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This chart is Thompson's interpretation of multiple pieces of data, including a 2021 CDC study of 8,000 high students.

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Writing and other complex tasks are scary.

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Writing and other complex tasks are scary.

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The teens’ accounts of the causes of these [anxious] episodes included overestimating their abilities, experiences of failure, lack of control, loss of self-confidence... (Orson and Larson 2020).

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Almost every measure of mental health is getting worse, for every teenage demographic, and it’s happening all across the country. Since 2009, sadness and hopelessness have increased for every race; for straight teens and gay teens; for teens who say they’ve never had sex and for those who say they’ve had sex with males and/or females; for students in each year of high school; and for teens in all 50 states and the District of Columbia (Thompson 2022).

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Part of the problem may be loneliness and truncated social connections.

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Part of the problem may be loneliness and truncated social connections.

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[M]ore aloneness (including from heavy smartphone use) and more loneliness (including from school closures) might have combined to push up sadness among teenagers who need sociality to protect them from the pressures of a stressful world (Thompson 2022).

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Longer, more sheltered childhoods (and the concurrent lack of agency) may also contribute.

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Longer, more sheltered childhoods (and the concurrent lack of agency) may also contribute.

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"Children are growing up slower than they used to. Today’s children are less likely to drive, get a summer job, or be asked to do chores. The problem isn’t that kids are lazy (homework time has risen), or that scrubbing dishes magically dispels anxiety disorders. Rather, Julian wrote, these activities “provide children with two very important things”: tolerating discomfort and having a sense of personal competence" (Thompson 2022).

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Orson and Larson set up a 2020 study of youth program leaders' strategies for helping with anxiety. The most prevalent was reframing.

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Reframing: "(a) providing youth with new perspectives or conceptual tools for understanding the situation in their proj- ect that created the anxiety and (b) helping youth apply this perspective in ways that quelled the anxiety and restored their motivation" (Orson and Larson 2020)

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Reframe the student's understanding of her own skills and encourage her to see how the work will help her improve.

[The student's] original approach reflected what Dweck (2006) has described as a “fixed mindset,” in which failure is evidence that one cannot do something. [The leader's] reframing conveyed a “growth mindset”—a belief that one’s abilities are malleable and sustained, deliberate effort can lead to mastery.

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Reframe the student's understanding of a particular challenge to increase her sense of agency.

Leaders provided perspectives that helped youth incorporate new information, understand what they can control, and better evaluate their goals... Across situations, this second strategy was aimed at helping youth better understand and manage unfamiliar challenges so that they felt in control and that success was within reach.

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Reframe the student's emotion to help her understand that anxiety can fuel good work.

Reframing youth’s anxiety appeared to empower youth by helping them, first, to reinterpret anxiety as an informative cue in difficult work and, second, to reappropriate it as a functional state-of-mind that can help one direct attention to constructive worry and problem-solving the unknowns.

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Vaughn (2019) suggests that a robust sense of agency has three parts:

1. disposition--seeing yourself as someone who can "act and transform environments"

2. motivation--knowing yourself able to make choices and manage your own actions and emotions

3. position-- knowing yourself able to "navigate and influence" social interactions and environments

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1. Willingness to act and choose

2. Willingness to reflect and persist

3. Willingness to interact and question

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Agency fosters engagement fosters growth (and decreases anxiety)

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Agency fosters engagement fosters growth (and decreases anxiety)

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Many motivation theories recognize that experiencing challenges matched to skills creates an experiential “sweet spot” that not only reduces disruptive anxiety but also creates favorable conditions for sustained motivation ...Research on flow theory indicates that this matching creates a “channel” in which people are likely to experience the psychological state of “flow,” which includes the experience of self-reward- ing engagement, deep attention, and optimal functioning in challenging work.... (Orson & Larson 2020)

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Anxiety can interfere with students' sense of agency. Each of these re-framing techniques aims to restore that.

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Truthfully, we can never be sure why our students are unmotivated to learn to write or read, but in my experience often the reason is pure and abject fear of the unknown and seemingly impossible. When we can dispel that fear, we can welcome these students into the mysterious fraternity of writers and lovers of language... A marvelous way to do so is to let our students see that writing and reading are messy processes that require discipline for everyone (Urbanski 2015).

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If we want our young writers to improve, we have to plant ourselves in the middle of our classroom and demonstrate how we approach this confusing thing we call the writing process. I am the best writer in my classroom. You are the best writer in your classroom. Our students don’t need the best writer in their classrooms to assign writing; they need the best writer in their classrooms to sit smack dab in the middle of those rooms and model the wrestling match we go through to produce worthwhile writing" (Gallagher 2011)

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The most important thing that we can do for our students is to demonstrate our own writing and reading habits in order to help them form their own (Urbanski 2015).

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Modeling is a kind of reframing: Strategies 1 & 2

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Modeling is a kind of reframing: Strategies 1 & 2

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We write with our students to give them a chance to observe a writer as he deals with real writing problems. By doing this, we offer our students a selection of skills to choose from, as they need them, while validating those problems as the difficulties that “real writers” have. The same goes for reading and thinking.

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Modeling changes the positional power dynamics.

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Modeling changes the positional power dynamics.

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The sharing of my messes, my writing under construction, had a salutary effect on classroom atmosphere. I came to look upon my students differently. From a judge ready to pronounce a sentence I metamorphosed into an advocate of student writers, helper and fellow crafter. (Romano 1987, quoted in Urbanski 2015)

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Urbanksi's Rules for Individual Writing Conferences (Paraphrased by Me)

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Urbanksi's Rules for Individual Writing Conferences (Paraphrased by Me)

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1. Ask the student what they need or want out of the conference.

2. Shut up and listen.

3. Ask the student what they like about their piece and where they're having trouble.

4. Shut up and listen.

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5. Ask "How do you think you could work on this?" or "Or what needs to happen next?"

6. Shut up and listen.

7. Repeat the student's thoughts to them.

8. Shut up and listen.

9. Go from there.

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Another opportunity for conferencing is a group conference... Students choose to come to the circle, and then the teacher works in a specific order (clockwise, counterclockwise, and so forth) with each student while the others listen and contribute to the conversation if they have something to say. I set up six chairs in a circle and let the students fill the chairs as they are ready. If all of the chairs don’t fill, that’s okay, but I never have more than six. The word fluid alludes to the idea that students can come and go as they please.

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Setting up Writer's Groups (Urbanski, my paraphrase again)

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Setting up Writer's Groups (Urbanski, my paraphrase again)

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1. Three is an ideal number of students.

2. Groups should meet regularly, at least once a week.

3. Students should choose what they bring to group.

4. Students should give written feedback on teacher-provided sheets, at least at the beginning of the year.

5. At least in the beginning of the year, groups should be silent. All communication is by writing. (This encourages focus.)

6. Students who don't participate or who get others off-task join the teacher in the revision circle.