Just working on a masters thesis, designing a measure to determine teacher perceptions of self efficacy in identifying and providing support for anxious and depressed students. Lack of pre-service training has been raised as a barrier issue.
Just taking a quick poll. Nothing official.
Hi Sherry,
No, I have not received any specific training in this respect. Maybe we all shoud have - 7-15 % of the students do struggle with mental health problems, as shown in a recent study here in Norway. A measure of teachers' self-efficacy in identifying and helping students at risk seems to be appropriate. Best of luck in your efforts towards this end.
Tore
I did not receive any training in self-efficacy or depressive disorder. However, I did receive training in anxiety in high school students.
None. Sounds like it could be an important "in-service" training for persons already teaching.
No, I did not and I think it should be part of becoming a professor.
No, I've never receive any pre-service training in identifying students at risk for anxiety and depressive disorders. At our university we have a psychological cabinet available to the entire university community. As our students are adults, it's hard to act without their consent when you detect any problem.
At most teacher education programs, this specific area is not usually covered. It might be a growing topic and need at least to be addressed. Most traditional schools of education are on large college campusues with a center for psycological counseling. I agree with some of the comments that maybe this should be a topic of conversation in the preparation of teachers, particulary the teaching faculty at the college.
Usually the only requirement to be a college faculty is the advanced degree and not a lengthy preparation program for teaching.
No, I haven´t received any specific training in identifying students at risk for anxiety and depressive disorders.
No, I did not receive any specific training to identify students at risk for anxiety and depressive disorders. My degree is in nursing education. It does seem that this could be beneficial to the learners, the faculty, and the community as a whole to be able to recognize and then to recommend use of the resources at the college.
No, I have not received any training in identifying students at risk.
No, I did not receive any education to identify students at risks. But now I am a faculty member and I am trying to teach what disasters and some risks in a society. Also disaster preparedness subjects in the department of social studies education (it is a teacher training program in the faculty).
No, I did not receive any training and we do not provide any training for our preservice teachers. I am doing a similar study with bullying.
No never through formal training. Being a professional educator means I am able to identify this lack of training and use my autodidactic skills to enhance my knowledge and skills and thus also my attitude towards this specific role. I remember not wanting to be a healthcare proffessional as an educator, Although this view has shifted since I now understand I'm a better educator if I am able to adapt to students with psychiatric problems as you described.
Dear Sherry
Being a teacher and experienced person , no formal training can help to judge the anxiety and depression but learning behavior and inquiring about circumstances that leads to anxiety and the upbringing of student can help which comes by way of experience.
No. I did not get any training. I know this now because the staff at the disabilities and testing services took time to train us. I have gotten more training since I teach the general chemistry course and they recommend that students with these issue take my course. My lecture style seems to work well with these students. I also have anxiety and a learning disability so students like to deal with me as I can understand the difficulty of learning.
We recently volunteered for a program Mental Health First Aid which in part covers symptoms but also how to communicate with students and fellow staff with mental health conditions.
Hi Sherry, no training and very little offered as professional development while teaching. Great area to research.
Not in my Education studies or when I worked for a secondary school.
I suppose I am a teacher in the essential sense of the word. I teach teachers and many psot graduate students who are not immuned to the condition you refer to. In my experience, both while training as a teacher and indeed, in the teaching of teachers that I do, awareness raising seems to be all we do. Yes, these conditions are mentioned, but the expertise to develop the ability to manage them is never really available. So, it is usually a cursory and superficial treatment of the relevant issues. You might want to look at my paper, Ade-Ojo, Gordon O. (2012) Practitioners' perceptions of dyslexia and approaches towards teaching learners with dyslexia in adult literacy classes. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 31 (5). pp. 623-641. ISSN 0260-1370 (Print), 1464-519X (Online) (doi:10.1080/02601370.2012.700646) on the views expressed by trainee teachers etc.
No formal training to identify depression but the secondary school where I was a teacher had a school councilor to whom learners who experienced difficulties of some form could be referred and cases of depression were identified.
No, I didn´t have any formal pre or in service teacher training to deal with that. I was a school teacher for three years and this issue was never addressed in the institution. I have been a college teacher for the last 10 years and in fact a couple of years ago one of our students commited suicide. I then enquired the institution whether this whole subject of suicide and factors that lead to it (deep depression and so on) shouldn´t get some institutional attention and their answer was that we should go on with life as usual, that dealing with these things was not our responsibility.
No formal training over many years (graduate school thru career); merely by experience through various encounters and accommodations programs. Only recently has training and similar awareness been raised through professional societies and employers.
Unfortunately no. In retrospect as a High school student in Brisbane Australia the mid 70's I think that I was one of those student types and remember clealy up to this day, the guilt of not coping and being like all the others. I think that in many ways becoming a teacher was theraputic in that I wanted to correct the ways teachers saw their students. Working in the conventional Secondary Education system in Israel and comparing it to my own experiences aside reading about similar systems in the western 'germanic' model, made me realse that most conventional education systems don't leave much time and energy for teachers to be feeling of their students' emotional position. Most of my initial knowledge and ability in this field is auto- didactic from reading Rogers, Korczak, Martin Buber, A S Niel, and others, as well as enrolling in a long term group facilitation course, volunteering in a Rape Crisis centre for men and youth. as well as learning Mediation. My work style has changed dramatically bringing me 14 years ago to leave the conventional system in favour of the democratic educational form, (similar to Summer Hill). I feel that most teachers are afraid to "touch" their students due to their not being trained. I am not a trained professinal counsellor and pass on the relevant information to professinals with student consent and agreement. There is real need for some type of proffessinal training, especially with the drastic change of the role of the teacher in schools such as Ken Robinson writes about in his poblications.
- No. undergrad teacher training did not offer any course on how to detect or deal with this. Students training to be teachers only did basic psychology and from there the teacher is expected to connect the dots. As our system argued, getting that first degree was actually getting the power to read. with that the teacher is supposed to find whatever knowledge is out there to help their work. That said though, some schools had a school counselor who when a teacher notices a student in need of such services then the teacher sends them to the counselor. These are in short supply and not all schools have one. The social ethics teachers are also supposed to double up and offer counseling services.
In the course of teaching qualifications I did exercise future teachers with testing to identify such problems in the students.
Regardless of school level (i.e. higher education versus pre-college), there is much more in the way of training to recognize/identify students at risk, predisposed, or in a state of psychological distress. Perhaps a follow-up question to ask is whether that training also includes any manner of intervention advice other than helping them to seek professional help.
Over the past two decades in higher education my colleagues and I have seen a variety of issues that are not readily resolved; other than suggesting or recommending to students to visit with counseling services on campus. What do you do if you see a student is clearly a 'cutter'? What happens when a student becomes withdrawn in a class to the extent that they cannot function in a group-setting?
What is the expectation or role of a faculty member?
Dear Sherry,
To identify debilitatively-anxious students (as opposed to their facilitatively-anxious counterparts) one has, of necessity to distinguish between facilitative and debilitative anxieties first. In fact part of the conflicting literature on anxiety can be disambiguated provided researchers, counsellors, and teachers abandon the absolutistic views on anxiety in favor of a bipolar relativistic notion whose conceptualization is further detailed in the attached which I hope you find useful.
Sincerely,
M. J.
PS: I was unable to upload the relevant research due to low internet speed here. You can google search using the key words Mohammad Jahangiri & Facilitative Anxiety to download the relevant research and view the phenomenon from another angle. (I have been actively involved in the creation of facilitative anxiety among students since 1963.
Hi Sherry
Have you conducted research in this area? I'm interested in pursuing this topic for my doctoral thesis in Australia.
Could you offer me any advice please :)
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