Transcript: Boredom: Data-informed Practical Implications for Educators

Lan Nguyen:

Welcome everyone. And on behalf of the CCSC, I’d like to welcome you to today’s webinar, Boredom: Data-informed Practical Implications for Educators. My name is Lan Nguyen and I will be your moderator for today’s session. What our time is looking like for today is that we’re going to start with school boredom, grounding and context. We’ll then move on to a live demonstration of the 360 School Boredom website, share some upcoming opportunities, and close our time together.

With that, we wanted to actually do a Zoom poll, and in this Zoom poll we want you to think about the experiences that you think that students most frequently have in their classrooms on a typical day. We’re going to go ahead and launch that Zoom poll and give you a few minutes or a minute to select your top two choices for emotions that students most experience. All right. It looks like 39% say frustration, 80% answered boredom as one of their top two. And then tiredness, followed by worried, contentment, disappointment, and the others. This is just in anticipation, to think about what those emotions are that students experience. And we’ll learn more throughout today’s webinar. And with that, I’m going to go ahead and introduce Tom Hanson to take us through the next portion of the webinar.

Tom Hanson:

Thank you so much, Lan. Hello. Welcome and thank you all for participating. I’m Tom Hanson and I direct the CalSCHLS Project on the WestEd side. I’m going to provide just a tidbit of information about the CalSCHLS survey system and then pass this along to Mike Furlong. Mike will introduce us to some research on school boredom and describe how two new CHKS school boredom questions can be used by school staff to differentiate boredom experiences among students so as to better understand and address students’ social emotional health and academic needs. So, what is the CalSCHLS? I’m just providing a little context here. We did a webinar on this, it feels like two weeks ago, but maybe it was last week. CalSCHLS is an acronym which stands for the California School Climate Health and Learning Surveys. It is the California Department of Education’s whole child and school climate measurement system.

The CalSCHLS system is comprised of a suite of surveys for different stakeholders. There’s a student survey, which is the California Healthy Kids Survey, or the CHKS; a staff survey, which is the California School Staff Survey, or CSSS; and then there’s a parent survey, the California School Parent Survey. All the surveys are modular in structure. Each stakeholder survey has a Core Module that’s administered to all participants so that a standard set of questions is available for all participants across the state. In addition to the Core Module, there are topic-specific optional supplementary modules. These supplementary modules assess other areas in more depth, like student social-emotional health, behavioral health, trauma.

Today, with regards to the data, we are just going to be focusing on the CHKS Core Module administered to secondary students. Okay, so what is new on the CHKS Core? What’s new is an increased emphasis on mental and behavioral health and wellness. This table shows the mental health and wellness items included on the Core by survey year. You can see that the measures have been recently added in social and emotional distress, optimism, and life satisfaction. The school boredom indicators that Mike will be talking about next is part of this new emphasis on student wellness. Combined, these two items can be used to differentiate students in terms of their boredom experiences and to better understand and address student needs.

Okay. I’m going to introduce Mike Furlong now. Mike is a distinguished professor, a distinguished professor — get that — of school psychology at UC Santa Barbara. He’s got too many accolades and accomplishments to list. He is renowned in the field of positive psychology. Most important, he somehow manages to be just a terrific, kind person to work with and who never loses his focus on work, aiming to improve student wellness in schools. He’s been working with CDE (California Department of Education) and WestEd on the CHKS for many, many years. He developed the CHKS Social-Emotional Health module. We can go on and on. So Mike, please take it away.

Michael Furlong:

Thank you, Tom, for those kind words. And it’s been a pleasure to work with WestEd and the CDE trying to engage in the activity, which we all are, which is trying to improve the lives of our young people. As a little introduction, Tom laid out the items that have been added to the Healthy Kids Survey there, placing more of an emphasis on children’s mental health and well-being. I’m going to do a little bit of an introduction here just to give you an idea — what you’re looking at on the screen now is a resource that is available to you. This isn’t a traditional slide deck but it’s like a mini course that we hope provides you a resource that you can follow up and investigate more deeply and that you’ll share with your colleagues. As an introduction, this is what we hope to accomplish, at least in my section today. It’s to present those two school boredom mindset items that have been added to the Healthy Kids Survey.

These two items relate to students’ overall school experiences. One survey item assesses opinions about school boredom and the second item considers how much students value their learning experiences. And because students’ boredom expressions have different origins, we offer a way for school personnel to differentiate among subtypes. A specific subtype of interest and that we’ll focus on today are those students who report that school is boring and at the same time they say they devalue their schooling experience. In a way, they might think it’s a waste of their time.

So, do these students express other suboptimal CHKS social-emotional and academic engagement indicators? We’ll take a look at that. And stated another way, when students report that they are bored with and devalue school, are they more likely to say that generally they are bored and disengaged with life? So, could we use this as an indicator of something more than just experiencing school boredom?

So, these two items offer another context to listen to students, try to understand their schooling experience, and provide responsive targeted support. That’s what the whole idea behind adding these two items to the Healthy Kids Survey involved. Of course adding new items, however, must respect staff and student time and effort, so they must be concise — which we hope they are, as there’s just two items — and they have to provide insights and additional information about how students are experiencing school. To further explore that and the value of these two items, what we’re going to share also are the utility of these two new items. And we will review responses from about 500,000 California secondary school students and we will show how students’ item responses are associated with those other CHKS social-emotional well-being indicators that you’re already tracking in your schools. The resource we have here is set up to you as a self-study resource. You can follow up, and this way you can also share it, hopefully, with your colleagues.

Okay, and then let’s go right to this. And here is the resource. This is a way of summarizing, what we want to think about today, is when students say they’re bored at school, is it another way of them expressing and just saying more generally they might, not always but might, be bored with life? And if we listen and attend to that, can it help us offer another way or avenue of communicating with them about their life experiences? So, the first thing you think about, just generally real quickly, what is school boredom? And if you think about it, school boredom has multiple components, the meaning and effects of school boredom vary from student to student, and some factors associated with students’ boredom experience at school are listed here.

So, it has two sides of boredom. It’s an unpleasant experience, but at the same time, it could also inspire novel behavior seeking. There’s some research that actually says boredom could be an indicator that you need to do something different to be engaged. It could occur with specific subject matter, but one of our interests here is could it also be more pervasive? And it becomes not just in a particular class or with a particular teacher or subject matter, but it might be reflective of more generally their dissatisfaction or disengagement with school. It can also reflect limited intrinsic motivation, but it can also stem from a mismatch perhaps between the student’s abilities and their task command. So, when a student just says they were bored, it could have multiple origins as we were saying.

There’s research, as your poll identified — although we gave it away if the topic of the discussion is boredom, probably we bias the results of your poll at the beginning — but the research has been pretty clear for many years that the emotion that students report experiencing most often in school is boredom and tiredness. Those are the two things that they experience. And there’s a lot of research that has found that over the years.

What are the effects of school boredom? Is it positive or negative? Generally, the results research suggests that there are negative consequences associated with students having frequent boredom — depression, anxiety could be involved with that. We could think of it as the opposite of engagement and with the importance of engagement with students and connectedness to school as being protective and resilience-building factors for students. Of course, it can be related to other things: low attendance, diminished academic performance, and even physical health problems.

A way of thinking about this is boredom offers us a canary-in-the-coal-mine emotion. So, we all have emotions, boredom and tiredness are some of them. When we hear students talk about being bored at school, sometimes we might say, “Well, of course they’re bored at school,” as if it’s not maybe an indicator of something else. All emotion experiences are important to consider, including boredom. Is the boredom reflective of their core interests in positive education suggests that we should pay attention to students’ boredom because it’s not optimal development. Or, humanitarian interests might be evoked because if students are engaged in any activity and they’re not feeling fully engaged and benefiting from it, we would want them to improve.

Embracing boredom as a critical indicator of school climate is another aspect of that. So, there’s multiple ways to think about boredom. And again, as expression might offer us an easier or an alternative way to communicate with students because students might be more likely, or more as a question: Are students more likely or more easily to say to someone else at school, “I’m bored” than they are to reach out and say “I might be depressed” or “I’m highly anxious?” It provides another window to connect with students.

So, what does it mean when a student says they’re bored at school? One of the ways that they often do this in research is they’ll have what they call experience sample monitoring. And later, when we get to our resources, we’ll have some links where there’s some resources you can use if you want to work with a student in this particular way. So, it says here, “Ping, Ping. . . how do you feel?” And this is how some of the research has worked and you’ll see them now. They’ll be an app that actually pings the student periodically, and it has a list of emotions, and it asks them how they’re experiencing at that time. So, in the moment, how are you experiencing that, the emotion?

This has been going on for many years. It used to be difficult because they would have students with a pager or the pager would go off in the middle of the class, everyone would know about it, and they’d have to take out a piece of paper and record. Now, of course, people could just take out their iPhone. You could even do it if students have tablets at school to help them monitor how their experience has been. So, they prompt students randomly during a period and in any moment they say, “Hey, how are you feeling? Angry, sad, excited, tired, bored.” Just as you did. Imagine doing what you did, but maybe you did it like three times randomly in a class. And you did that for a whole school day at random times to try to get a sense of how a student was experiencing school moment-to-moment, mobile devices and so on?

So, here’s an example of that. If you think of four students in a class and they’re sitting in their second period social studies class. And at 9:10, 9:22, and 9:45, maybe they have their earbuds in, and they get pinged and they can get to their phone and they could ask, they could do just what you did at the introduction. And like Ari picked bored, pride, and alert. Another student, Baylor, picked bored, anxious, and tired. You could see they all picked bored at 9:10. At 9:22, three picked bored. At 9:45, two picked bored. The question is, in any moment, of course any of us could be bored at any particular moment. This isn’t at any moment are you bored? But can we see if there’s some underlying patterns that when you look at those profiles, they suggest the student has more than just an in-the-moment experience of boredom.

The students can go to another period, you follow those same students, and they get pinged three more times. I won’t go into all these, but you can see each of these examples here have a wider description. When you follow up and you want to read this, you can read these descriptions to see what these students are like. In this presentation, we’re concentrating a little bit more on Ari perhaps, or Dylan particularly. Because you see Dylan was bored, bored, bored, bored, and angry, suggesting that this was something that was more pervasive. It wasn’t about just an in-the-moment experience. It just wasn’t that they didn’t like social studies, or just wasn’t maybe they had some issues with their teacher in social studies, or a particular topic in social studies, but it was something that was broader. And I think we’ll get to this and we’ll show you a profile of students who look like someone like Dylan and ask ourselves, “Well, is Dylan also telling us that other aspects that of their life might not be optimal?”

The Healthy Kids Survey has these two items. One item is just simply this, “School is really boring.” We add “really” in there to make sure that they’re saying, “Yes, it’s really boring,” and the students on the Healthy Kids Survey now answer it on an 11-point response scale, from zero to 11. They disagree with that response or they agree with it. We’re going to look at that item. The second item is a question that asks about how much they value school. Now this is, I might say, harsh because when I read this every time I think, “School is worthless and a waste of time.” But what we’re really trying to get at with this question is a real deep feeling like the students were saying, “No, learning is just not important to me.” And what I think, as you can foreshadow, we’re interested — what about students who say their school’s really boring and they’re at the same time feeling that they don’t value their schooling experience that much? So, we asked these. These are on the Healthy Kids Survey now.

Let’s go to here now. This is how 500,000 students in California actually responded to these items. And as you yourselves and your poll identified, two out of five students, if you divide these, like these are the 11-point scale. . . that’s low, like zero to four responses, three in the middle, four in the high. If you think about it that way, two out of five students said that they were kind of in the high boredom response. They think school’s really boring. 21 percent no. So, your polling reflects what 500,000 students in California are saying how they view their schooling experience. What about the valuing question? Well, that is good news because you can see almost two thirds of students actually responded like, “Even though I might experience some boredom in school, I still value my educational experience.” And you can see there it’s much lower, one out of nine students, who actually say kind of in a way they’re devaluing.

So, I hope you can see where this is going. What do you do if you cross these two together? And I think I need to make sure… So, this is going to be a little video. I have to turn off my volume, I think. [Sound from video in the background.] So anyway, this is going to move while I’m talking, I hope. Yeah, it’s moving. You can see if you have students who are low, mid, and high. Remember those percentages and the valuing low school and high? — If we flip these around, you’ll see they’re going to flip it a second. By the way, when you do your… Yeah, there they go. So, because the valuing is flipped, we have to flip the low and high around. And you can see if you do this, you just create natural groups of students’ profiles. And in the upper left there, you see there’s students who are optimally. . . they have high valuing of school and low boredom. And if you go down the other end, you’ll see that you have students who are low on value and high on boredom. And, of course, you can get all these other different combinations in there. You can have mid-value and low value. So, you can fill in the rest of this matrix. We’re particularly interested in this group of students (high value, low boredom) and this group of students (low value, high boredom). And at your school you could see for that.

So, let’s just go a little bit. What if we do that? Okay. So then if we do that, you can think of these students… If you want to think of this in some way, like Carol Dweck has the growth mindset. Another way to think of this is a school boredom mindset. What’s the global feeling? So, it’s not in-the-moment but more generally how the students experience boredom as an emotion as it interfaces with their valuing of school. As you can see, you’ll come up with this. These students are high value, low boredom, and these students are low value and high boredom. This is the suboptimal and optimal pattern. We’ve done this now with the 500,000 students to say, “Well, how many students are in each of those groups?” And this is what we find.

There are 20% of the students who are in this optimal pattern and just 10% — and we want to be interested and we’ll show you — how do these 10% of students compare to those students in that first group. You can see there’s a lot of students in the middle. And you can see here, it’s very unusual for students to say that I have high value, low boredom here and low value. These groups are very infrequent. You can see the percentages that go here. One way to take away from this is about 50% of the students say they have experienced some or low boredom, but generally value their education.

So now. . . and Tom will give you some information about this later at the end … so that’s all fine and good, but so what? If this isn’t related to anything else that’s in the Healthy Kids Survey, then that’s kind of interesting information, but does it give you a different lens to think about students’ experiences? We did take a look about how students in those profiles responded to other CHKS items, sort of flourishing indicators — academic self-reported grades, school satisfaction, sense of school belonging, optimism — and some languishing indicators — the two that have been in the Healthy Kids Survey for a long time, the past-year chronic sadness and past-year suicidal ideation. So, what do we find?

We find that if this is the optimal group, that’s with high valuing and low boredom, and this is the suboptimal group — this is looking at those two extreme groups — and we take a look at those indicators for the percentage of students who responded to them. So, for example, chronic sadness in the past year, you can see the difference, 49% to 22%. Suicidal ideation, 27%, 9%. School satisfaction, 73(%) to 17(%). These other indicators in the CHKS that you’ve often looked to to try to identify students presenting needs for services, you can see these two items considered together help you really separate out students who have risk indicators of concern to us. So, these two questions, again, offer maybe a unique opportunity or avenue to try to connect with students in a way that would open up a conversation about how their life is going. Optimism, school belonging, and self-reported grades.

Lan Nguyen:

And Mike, just before you continue, we had a couple questions in the chat.

Michael Furlong:

Yeah. You do, Lan.

Lan Nguyen:

Yes. So the first question we had in the chat was, “I’m surprised to see ‘tired’ listed as an emotion.” And I believe that was in response to the original poll question. Any additional context for that?

Michael Furlong:

For saying boredom is an emotion?

Lan Nguyen:

Tired listed as an emotion.

Michael Furlong:

The items that we took this one from research that looks at academic emotions, and I guess you can get is, is that a mood or is an emotion? I hear what you’re saying on that. Brackett, who’s at the Yale Child Study Center that does the RULER Program — some of you may in school do that — it’s a curriculum that’s surrounding and helping students learn and expand their feeling or emotion, whatever we’re going to call it vocabulary. They’ve done national studies where they include that in there that … It could be physically tired, I suppose. But anyway, it has been used in this research. I don’t have a particular answer to say why it should or shouldn’t be, but it has been used in research where they ask students about academic emotions.

Lan Nguyen:

Okay. And there was another question around if these data have been disaggregated?

Michael Furlong:

Well, they are being disaggregated, yes, and if there’s interest that could be followed up. Actually, I’m catching myself. I have looked at this information in so many different ways. One of the things that particularly I have found actually in working with one school district is, it’s important to identify equity issues, and also students’ gender identification has shown some real differences. So, there is a need to do this and that’s a note to us, Tom. I think there needs to be a report that will look at this more deeply. Yeah.

Tom Hanson:

Can I jump in just to add to that? Yes. I mean, so we will have these school boredom profile indicators on the CalSCHLS dashboard. And with the dashboard one can disaggregate the results by various demographic factors. So, that will be something that participants in CalSCHLS will be able to do interactively.

Lan Nguyen:

Great. And it looks like that’s the questions for now, so we can continue.

Michael Furlong:

Okay. Thank you, Lan.

Lan Nguyen:

You are welcome.

Michael Furlong:

Okay. There’s some main takeaways I think from here. I mean, not surprisingly students do report that boredom or boredom related experiences are common. Students do experience that. At the same time, a majority of students say that they value their school highly. I think that’s a positive feedback for us because that’s an indicator that it will help us differentiate the type of boredom experiences a student might have. This preliminary look, we need to look more deeply as has been observed, but it is related to other high risk related experiences. But at the same time also, if we measure more positive aspects of well-being, it also is related to those. And I think it shows us that it’s important to consider boredom is a vital experience to attend to because it may represent less than optimal feelings or experiences of the students. So, it may be worthwhile to explore further with them.

The other point I made a little bit earlier. . . but the students are not necessarily reluctant to say that they’re bored or to say that. So, when they say that, should our bells go off and say, “Oh, I need to look into this more deeply”? I need to explore this with the student, is the way I would think about it, or have an opportunity to dialogue with the student to try to better understand what that means to the student — an opportunity to discuss and explore what are their values, what are their interests. It could be that they’re experiencing some mental health challenges, but it could be that they’re maybe just not having the direction or purpose in life, and that might benefit from some counseling and support that would help them do that. It could represent low life satisfaction. There might be a need for mental health services and supports as you saw there.

So, responding to it. There’s a little introduction here, but as you can imagine, we do offer some ways to think about offering attending to this through a multi-tier support. When you get your CHKS data back, you’re going to have a profile of your whole school. That might provide some suggestions to your staff about, well, how many of our students are in the optimal or suboptimal ranges? Or what strategies do we want to have to help students who don’t necessarily see high value in their education to explore that and build that? Or how do we help students even who are value their education and might be doing reasonably well, but they’re not experiencing some enthusiasm or zest or excitement during their learning activities. Do we care or want to help students build that more? That can be a broader school climate for all students. And then you can see, when you get down to the suboptimal — maybe that 10% of students or so who are really maybe between a Tier 2 or Tier 3, they’re not valuing school, they’re not engaged, and they’re not excited — they need maybe more targeted services and supports, which could include mental health services in some cases.

So, what we did is we have a whole bunch of resources here for you that we hope you’ll use and take advantage of. And there’s resources for. . . it says here, I’ll build that up. . . for a student boredom conversation, at least that’s the way we try to frame it. So that resource, when you bring it down, will go back to those Dylans and those four examples that we had for you and say, “Well, how do you approach each of those different types of students when you’re thinking about boredom?” Those might not be the only four types, but I think they provide a range of students. You know, the student who is, I don’t know, the stereotypic student who’s in a class that they’re not challenged by so they feel bored. Well, what do you do with that student? What about the student who doesn’t get along with a particular teacher or hasn’t high interest in a particular subject matter? They do fine in social studies or art, but the biology or science isn’t their thing, so the approach to dealing with them and the conversation is different.

There’s other measures in there. Counselors might want to have a boredom. . . or when you’re working with students, psychologists might want to have a measure that actually asks students what their boredom experience is, in particular, how they’re coping with boredom. What do you do when you’re bored? How do you respond to that and then how can you take more agency as a student and ownership of that and decide what you want to do about that? So, there’s a whole bunch of resources that are set up for you that you can click there, go to it, and download them.

And then there’s a few other resources for those of you who want to explore further. These are articles that you can check out — easy to consume, not heavy research papers but articles that people have written about the topic — and to try to round out your information and thinking about it. As you consider, these items are in the CHKS survey now, how can I use this information now in my own work, but also maybe considered more broadly, how does the school consider this new lens that’s in the CHKS survey to help understand what students’ experiences are?

So, okay, shall I turn it back to you, Tom?

Tom Hanson:

Okay. Thank you so much Mike. And there’s some interesting discussion going on in the chat that we’ll probably get to, but I just wanted to bring this back to the CHKS data. As I mentioned earlier, these school boredom mindset profiles will be displayed on the CalSCHLS dashboard. Now there’s two CalSCHLS dashboards — there’s a public dashboard and then there’s the district private back dashboard. They will be displayed for districts participating in the survey who have signed up for the dashboard first, and then they’ll make it over to the public dashboard once we update those data with the… public dashboard is updated with the 21-22 data in November, which, oh my gosh, it’s the end of November. But that’s coming up soon. I just had a panic. So, my current emotion is panic.

What I wanted to just show you, though is, so these results will be entered on the dashboard, but they’re also in the CalSCHLS reports, and the type of table that we’ve included in all the CalSCHLS reports looks something like this. I hope you can see it. It’s basically that same cross tab that shows the optimal values are low boredom and high value. In this particular instance, that’s 21% of the students report on this. This is by grade 11. And that suboptimal is the high boredom, low value, that’s about 8% in this instance. There’s been some discussion about sometimes boredom is… Anyway, there’s a whole bunch of different sources of it. Sometimes it’s episodic or related to a particular class or a mismatch between modality of teaching and personal learning styles. What I would think in that situation would be maybe the high boredom, high value. These are students that probably value their educational experiences, but episodically, they’re bored in certain instances or for certain classes. We don’t ask about which class they’re in. These are global measures in the CHKS survey. I mean, we recommend additional assessments if folks want to learn about this in more detail, and I recommend the resources to do those student-level assessments.

Basically, this on the screen is what will be presented in the CHKS reports. Something similar will be developed for the dashboard. And in the dashboard the benefit is you can disaggregate the results by different subgroups: gender, race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation. We have parental SCS which is measured by reported education of parents now. So, stay tuned for that.

That’s all I have there. And did we want to open it up for questions or anything, Lan?

Lan Nguyen:

Yeah. So I don’t know if there’s any last-minute burning questions in the chat. You can put them there in the Q&A. Looks like we’ve got a question coming in from the Q&A and it says, “Is there a resource that has boredom indicator thresholds that schools can use to move students through MTSS?” So that can go to Tom and/or Mike.

Tom Hanson:

I think that should go to Mike.

Michael Furlong:

Okay. I hope you can hear me now then. Well, that’s a great question. I’m hoping counselors or others might see they could actually use these two items — when they’re doing some special assessment — they could actually use these two items and, based on the responses of the students, can see which of these nine areas they’re in. If I was thinking about. . . definitely, for example, the students who are in the high boredom and low value area, that definitely would be moving up towards the top of the MTSS. I noticed a comment that someone made, which is right on because sometimes, people in general, but students can say I’m bored as an excuse. It’s not maybe necessarily an expression of their inner feelings, but it’s more like an expression of saying, “Well, yeah, I’m not engaged in this because I’m bored,” and it becomes an excuse for not engaging or trying. So, that’s why we offered the various questions (inaudible) search that. . . if you look at the percentages of the other indicators, the students who are higher value, I think, or less might be they’re not in the upper tier, but the mid-boredom/high value, low boredom/high value are definitely probably okay. It’s obviously better to be high value than high boredom if you look at the patterns. If I was going to try to differentiate and you needed to. . . like, how do you move up towards a Tier 2? I would start looking at the students who had low value on education, the mid-boredom, high boredom value definitely might be a level two. But you could use this, monitoring the students could do this. They could monitor themselves as a self-development or self-awareness activity. Yeah, I hope that helped.

Lan Nguyen:

Great, thank you. And another question is, considering this idea of boredom, have you heard of maybe any schools or districts or any places where they’re really going in on boredom and thinking about addressing it from that perspective? Or any practical things you’ve seen or stories you’ve heard from the field?

Michael Furlong:

Well, Brackett, who does the RULER Program, did a national study and that’s where there’s renewed interest in this. In January of 2021 they did a national survey and this is what resurfaced, as often does, is boredom and students reported being tired were the most common emotions — if that’s what we’re going to think of them as being — as they reported. The value of education’s positive, that’s something that could be addressed by any school, that’s not a negative. My own view is addressing this as it’s a boredom issue, I probably, in my own mind, I would try to reframe it as an engagement issue or I’m going to use the word enjoyment. I’m not sure why students shouldn’t enjoy some of their educational activities. Or how do we increase experiences in schools that provide some level of enjoyment, so it’s not all maybe just work or something like that.

So, I’m not sure I would address this as boredom directly, as much as this is an engagement issue. How do we engage students and how do we engage them in a way that they get some enjoyment out of it, I guess might be another way to think about it.

Lan Nguyen:

Great, thank you. And I don’t believe there are any other questions.

Michael Furlong:

I’ll ask. . . two things. If you look at the resource, the mini course that we put together as a resource for you, there’s some other information there that shows other indicators that are also new to the CHKS. For example, there’s questions about optimism in there and life satisfaction. When you look at this and you’re working with a student who might be in some of these areas, look at those other positive indicators of well-being to see how the student was reporting on them. So, the students who had the high boredom/low value profile also had low life satisfaction and lower optimism. So, this isn’t just a boredom experience. That’s why I keep saying, are they bored just with school? This is the fundamental question and the opportunity. A student’s feeling bored at school — is this just a school-related experience that we need to help the student develop more connections and positivity at school? Or, is it a reflection of a broader disinterest or disengagement from a student’s life?

Lan Nguyen:

And it looks like we have another question in the chat. It says, “Does anyone suggest replacement statements? I’m bored. Please explain that differently.” I’m not sure if that’s a question or a statement. It says, “Does anyone suggest replacement statements. I’m bored. Please explain that differently.” Something about I’m bored, like not getting it. Statements from the student.

Michael Furlong:

My sense is, and that’s what we tried to offer some ways to engage in a conversation is not to judge the statement. I’m not sure I’m answering the person’s question or comment appropriately. But it’s not to question the value of the students, why are you bored? But to explore with them when they say that, what does it mean to them? It’s kind of a way of thinking about it. And then the information we provided was try to provide. . . sort of expand our thinking about what that could mean to a student. So we just don’t presume it’s one of the subtypes or another.

Lan Nguyen:

Great, thank you. So I believe we’ve covered all of the questions so far. I don’t know if there’s any last words from either Tom or Mike before we. . .

Michael Furlong:

Could I please? I’d say, really, thank you for coming and also please, when you have the opportunity, look at the resources and review this again. And please share with your colleagues because I think it might help us when we work with students just to have… We all try to be as empathetic and supportive as possible. Maybe this might provide another little nudge for us to engage students in conversations that could help them.

Tom Hanson:

Great. Thank you, Mike. And thank you all.

Michael Furlong:

I just realized something, the person who asked about the replacement statements, what I think what they were getting at, I can see now is they were saying, helping the student to reframe their boredom experiences and that comment is right on. I think the resources we’re offering are a way to try to help a student think through and reframe their boredom experience in a hopefully more positive way. So that was a right-on comment. Thank you.

Lan Nguyen:

We really want to thank you all so much for taking time out of your busy schedules to join us on today’s webinar on boredom.