Developing Mental Toughness in Young People by Strycharczyk Doug;Clough Peter;

Author:Strycharczyk, Doug;Clough, Peter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Young people—mental toughness and raising aspirations

Toby Pearson, a head of year and professional mentor with both academic and pastoral responsibilities at St. George’s Catholic School in West London, became particularly interested in the field of mental toughness when he changed careers from business into the teaching profession, finding that interactions within the school environment differed greatly from those he had experienced previously. Teaching Leaders gave him the opportunity of trialling MTQ48 as an assignment for an MA in educational leadership with Warwick University.

Given the pressure and time constraints of the school day, he felt the need to sharpen his communication skills in the “difficult conversations” he found he needed to have with colleagues and students, both underperforming in a complex urban school with a difficult past. Under pressure to improve, staff at the school were having to work hard at setting higher expectations and stricter behaviour boundaries and tackling the low self-esteem of most pupils. Toby wanted to build the capacity of his team of teachers in more specifically supporting pupil needs.

Tracking and monitoring pupil progress using performance data is commonplace in today’s schools. Performance in each subject is measured by pupils’ ability to meet targets and improve grades against a set number of National Curriculum sub-levels per term. As long as pupils hit their targets, teachers are satisfied and assumptions are made about an individual’s ability to cope. However, few identify and track pupils’ ability to withstand stress and overcome obstacles—and some don’t even recognise it at all. Even fewer put in place interventions to counteract stress and develop mental toughness.

Toby decided to use Dr Peter Clough’s attitude test with a group of sixty year nine pupils who had been identified as eligible for fast-tracking to early GCSE entry (two years prior to the usual entry age). Toby thought that this would be a suitable test group to help him and other staff gain a better understanding of how students might cope with the added pressure, providing information about their relative performance in addition to assessment grade data. Most schools collect only the latter.

His decision stemmed from an interest in psychology and learning theory and a strong belief that young people can be helped to reach their potential through developing a better understanding of their own behaviour, self-motivation and responses to all aspects of their whole experience of schooling. His focus was on how pupils handle perceived stress and what effect this had on their academic performance, an approach not commonly used in a systematic way in schools at present. Most schools will recognise the stress experienced by pupils at examination time, particularly in schools most in need of improvement and will put in place support, such as extra revision classes and one-to-one tutorials. But few have systematic strategies to help individual pupils cope with the pressure and stress associated with examinations—possibly because the teachers themselves are under stress.

The very choice of this target group is symptomatic of first the enormous pressure on schools today to fast-track students in

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