Students spend hours and hours working beside each other in classrooms and lecture halls. Despite such constant proximity, these settings can be lonely places where each student forges ahead (or falls behind) without feeling connected to a supportive classroom community. A recent survey of nearly 85,000 undergraduate and graduate students across 135 universities in the United States revealed increased feelings of isolation, depression, and anxiety. As one of my former students wrote in the MIT student newspaper back in 2015:
“This is how I believe we fail at MIT: in the tumultuous schedule of each of our lives, we use the little time we have to celebrate with people during their successes, sometimes cry with them during their failures. But depression is subtle, and when we are too busy to be present for each other’s day-to-day, it goes unnoticed until it may be too late… Most of all, all of us—professors, administrators, and students alike—should work to be more present in our relationships, so that we can foster a truly safe and supportive community.”
I’m concerned with students’ academic success and wellbeing, because both are interdependent in their lives. As an educator, I’ve been experimenting with different ways to strengthen intellectual and social-emotional learning, primarily by supporting opportunities for peer learning both in and out of the classroom. For example, in my Communicating Science to the Public class, I lead guided peer review workshops, which offer students a platform to help each other by giving and receiving criticism, and learning from different perspectives. In the Communication Lab, through coaching sessions and workshops, our Comm Fellows model compassionate honesty, that is, they are explicit about their goal of wanting to support their peers through authentic feedback, careful listening, and mutual learning. As one grad student said about their coaching experience: “I think the empathy and connection of having someone very familiar with the problems that I’ve taken to the Comm Lab just makes the whole experience more empowering for me.”
Benevolent Beavers
In recent years, I’ve also attempted to find ways to promote compassionate communication through classroom assignments. For example, in my Communicating Science to the Public class, I ask each student to sign up for one week to serve as a “Benevolent Beaver” (the beaver is MIT’s mascot). At the start of each student’s assigned week, they send a message to the class email list offering support to their peers. This weekly schedule allows for help-offering messages to be sent and received in a constant flow throughout the term.
Prior to the assignment’s debut, I model compassionate communication by offering myself as a resource for students who might be struggling with an academic or personal issue. I also include a list of on-campus support services in the syllabus, and briefly discuss each resource in class. I also invite a staff member from Student Support Services and Student Mental Health & Counseling to visit the class to introduce themselves and answer questions from students.
The Benevolent Beaver assignment is simple and low stakes. Students are given total freedom over the content (words/images) of their email, and the assignment is graded simply as “complete” or “incomplete”. To encourage authentic communication, I explicitly state in the assignment text: “Although this is an assignment for a class, don’t worry about pleasing the teacher; this activity is about you and your classmates. Your authentic voice is important; don’t be concerned with ‘academic’ or ‘formal’ talk.”
The assignment also includes guidance on how to offer support to colleagues, which can be difficult for all of us: “Although you do not know the lived experiences of your classmates, you are all going through a shared experience together at MIT, and there is strength in solidarity. Keep in mind that your classmates may be hesitant about reaching out to someone they don’t know very well. This discomfort may also serve as a point of connection, as you might feel anxious about sending an email offering support to others, particularly to classmates you don’t know very well.”
I also offer guidance about how students might respond to someone who replies to their email seeking help: “Whether they are experiencing academic or emotional struggles, you will likely not be able to solve their challenges, but you can listen, brainstorm together, and/or suggest resources on campus. If no one responds to your email, that’s okay too! They’ll know that you’re available, and hopefully your message will help them feel supported.”
Anecdotally, the Benevolent Beaver assignment seems to be a success. The emails students craft are supportive, heartwarming, and creative. Some share specific advice they’ve received from friends, family, and mentors; others share examples of how they de-stress and connect with others outside of classes; many express empathy about the demanding academic environment at MIT; and some attempt to lift the spirits of their classmates by including funny memes and images of pets. Across this variety of content, every email explicitly extends an offer to support their peers. In our end-of-term discussions about the overall class experience, students consistently cite the Benevolent Beaver assignment as a highlight of the class.
Care Bears
These positive anecdotal experiences motivated me to gather evidence-based data, especially since compassionate communication among students has not been documented or well-understood in the literature. With an interest in STEM education, I designed a compassion-based assignment that could be integrated easily into an existing engineering course. Using a mixed methods approach—conducting surveys, interviews, and collecting students’ compassionate messages—I set out to learn how, if at all, sending and receiving supportive messages impacts students’ wellbeing and coursework.
The new assignment was called the “Care Bear Connection”, and that name was chosen to fit the culture of the specific engineering class in which students design and build prototypes of original toys. The class was team-based, so each student signed up for one week to serve as their team’s “Care Bear”, during which they sent a message offering support to their teammates via Slack. Prior to the intervention, I had observed that students communicated with their teammates in Slack when discussing technical content outside of class, so rather than create a separate format for their compassionate messages, such as email, using Slack situated the compassionate messages right alongside their technical communications. Here is a sampling of the messages sent throughout the term (with identifiers redacted):
I gathered data from students who had participated in the assignment (i.e., students in the intervention class) and from a group of students in a comparison class. The way students embraced this assignment exceeded my expectations, particularly in this engineering context, and the results were striking. Compared to the comparison class, students in the intervention class reported a significant increase in social connectedness, a reduction in perceived stigma (i.e., a decrease in the perception that their peers stigmatize those with mental health struggles), greater compassion toward and from their classmates, and more effective team communication and collaboration during technical decision-making meetings. These findings were recently published in the Journal of Peer Learning.
Compassionate Communication is a Skill
Offering to help those we do not know well is not an easy thing to do, particularly in a formal classroom or workplace setting. Rather than being an innate ability, I believe compassionate communication can be learned, practiced, and developed. In my interviews with students who had served as their team’s Care Bear, many shared that they would not have even attempted this type of compassionate communication with their peers had they not been required to do so by their instructors, and moreover, they were grateful that the assignment was mandatory. That was a big surprise!
These experiences show the power of teachers and peers to not only impart technical knowledge to each other, but to help each other develop social-emotional skills and grow as communicators. Particularly in today’s academic landscape of increased stress and shrinking resources, a simple compassion-based intervention could be one tool among other resources to help improve wellbeing and learning within the curriculum.