Students are facing a well-documented mental health crisis that was on the rise even before the pandemic, and schools have responded with social-emotional learning (SEL) and wellness programs. But what if some of these very practices are contributing to students’ stress?

In “The Teens Are Not Alright: School and Classroom Practices to Support Student Well-Being,” education researcher Cathy Vatterott argues that to truly support adolescent mental health, schools must look beyond programs and interventions and examine the environments they create for students.

Grades, tests, homework and heavy workloads are top among high school students’ sources of school-related stress. Vatterott, professor emerita of education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, posits that traditional approaches to grading, scheduling, classroom management and instruction often work against adolescents’ developmental needs.

This doesn’t mean schools should lower academic expectations or rigor. Instead, Vatterott calls for a shift toward a “wellness paradigm” — one that treats mental health as part of overall health and recognizes that every adult in a school has a role in supporting student well-being.

That can include giving students greater autonomy in their learning, reconsidering grading and homework practices, creating more consistent schoolwide policies, strengthening relationships with trusted adults and providing students with opportunities to manage stress and develop self-regulation skills.

EdSurge spoke with Vatterott about her latest book and how to create stress-free schools where students feel valued and heard while having autonomy over their learning.

EdSurge: In “The Teens Are Not Alright,” you argue that schools can’t just “teach their way out” of today’s teen mental health crisis with SEL, mindfulness and other interventions. Instead, schools must examine the practices contributing to student stress. What are some of the most harmful practices and why are they so difficult for schools to change?

Cathy Vatterott: The first practice is this crazy schedule. In a seven-period high school schedule, kids are supposed to have seven different classes and are supposed to switch their mental state to a different subject with three minutes in between and 20 minutes for lunch. Is this for the convenience of the teachers or for the administration? Or is it just tradition that we’ve done this?

The second big practice is the homework load; it’s just absolutely insane in a lot of secondary schools. There are three reasons why that’s so hard to change. I think we confuse load with rigor: If some is good, more is better. I think we confuse compliance with responsibility: We want these kids to be taught responsibility, but what we’re really teaching them is compliance. In middle schools and high schools, I think we confuse replication with preparation: “Well, they’re going to get a bunch of homework in high school, so we need to do that in middle school. And in college, they’re going to get even more,” so that’s how we need to prepare kids, when instead, what we need to do is to prepare kids to be independent learners.

How can schools reduce that stress without also lowering academic expectations and rigor?

Here, again, we have to be able to hold both ideas in our hands at the same time — that we can change things to make this less stressful, without compromising that learning. What we do know is that student well-being is a necessary foundation for academic learning. We know from trauma research that kids can’t learn when they’re hungry or when they’re super stressed out about something. I like the idea of Maslow before Bloom — students’ basic needs must be met before they can engage in higher-level learning.

Another misconception is that we don’t have to do less assessing, we have to do different. When we look at what we’re doing with grades, how we’re weighting our grades, can we stop counting homework in the grade? If there’s ever been a time where we now understand that counting homework in the grades is unfair, given all the access kids have to AI, it’s now. It’s not that we’re going to stop giving homework, but we’re going to start making kids aware of the goals they have to reach, what the assessment’s going to look like, and then figure out what you need to do in order to pass that assessment.

The other thing we can look at is how we can de-stress our in-class assessments. We can start by making sure everybody has enough time to finish the assessment. We can also look at how we are preparing kids. Do they know what they need to know?

A major theme in the book is adolescents’ need for autonomy. What does meaningful autonomy actually look like in middle or high school? How can teachers provide autonomy while still meeting standards and maintaining classroom structure?

It’s a false dichotomy for people to think that if we give students any autonomy, we’re not going to have structure or meet standards. That’s the first misconception we have to get out of our heads. What I think we fail to understand is adolescents need autonomy, they need independence. But it’s not all-or-nothing. Use the analogy of driving, because what we really want is for our kids to drive their own learning. You wouldn’t put a teenager in a car and tell them to drive without any training or instruction or supervision, right? At the same time, you wouldn’t dream of never letting a teenager drive. At some point, you have to give them the keys. At some point, you have to give them that freedom.

When you give kids more autonomy in their learning, you move gradually from a teacher-directed environment to giving kids more choices, and then you move into more collaborative decision-making with kids. Teachers can start small.

But let’s go beyond the learning — what does it look like in the classroom? You co-create your rules and routines with your kids. Is there any reason why they can’t have a water bottle? What are our rules going to be for when you can talk or when you can use the restroom? When you put kids in charge of that, that is autonomy as well.

If we look at adolescence, autonomy is how they become independent adults. And I think we forget about that. This is a developmental need for adolescents.

You note that achievement culture is especially damaging to teenagers. In your opinion, how much of the stress students experience today is actually created by adults — parents, educators, college admissions — and how can we change that culture?

How much of that is coming from adults? Well, a lot. But it depends on the community, and in some communities, it’s just insane. And the college admissions process is a huge part of it, but parents don’t have to buy into this “Harvard or homeless” mindset.

One of the most important things to me is thinking about our messaging, and that goes for teachers, administrators and parents. Can we broaden what we showcase as achievement in our schools? If you’ve got a kid doing incredible volunteer work in the community, does that get showcased in school? If you have a student doing something artistic or creative, but it’s not within the school extracurriculars, does that count?

The other thing is this “group think” message coming from many adults — that if you make one false move, your future is doomed. You need to commit and make that decision about the whole rest of your life when you’re 15. When we do that, we’re not valuing the freedom that a teenager should have to explore their interests and to think about paths for their life. I think we’re also failing to dignify other choices. Everybody says, “Well, you either go to college or you go to the military,” but how many paths have we explored? I think career education and exploration is a huge thing we need to work on right now.

Schools have limited resources and many struggle to address growing student stress and mental health needs. If a school principal asked you for two or three things their school could change tomorrow that don’t require hiring more counselors or launching a new program, what would you suggest?

The first thing they need to do is start listening to students. Kids have to look out for kids; teachers have to look out for kids. This is no longer a problem that can be pushed off to counselors. If you have some kind of tool already, an SEL screener that shows what your kids need to work on, that is a great way to look at potential red flags. Find a way to do a once-a-week check-in for kids. If every kid identifies one trusted adult, and that adult takes even five minutes in the hallway, or a few minutes in class to talk to kids — that’s been really beneficial in the buildings I’ve looked at.

Second, empower kids. Students just need to feel like they’ve got some control over things. Let’s give students some real representative power. What are your concerns as kids? Then take those to your principal or assistant principal.

Third, if you’re in a big building, schedule a staggered class release in different parts of your building or different classrooms within a hallway. You want to identify stress? Look at the stress that comes with having five minutes to get to your next class when there are 1,000 people in the hall.

How might schools approach problem-solving differently if they’re thinking about it from the whole child perspective?

Our approach to problem-solving in schools is behavior-based, and we’re not really whole-child when we’re asking how we get students to show up, do the work, behave.

When we focus on issues such as attendance or behavior, we want to move to a more proactive approach. Do we have to wait until there’s a problem? “How do we get them to…” is the wrong question. We ought to be looking at other things that might be going on with this student that are contributing to their behavior. I think we started to do this with attendance and started to look at it more through a mental health lens or a wellness lens. But this is a whole shift in our mindset that really needs to happen in terms of how we approach problems. We’ve got to show that mental health and wellness are as important as achievement, that student well-being is as important as achievement.

I was hoping, after COVID-19, that people would get this message that there are more important things than the test scores and the standards — that we want kids to be mentally healthy. I get a little aggravated because everybody seems to think if we just get the phones out of the schools, that that’s all we need to do. That’s not the only boogeyman out there. Absolutely, it’s a big thing. But it’s not the only thing.

If schools adopted the wellness paradigm you describe in the book, what would feel different about a typical school day, from a student’s perspective? What do you think students would notice first?

The first thing I think kids would notice is the vibe. It feels like a relaxed work environment. People are happy and calm. They don’t seem so rushed and so frantic. I talked to students in schools focusing on mental health and lowering stress, and they said that they feel respected. They feel valued. They feel that their work is meaningful. They feel in control of their learning. And therefore, they’re engaged.

I would want kids to see that there’s a balance between academics and social time, and that relationships and interests are important. When we start letting kids explore their own interests, when we start dignifying their choices, it makes them feel like the present is as important as the future. And that’s really where calm comes into the picture.

We’re not doing these kids any favors by tightly controlling them. I think schools don’t know what else to do, so they’re doing all this SEL and mindfulness stuff, and it’s treating the symptoms instead of looking at the problem — and we are part of the problem.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

EdSurge is an editorially independent digital news site of the International Society for Transforming Education.