Creating High-Stress Academic Environments

18 March 2022

Creating high stress situations may come naturally to some of us. For others it may seem like it is a form of hazing, and for the rest of us it may present itself as a challenge as we may not have ever been in an extremely high-stress situation. Fret not, I am going to walk you through a demonic world of creating high-stress, academic environments for your students in order to ensure knowledge transfer has occurred and is accessible even in the most extreme situations.

First, the why. It is important, for those professions that need or desire it, to ensure their professionals are capable of making the appropriate decision at the appropriate time and place of their choosing no matter the situation. What do you mean John? I am talking about life-or-death situations where you have fractions of a second to choose whether or not to pull the trigger, those moments where it seems like death may be the only option but there is “always another way”, and those situations where you have to choose the lesser of two evils (the needs of the many versus the few). Wow, that seems kind of crazy right? Can we actually teach people how to react in those situations before they even encounter them? My answer is yes. I plan to follow this informal post up with more professional, educationally cited post, so you can understand the academia behind my solutions to show that I am not just a demonic person, but I have trained critical thinking in life-or-death situations for quite a while.

The first step with all of this is always to consider what your student has already been taught. The must here, is that you have ensured that the basic knowledge set to complete the task has been transferred. Man, I keep using this transfer word, right? Well that all goes back to problem-based learning (PBL) in that, you teach the basics and parts of the tasks to be performed before the complete scenario can be acted out or performed by the student. An example of this would be that the teacher desires someone to react appropriately to a hostile or non-hostile target and shoot the correct one at the right time. In an effort to keep it simple I will caveat that there are A TON of sub-tasks with that one scenario but I’m only going to show you a few… The teacher in that scenario needs to ensure that the student understands how to shoot the weapon, how to distinguish between a hostile and non-hostile target, and probably what a back drop needs to look like when the shot is taken. Imagine that those areas were our baseline, part task training sessions that we have ran over and over again until the student has displayed a competency level to which we, the teachers, are comfortable with “stepping up the game” or “turning up the heat” to make sure the student has the basics mastered. That sounds subjective, but it can be put into an objective sense of performance with specific “mastered metrics” applied at critical points in the students training plan. (guess we will talk about that in another post)

Once your student has performed the basics to a “mastery-level” we can start to play with their emotions a little bit. So, the basis of high-stress situations that we need to keep in the back of our minds as teachers is that these are not malicious scenarios by any means. The intent here is that we are ensuring basic tasks can be accomplished under the most extreme circumstances in training. In training, failure IS an option. In real-life, failure IS NOT an option for these scenarios. When our students encounter these scenarios in real-life we want to make sure they have had a chance to see it in the worst circumstances possible before that point. So, going back to PBL and our debrief post as well, there is only an intent to make your student better than they were when they showed up and have something they can go and immediately apply outside of the classroom.

How do you build stress for your students? Well, I have three different ways: physical, mental, and combination. Physical is literally physically stressing your student. Mental involves a systematic approach to overload the student’s mental capacity. Combination is exactly what it sounds like, a combination of both mental and physical stress.

Physical stress is probably the easiest stress to cause a student to have to work through. This process would involve you placing your student under physical stress before having to perform the activity or tasks that you need them to accomplish under stress. The physical portion doesn’t even have to be part of the scenario honestly. Have you ever tried to have someone complete a math test after making them do sprints? Try it… the results are amazing. How about just asking someone a simple question after they just got done running a mile for time? The results, again, are amazing and maybe even surprising to some of you. Physical stress basically takes the students mind off of the “what’s next” and you get to see what the raw transfer of knowledge truly is for your student. When they are physically stressed they are usually incapable of fine motor skills and go back to macro motor skills when handling objects. (think about trying to take a tiny little nut and screwing it onto a bolt while you are physically fatigued) In the same regard however, the student also seems to go back to super simple brain bytes and if it isn’t in their mid-term memory locker (not a real place, but I can talk about this in another post on transfer) then they go to whatever is first. THAT RIGHT THERE IS WHAT WE ARE TRYING TO TRAIN! How do we get the correct process in the memory back as the “go to” for the student? Well you keep doing it over and over again until it is there, honestly, in the most basic sense, that is all we are trying to do. We just do it with finesse and purpose.

Mental stress is a little more complicated but also is not hard to incorporate. The best way to think about this for me, is a retail cashier or fast food worker at the cashiers desk during a rush. The task, in all reality is not that hard. Take the customers order, input it into the system, give them the total, take the cash or card, give them their change and receipt, move on to the next customer. Now, take this simple task of taking one customer’s order and give them twenty customers. If they are able to handle twenty customers, give them a time frame to complete it. Keep shrinking the time frame on them. See where I am going? The task can be simple. It just needs to have constraints on it that make it more mentally taxing. Can you see how this gets a little diabolical? Well imagine you took the task that you needed them to perform but you gave them an off the wall trivia question in the middle of it? Would that throw them off? I saw a recent YouTube video for some pilot training where the instructor made the student complete three different, totally irrelevant, math problems while also completing a pre-climb checklist. The simple task was fly the plane to the prescribed altitude BUT I also need you to do all of these other things. The intent was to show the student how quickly you can get task saturated and make you go back to your basics of aviate, navigate, communicate. It was amazing to see. The theme supports this holistically though; give your student mental stressors.

Combination is easy now that you know what we mean by physical and mental stressors. Take a combination of any number of physical and mental stressors and give them to your student during the task portion of their scenario.

Alright, that is a lot of background, what about the execution John? Apologies, sometimes there is so much I want to put into these posts that I get lost in my own thoughts…

Executing this is actually fairly simple. I have a few different methods for execution: deliberate, consequential, and spontaneous.

Deliberate execution means that I am going to deliberately inflict mental and/or physical stressors on my student in the scenario. Those deliberate stressors can be time or trigger based on the scenario itself. An example is that I am going to have the student perform a “patrol” prior to entering the scenario. That patrol would be on foot and I would give them a time limit we need to be there by to force the physical stress portion. Let’s just use an example of I need the student to maneuver 800 meters in 5 minutes in order to get to a point where they can observe the area or reach the scenario start point. During that patrol maybe I give them several cognitive (mental) problems to also deal with. That can be in the form of them having to answer radio calls during the movement or provide position location information to a headquarters agency or even tell me where other people are in the patrol so we can keep some situational awareness during our movement on where other people are at. All of that would be in-scenario for the student and seem like regular tasks to the student. Meanwhile, the student has no idea that all I am doing as the teacher is setting them up for a chance to fail. What do I mean by that? I am literally trying to stress my student so they encounter a point of failure. What they do at that point determines what we will probably talk about in the debrief. Hopefully that makes sense. Basically, deliberately plan the stressors into the scenario.

Consequential execution is something I invented while I was stationed at Nellis AFB and wasn’t taught in academia at all. But it is exactly what you think it is, every decision has consequences. Make the right one, it is probably a good consequence. Make a bad one, it probably isn’t a good consequence and will result in a physical, mental, or combination stressor being added to your plate as a student. Since I have been giving examples so far, here is another. Imagine that you needed to remain hidden from an enemy force and strict light discipline had to be maintained for your position. If the student chose to pull out anything other than a covert light source during that period of time and use it, there would be a consequence. An example of a physical one would be that our position was compromised and we had to maneuver to a new position really quickly. An example of a mental one would be that a new target presented itself that was hasty and had to be struck before we could do anything else. An example of a combination stressor would be that we had to do both of those things at the same time. Again, we are thinking in very diabolical terms here. But the intent here is that we teach “decisions have consequences” but decisions still need to be made.

Spontaneous execution is something I try to personally avoid. But every now and then a student is so awesome that you need to have them experience additional stressors so you make something up on the fly. The reason I avoid this execution method is that you probably haven’t done the appropriate learner assessment on your student to ensure you are challenging them enough in the scenario if we have ended up in this situation. Yeah, that is a hit on the teachers themselves. This is probably a good time to remind each of you reading that PBL will absolutely highlight your lazy instructors or your lazy habits. Your students will suffer and the course will suffer if this is happening… just a side thought. Now back to this execution method. Let’s say that you aren’t actually a lazy instructor and you had some deliberate stressors, along with some consequential stressors but your student was still doing awesome. Well, if your student is doing awesome, you have two options… continue to let them be awesome, or provide them with an opportunity to learn even more. If you chose the latter, we can probably still be friends and you can continue reading this post. If you chose the former, thank you for reading up to this point but we are going to get weird now…

At this point in a scenario your student has already “passed the scenario” but you want to give them something to experience that may be totally off the wall. The important piece is that you remain in scenario and it isn’t too far outside of the realm of possibility for them to perform. What I am saying is that you want to present a problem that will give them a visceral memory for years to come. No, I am not asking you to perform an easy task at this point, this is difficult, especially if you do not have a ton of experience “in the field” within your profession (a real military problem). An example would be that your student has ran the entire time, scaled the mountain, is still talking to aircraft clearly, has maintained their light discipline the entire time, and are basically just crushing your scenario. I always had a “hip-pocket” problem set for my students and hopefully no future students are reading now as I let them in on this little secret. I would insert for my students a problem with a callsign (literally a nickname on the radio that identifies a certain person on the other end) that they had never heard before and wasn’t even briefed. I would have them come up on the radio net (this would be me playing it or I would have a role-player play it) and tell the student some information in the middle of something else that they were doing. That would sound something like; “Hey student this is <Insert Callsign> and I am taking some pretty serious fire over here at <insert location>. I need help since we are about to be overrun.” This scenario would play out for an already stressed student in a ton of different ways. But we would ALWAYS have something to talk about afterwards.

For your specific profession that might look a little different and that is okay. Imagine that for the law enforcement profession it becomes an officer down scenario, that is close by while they are already in a situation that they have somewhat handled but nobody else can respond. We can use it for a medical professional where they have been presented with tons of problems during surgery but then all of a sudden, a new problem pops up with something that isn’t even in the area of the body that they are currently operating on. I don’t have the answer for every single profession but the best way to think about this is that you have a hip-pocket card to play when your student is just doing really well.

Alright, so here is the bottom-line for you to walk away with. Building high stress scenarios for your student isn’t easy. However, the benefit gained is you, as a teacher, can ensure that knowledge transfer has occurred under the most dire of circumstances and that your student’s transfer becomes their natural reaction. This is accomplished by making sure your student knows the basics first and has mastered the sub-tasks required to complete the overall task. Then, when you are building the scenario, you need to decide whether your student needs physical stressors, mental stressors or a combination of both stressors. As you design the scenario you also must ensure that you have a plan of execution for those stressors via deliberate, consequential, or spontaneous means. Those are the baselines for high-stress scenario design. Hopefully this is somewhat educational for you. Next week, or at the end of this weekend I am going to support each of these concepts with some research backing. Stay tuned. Keep teaching.