Teenage Mental Health

by Christine Vasilaros

Students at Appleby College do a lot…and so do their teachers…and for the most part, we LOVE it! Having worked in the guidance office supporting student wellbeing over the past 11 years, I have noticed the number of competing demands on a typical Appleby student are on the rise. Which makes sense! As a school, we continually offer more and more programing to improve the quality of our education. And our students, are always striving to do more and of course, to do it better than before.

To make matters even more challenging, there are external pressures on students (parental, post-secondary, social media, cancel culture, world events to name a few) that make growing up and planning a future harder than ever.  

So, what does a Director of Guidance and Student Services do when student well-being begins to suffer in part, because of these increased tensions?

She gets to thinking…surely other high-performance, elite educational institutions are grappling with the same thing?

How might we optimize a challenging and fulsome student experience without compromising well-being?

How do we nudge students past their comfort zone, holding them to high expectations, while offering encouragement, support, and scaffolding to help them reach mastery?

How might we tweak our current program offerings to ensure they are in fact “doable”? 

With the current state of teenage mental health, it is certainly worth a try!  Challenge Success, out of the Graduate School at Stanford University, led by Denise Pope, has been doing research in this area for decades. I attended their virtual S.P.A.C.E. camp to learn more about how schools can help reduce student stress in high-challenge settings. Participants were shown “how to work through a change process cycle: learning how to approach and define a problem, use data to contextualize it, design a data-based experiment, and plan to pilot it.” (Challenge Success, 2023)

So, I am ready to take the next step and design an experiment where we can hear from Appleby students and focus on the student user experience of the program. Teaser alert, the options I am considering to collect student feedback are The Fishbowl, The Letter, and The Workshop. Stay tuned to learn more about what this experiment looks like and the key takeaways to inform our practices!

Stanford Graduate School of Education. (2023, June 2023). Space Framework for School Change. Challenge Success. https://challengesuccess.org/resources/space-framework-for-school-change/

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Christine Vasilaros – Director, Guidance, Student Services Christine began her teaching career as a math and economics teacher who has shifted to working as a guidance counsellor for the last 12 years. She is a member of the Appleby Care Team (ACT), dedicated to ensuring that all Appleby students have access to the mental healthcare they need to flourish. Despite being immersed in the student support world, Christine keeps her “math” brain stimulated by working as a part of the academic scheduling team.