As Ontario enters another state of emergency and a new stay-at-home order, many students and instructors experience heightened stress and anxiety in adapting to this new normal. How do we navigate time and care for our minds from day-to-day?
Time Off
In last week’s musings, I offered strategies for designing courses with time in mind—using time as a tool to build community, flexibility, and agency. Another way to incorporate time into the design is building “time off” into the course schedule (Palloff and Pratt, 2003).
Time off comes in many forms. One form of time off is advising students to wait twenty-four hours before responding to discussion board posts or requesting a re-grade. The twenty-four-hour timeframe allows students to reflect, reorganize, and recharge. We all work at different paces within very different schedules. Scheduling time off between reading and writing discussion threads enables learners to participate at their own pace. I encourage learners to download the course materials to distribute their study time throughout the week and avoid overload. Cramming a week’s worth of study into one day is a surface approach to learning—too much material, too little time.
Time off can come in the form of defining work/study vs. personal time. I welcome emails at any time, but my students know that I will not respond on the weekend (unless there is an emergency). Similarly, I do not expect my students to respond to my messages during non-working hours. I want my learners to take time away from their computers, and I try to model good time management by stepping away from the course on weekends. I schedule course communications during working hours, and I remind students to submit assessment enquiries as early as possible. My email policy states, “I am committed to responding to your emails within 48 hours; however, I cannot reply to assessment queries 24 hours before the assessment deadline.” Do I really take 48 hours to respond to emails? No, but I do want to set realistic expectations, and as Nate Kreuter notes, “No student will ever fault an instructor for answering a message sooner than promised” (2012). I am very fortunate that my students visit me regularly during student hours, and course email volume, for the most part, has been manageable.
One time-off strategy that I would like to incorporate in my future practice is building in “time-off” weeks. These are weeks with no new content, and learners can use the time to catch up and review course materials or complete assignments. For example, the instructor can introduce new content for three weeks and schedule a “time-off” week in the fourth. This pattern of introducing new material with scheduled time off allows students to pause, absorb, and engage with the learning experience.
Mind TIPP
Building “time off” into the course schedule allows our learners to engage more fully with their studies and provides us with the opportunity to care for our minds. The overarching theme in every student-hour meeting since 2020 is anxiety. Students are anxious, teaching assistants are anxious, course instructors are anxious, I am anxious. I recently attended a workshop* about managing anxiety, and I found the TIPP approach for changing and hacking our biology effective and easy to integrate into my daily practice.
Anxiety is our body’s natural response to perceived stress and threat. It’s a feeling of fear or dread about “what’s going to come next?” Stress is not necessarily a bad thing. Optimal stress levels propel us to get things done; however, excessive stress for prolonged periods causes exhaustion and anxiety, leading to eventual burnout. When our body perceives stress and threat, we go into an automatic mode with only four responses: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. These four automatic responses are bodily responses, which means we have the opportunity to change our body, or hack our biology, so that we can move from excessive stress levels to a more optimal level.
The TIPP approach offers four methods for hacking our biology through temperature, intense exercise, paced breathing, and progressive muscle relaxation. We can use cold temperature, such as an ice cube or a glass of cold water, to wake ourselves up and reset our system. The cold temperature snaps us out of the zone of perceived threat momentarily. Similarly, doing (intense) exercises, such as jumping jacks or walking up and down the stairs, moves our body from the threat state to a calmer state. Alternatively, we can try paced breathing (boxed breathing) to calm down our body from the perceived threat state. Boxed breathing is when you breathe in for 4, hold for 4, breathe out for 4, hold for 4, and repeat. This breathing exercise is an excellent activity to try with the whole class. Finally, tensing our body and relaxing our body over and over (progressive muscle relaxation), such as squeezing and relaxing our fists, sends the message to our mind that we are back in control. I hope this “TIPP” will help you in your work every day!
* The workshop was led by Vivian Zhang, a clinical therapist and registered social worker, and the TIPP approach is adapted from Marsha M. Linehan’s Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Manual.
Works Cited
Dialectical Behavior Therapy. (2021). T10: TIPP. https://dialecticalbehaviortherapy.com/distress-tolerance/tipp/#
Kreuter, N. (2012). E-Mail Boundaries. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2012/02/06/essay-obligations-professors-e-mail
Palloff, R. M., and Pratt, K. (2003). The Virtual Student: A Profile and Guide to Working with Online Learners. Jossey-Bass.