypothesis was that helping students make a stronger connection to their sense
of purpose would increase their motivation and engagement and thus improve the quality of the work
itself.

Purpose, however, is important not only to engagement and motivation, but also to well-being and
mental health.
Pressing Concerns

Understanding the connection between purpose and mental health starts with understanding executive
function. Struggling students in high school often justify their lack of effort in even the most engaging
and well-designed classroom activities with statements like, I just dont want to do it or I dont see the
point In many cases, this is because the students are lacking executive functioning skills, which make
up, as the Harvard GSE calls them, the brains air traffic control system that allows them to conduct
the organization and self-management behaviors that school typically requires for success. What I
learned not long after stepping into the classroom as an educator is that this is too often the case for
many of our students, but especially for those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds and/or have
dealt with adverse circumstances at home. Paul Tough, in his 2016 report Helping Children Succeed
(2016), writes,

Educators across the country are intimately familiar with the struggles of children experiencing
adversity, as are social workers, mentors, pediatricians, and parents. If you work with kids who
are growing up in poverty or other adverse circumstances, you know that they can be difficult for
teachers and other professionals to reach, hard to motivate, hard to calm down, hard to connect
with.

For kids whose executive functioning skills have been compromised by adverse experiences, one
metaphor to better understand their situation is what Mullainathan and Shafir (2014) call tunneling,
which is meant to evoke tunnel vision, the narrowing of the visual field in which objects inside the
tunnel come into sharper focus while rendering us blind to everything peripheral, outside the tunnel.
On the contrary, school often requires juggling--the active maintenance of deadlines, assignments, and
other responsibilities. Because struggling students with poor executive functioning ability cannot juggle
more than one thing, they reserve their limited focus for the most pressing and urgent matters.
Anything less so fades to the background and, in my observation, is often replaced with more amusing
and passive distractions like Instagram, Youtube, video games, or worse...

These ideas are what led to my hypothesis for this work: if a student only has enough to capacity to
focus within a narrow tunnel of vision, perhaps the answer is to bring schoolwork into the tunnel. In
other words, find out what is pressing and urgent for that student, and help them find ways to
incorporate that into their project or assignment. This is what could give them the sense of purpose
needed to overcome their socioemotional challenges and regain interest in their work.

The great thing about doing this work to make school more purposeful for students is that while it likely
has the most impact on students who are struggling the most, the changes and personalization it
requires from an educator perspective stand to benefit all students.

A Purposeful Senior Project

We took the Senior Project traditionin which students pick their passions and design their own projects
around themand added our own scaffolding that helped students discover what they were interested
in and connect that back to a larger purpose. This consisted of two main elements: (1) a series of
interest- and problem-discovery exercises that helped students find a problem in their life and/or
community that felt relevant to their interests, and (2) using the human-centered design process to
support them in doing field research and interviews to gain empathy and understanding for their chosen
problems.

Sometimes, however, the process mainly demanded deep one-on-one conversation between us and our
students. Alex, who felt that school had been a waste of time for her, was one of the students for
whom this proved especially important: I had several conversations with her to probe her interests, her
long-term goals, and what bothered her about the world or her day-to-day life. Through much
back-and-forth, what we eventually kept coming back to was her frustration with school itself. It only
made sense that her project should be about that.

Now, for her Senior Project, Alex will be synthesizing her thoughts on school and collecting data from
other students about their experiences. Her product: a report and presentation to staff members that
includes insights and feedback about the aspects of the high school curriculum have felt most or least
meaningful to her and her peers. This project feels real to her, and shes excited about what shes doing.
This perhaps is the most powerful example of why purposeful work can impact student well-being and
engagement: it can encourage them turn the very issue that they are struggling with in their life into a
project that they are excited and motivated to be doing.

My Story

When I started to deal with depression and anxiety during my undergrad years of college, I first truly
began to understand the connection between students mental health and their ability to be good
students. I found at the time that I could barely find the energy or focus to sustain the myriad
assignments, content, and projects I had to juggle. This daily struggle continued to eat at me until I
simply didnt feel like doing school anymore. Sound familiar?

It was not until I started my work in education that I recognized that this is a daily struggle for more
students than wed like to think. San Francisco-based researcher Nadine Burke-Harris (2011) conducted
a study with ~700 youth in a low-income, urban environment, through which she found that two-thirds
of kids had experienced at least one adverse experience and 12 percent had experienced 4 or more
adverse experiences, thus establishing a connection between adversity and low-income environments.

At the school where I work, High Tech High Chula Vista, more than half of our student population
qualifies for free or reduced-priced lunch. And through the close relationships our staff develop with
students, we know a large portion of these students have faced adversity in many forms growing up in
their homes. This recognition has led to a culture that emphasizes the social and emotional well-being of
our students. In fact, our school was designed from the ground up to foster this well-being, through
what much of the education world calls socioemotional learning (SEL). Understanding what SEL already
entails, at our school and others, will help illustrate that focusing on purpose simply involves taking our
existing efforts a little bit deeper.

Peeling Back the SEL Curtain

Socioemotional learning (SEL) has become an area of emphasis in schools throughout the country.
Researchers such as Paul Tough, Angela Duckworth, and Carol Dweck, have helped deepen educators
focus on developing their students non-cognitive skills in addition to traditionally academic skills. The
idea is that these non-cognitive skills work directly with our students executive functioning systems to
produce academically-positive behavior, and that these skills can and should be taught.

Tough (2016) also shined light on a deeper level of intervention to address student socioemotional
growth: improving school environments. If we want to improve a childs grit or self-control, what we
need to change first is his environment, he states. High Tech High is a prime example of what a great
environment could look like: small classes, advisories, a kind and cordial culture, and strong
student-adult relationships, each of which work together to make sure that every student is well-known
and appreciated by both peers and adults. This sense of belonging, Abraham Maslow would concur,
sets the foundation for deeper learning.

These structures demand a lot of skill and resources to put in place and maintain; however, when
utilized well, they bring us a long way towards being able to reach all of our kids. One thing they all have
in common, though, is that they are typically auxiliary to the core classroom experience. This begs the
question: what can classroom teachers, the ones who typically spend the most time with and arguably
have the most influence on our kids, do to reach the ones that, due to the socioemotional challenges,
are the most disengaged?

The Senior Project experience my co-teacher and I designed for our 12th graders is our answer that
question. The project is still in progress, but the results so far are promising. A recent survey we did with
our seniors showed that 86% of them are either Excited or Really Excited about their chosen topics
for senior project.

Our larger hope? That helping students find a purposeful project, one that connected to their interests
as well as to larger problem they cared about, would lead to higher quality senior projects and also more
engaged, more motivated, and happier students.
References

Burke, N. J., Hellman, J. L., Scott, B. S., Weems, C. F., Carrion, V. G. (2011). The Impact of Adverse
Childhood Experiences on an Urban Pediatric Population. Child Abuse and Neglect 35, no. 6.

Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University (2011). Building the Brains Air Traffic Control
System: How Early Experiences Shape the Development of Executive Function: Working Paper
No. 11. Retrieved from www.developingchild.harvard.edu.

Damon, W. (2008). The path to purpose: Helping our children find their calling in life. New York: Free
Press.

Damon, W., Menon, J. L., & Bronk, K. C. (2003). The development of purpose during adolescence.
Applied Developmental Science(7), 119-128.

Deci, E. and Ryan, R. (2008). Self-determination theory: A macrotheory of human motivation, development,
and health. Canadian Psychology, 49, 3, 182-185.

Farrington, C.A., Roderick, M., Allensworth, E., Nagaoka, J., Keyes, T.S., Johnson, D.W., & Beechum, N.O.
(2012). Teaching adolescents to become learners. The role of noncognitive factors in shaping
school performance: A critical literature review. Chicago: University of Chicago Consortium on
Chicago School Research.

Felitti, V., Anda, R., Nordenberg, D., Williamson, D. F., Spitz, A. M., Edwards, V., Koss, M. P., Marks, J. S.
(1998). Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading
Causes of Death in Adults. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Vol. 14, Issue 4.
(The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study)

Frankl, V. E. (1959). Man's search for meaning. Beacon Press.

Hulleman, C. S., Barron, K. E., Kosovich, J. J., & Lazowski, R. A. (2014). Chapter 8: Student Motivation:
Current Theories, Constructs, and Interventions within an Expectancy-Value Framework (A.
Lipnevich, F. Preckel, & R. Roberts, Eds.). In Psychosocial skills and school systems in the
Twenty-first century: Theory, research, and applications. Springer.

Kataoka, S. H., Zhang, L., Wells, K. B.. Unmet need for mental health care among U.S. children: variation
by ethnicity and insurance status. The American Journal of Psychiatry. 159(9): 15481555.

Kohn, A. (1993, September). Choices for Children: How And Why to Let Children Decide. Phi

Kunc, N. (1992). The Need to Belong: Rediscovering Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Retrieved February
11, 2017, from http://www.broadreachtraining.com/articles/armaslow.htm
Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2014). Scarcity: the new science of having less and how it defines our lives.
New York: Picador/Henry Holt and Company.

Tough, P. (2016). Helping children succeed: What works and why.

Yeager, D. S., & Bundick, M. J. (2009). The Role of Purposeful Work Goals in Promoting Meaning in Life
and in Schoolwork During Adolescence. Journal of Adolescent Research, 24(4),

Yeager, D. S., Henderson, M. D., Paunesku, D., Walton, G. M., DMello, S., Spitzer, B. J. (2014). Boring but
Important: A Self-Transcendent Purpose for Learning Fosters Academic Self-Regulation. J ournal
of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 107, No. 4, 559580.