Higher Listenings
A lively look at the trends and people shaping the future of higher education, featuring thought leaders from across the industry. Brought to you by Top Hat.
Higher Listenings
Emotional Support Frogs (+ Getting Your Spark Back)
Higher ed may be going through stormy weather, but in this soul-nourishing episode, we’re choosing joy. Psychologist, author, and happiness researcher Sarah Rose Cavanagh joins us to explore the science (and the magic) of cultivating happiness—even when times are tough.
From the chorus of spring peepers in New England wetlands to building resilience, Sarah shows us why collective effervescence isn’t just a beautiful phrase—it’s a survival strategy. We talk about why emotion is the secret sauce of learning, how to bring more curiosity and play into your classroom, and what “compassionate challenge” really looks like in practice.
Oh—and keep an ear out for our very first feline guest: Sarah’s cat, Rogue, who drops in with impeccable timing.
Whether you’re feeling discouraged or just need a dose of inspiration, this episode is your permission slip to lean into what makes you—and your students—feel alive.
Guest Bio
Sarah Rose Cavanagh is a psychologist, professor, and Senior Associate Director for Teaching and Learning at Simmons University, where she teaches classes on affective science and mental health, researches the intersections of emotion, motivation, and learning, and provides educational development for faculty. She’s the author of several books, including The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion and Mind Over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge. Her essays are featured regularly in Psychology Today and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
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We get so tied up in our individual selves and our individual goals and our own happiness, but really regularly releasing ourselves, whether it's in intellectual work, whether it's in things like performing arts or skilled activity. I think that there's so many ways that we can kind of forget that we're an individual and join in the collective. I wrote a book named Hive Mind a few years ago and that was one of my favorite aspects of that book and diving into that research was this sense of collective joy. When we're moving together and vocalizing together, we almost like forget that we're a person and we become part of this collective.
Speaker 2:Higher ed may be going through stormy weather right now, but in this episode, we're choosing joy, and we couldn't have asked for a better guest. Sarah Rose Kavanaugh is a psychologist, happiness researcher and the author of the Spark of Learning energizing the college classroom with the science of emotion. In this warm and wise conversation including our first feline guest appearance we explore practical ways to nurture happiness even in tough times. Sarah shares her thoughts on creating courses. We love to teach, the art of compassionate challenge and why joy might just be your most powerful pedagogical tool. Welcome to Higher Listenings, sarah. Let's start with a personal check-in. Right now, many educators are feeling exhausted, disheartened, maybe even demoralized, and you spent years studying happiness and emotion, so I'd like to ask you, given everything that's happening in higher ed right now, and maybe even to you, what are you doing to nurture happiness in your own life?
Speaker 1:Sure, I love starting there. I love starting with joy and happiness. I think, like a lot of people, I'm focusing local, right and small, on the people that the Friends of Drama, my daughter's high school drama booster club and that was such a joy, it is such a joyful play with all the singing and the dancing Under the Sea is going to be stuck in my head for literally months and it really was. We'll get into this a little later, I think, but collective joy is so important, I think, in these times. So I think I've been doing a lot of that. I also one of my favorite emotion regulation strategies is intellectualizing. I think I have that in common with a lot of academics, and so I've been working on a new book on happiness, and so reading a lot about the ingredients of happiness, including scholars going back centuries, is really soothing, actually, and reassuring for me.
Speaker 2:So research, it's not something I might have thought of, as you know, as a way, but like obviously for you that that's a, that's a nice place to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you got to get down to the books and the data Cool things down, get them cognitive.
Speaker 2:You know what I'd love to? Actually, I'm going to flip the tables. I know Brad is a co-host, but I'm going to ask you the same question. For me, one of the things I'm doing and have done is a little volunteer work, which is maybe not quite the same thing as, like, collective joy, but there's definitely some of that. And I think, shifting my focus outwards, which is, away from myself, which is that's something I do on a weekly basis and it's something I never regret.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And you can see actual change.
Speaker 1:right, you can see the effects of your actions making the world a tiny bit better moment by moment, and that's so empowering.
Speaker 3:How about you, brad? You know I'm engaging in a variety of strategies. I still feel myself going through this turbulence, so some days are better than others, and so I'm like grasping at straws. Sometimes I'm isolating from the news. I'm going deeply to figure out where my action you know where can I seek to participate in a meaningful and impactful way? I'm reading both nonfiction stuff that's very interesting to me, and escapist fiction that's given me a break from all of that. I'm spending as much time as I can with the people I love in ways that are really rewarding for me.
Speaker 3:So that's kind of all of the above basically, and occasionally just hiding under the covers and trying to cover my ears With a cat maybe.
Speaker 3:So you mentioned happiness as your current interest. I think a lot of people think of happiness as overindulging, binge-watching TVs, escaping stress through behaviors that may not be ultimately healthy. As I'm speaking this, I'm thinking check, check, check. Occasionally I indulge in these things, but your research really suggests that happiness, and developing and cultivating happiness, is better sought in other ways. Can you say more about what the real path to happiness might be?
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and I think you'll see a lot of the threads we've already pulled through right. So a lot of happiness is grounded and face-to-face time with human beings that we care about, whether they're loved ones, whether they're part of the broader community, so-called loose ties, you know, kind of like my drama example or Eric's example of community service, you know, interacting with other human beings in our community that we don't have such tight ties with. So a lot of it is that and feeling connected. Happiness is also about pursuing goals and developing competence at new skills, which makes it a very natural connection to higher education right and feeling empowered to make positive change, to learn new things.
Speaker 1:I think happiness is also in regular releasing of the self. So we get so tied up in our individual selves and our individual goals and our own happiness, but really regularly releasing ourselves, whether it's an intellectual work, whether it's in things like performing arts or skilled activity, individual and join in the collective. And I wrote a book named Hive Mind a few years ago and that was one of my favorite aspects of that book and diving into that research was this sense of collective joy, kind of back to the Little Mermaid. When we're moving together and vocalizing together, we almost like forget that we're a person and we become part of this collective.
Speaker 2:You know, it reminds me too, because I came across a term it's similar of like collective effervescence. Yeah, and I, you know, I never forget because I went to a concert years ago and I hadn't been to a concert in a long time. It was a large outdoor concert. I had some familiarity with the music, but everyone sort of knew the songs, yeah, and 20 000 people singing along with this and it was sort of upbeat, positive stuff. And I felt wonderful for about three days after this concert and I kept thinking like I got to get more of this into my life. And then I stumbled across that term, collective effervescence, which I thought was beautiful.
Speaker 3:I love that term yeah.
Speaker 2:So you know, you talked about pursuing goals, yeah, and that's obviously a great fit within higher education, that's what academics do and it's what students do on a daily basis. I was doing a little bit of research and came across Paul Bloom, who you may be familiar with, and he wrote a book called the Sweet Spot, and he argues that some of life's greatest goals like this actually, you know, certainly I can think of many personal experiences come from challenge, discomfort and even suffering, and I felt that too, where I'm suffering through something and then you come out the other side and it's a wonderful feeling. So I'm wondering how does leaning into challenge and maybe even a little suffering along the way make us happier in the long run?
Speaker 1:Absolutely Well.
Speaker 1:I think we've already talked a little bit about this, about goals and about becoming self-efficacious and developing new competencies, and all of that is deeply tied to our own fulfillment, to our own self-determination.
Speaker 1:And, as you're saying, eric, you only get there sometimes when you've really had to over-apply yourself and really had to bring every bit of your intellectual ability and your effort to that challenge.
Speaker 1:But I'm also discovering in my research you mentioned suffering that some of the happiest people that you can find are in really unusual places, so they work in hospice or in shelters for the unhoused or they've been through a really life-threatening illness and come out the other side.
Speaker 1:And there seems to be something about how your mindset shifts when you have these perspectives. There's something about walking into the darkness that makes coming out into the light particularly sweet, and so I think that that is also has to do with a framing and a mindset shift. And then I think also, when we think about higher education, which I know a lot of our listeners are going to care deeply about, I think this nexus between both happiness and wellbeing and safety and belongingness, but then also intellectual discomfort on the other hand, is where learning lies right, and that's really where I've spent the last couple of years talking with faculty on different campuses and talking about what I call compassionate challenge, which is the focus of my last book on supporting youth mental health, and I think that that is how we support youth mental health, that we give them both compassion and then we also challenge them.
Speaker 2:Could you say a little bit more about that, that notion of compassionate challenge, Because like I'm thinking about, you know, I mean, I think I might do that to myself Sometimes. I've got, you know, a project or something I've got to write and I know, it's kind of painful going through that but.
Speaker 2:I've been through it enough times to go. It's always like this Eric, you will get this done and it'll be fine and you'll have a sense of satisfaction coming at the other end. But what about for a student who's maybe not used to that level of rigor and in higher education and may feel demoralized or stressed out, overly anxious, et cetera?
Speaker 1:Right? Well, I think that I always say that compassion has to come first and I think it's for that reason that you're saying, if you just introduce challenge right out of the gate and you push students outside their comfort zone before establishing a sense of belonging, a sense of the fact that risks that they might take are not going to have really dire implications for their future careers, for their GPAs, if you start there, students are going to be demoralized and it's not going to be effective. If you start there, students are going to be demoralized and it's not going to be effective. So we have to start with compassion, we have to start with laying this base of psychological safety and belongingness. But then students are only really going to learn if we do push them outside their comfort zone.
Speaker 1:I completed a qualitative interview study with an undergraduate at my previous institution and we collected on Zoom about 35 interviews of various students at different types of institutions across the country about their emotions and mental health and learning and one student had a quote that I'm not going to remember word for word, but it was so great, and we asked him about negative and positive emotions in learning and he said, well, it depended on the class and he said that if it was a class that he wasn't enjoying, that he didn't like the professor, he wasn't connected with the fellow students, negative emotions would make him automatically shut off.
Speaker 1:He said he'd just stop listening, he'd turn his brain off, he was done. But then he said if it is a class where he feels really motivated by the instructor, he feels really connected to the other students, that negative emotions will make him clue in more because he wants to catch up and be a part of the conversation and that he would actually get motivated by negative emotions like anxiety and feeling a little confusion and intellectual discomfort in those settings where he felt really connected. And so I think that's really where the power of compassionate challenge comes in. But they only work in synchrony and you've got to start with compassion.
Speaker 3:Yeah, one of the things that I do to try to cultivate happiness in my own self is gratitude practice of one form or another, and occasionally I feel like I'm falling down in the way I fall down on exercise or another. And occasionally I feel like I am falling down in the way I fall down on exercise or diet, and I worry that some of the happiness conversation that we're having and that is happening sort of more broadly, it strikes many as a kind of addition to a never ending to-do list. This is just one more thing I'm going to fail at. I like exercising and eating well, so before we move on to the classroom, is there a simple, easy way forward, some small, doable thing that I can commit to right now or that our listeners can commit to right now, that can shift their mindset even just a little bit in the direction of more joy, more happiness, more satisfaction?
Speaker 1:Well, first I'm going to start with a contrarian note and say that actually there's a lot of literature suggesting that trying to be happier is the very worst thing that you can do in terms of attempting to be happy, and that there's this really counterproductive effect. Right and actively look for happiness the less happy they are. So that's my contrarian note. But then, on a less contrarian note, I would say number one, sleep. I am a huge sleep advocate. I think sleep contributes to wellbeing in so many different ways. We could have a whole podcast interview just on sleep. So sleep and then second-.
Speaker 3:I could use some coaching in that area.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, it's almost impossible to be truly happy without good sleep, I believe. And then, secondly, time and nature is an easy thing, and I think that that fits with the contrarian note because it's not really explicitly focused on happiness, right. But if just getting out in nature, I had last night my dogs I have two dogs and they were being a little frustrating out in the yard barking at monsters, I don't know what, and I had to go out and get them and I was very frustrated with that. I was a little grumpy, but then I heard, heard. You know, we live in front of these wetlands and the spring peepers in New England had this whole chorus and then, and then there were like these toads doing a twang underneath. It was like a Disney chorus.
Speaker 1:Back to the art museum, I guess and and all the stars were out, and it was just this moment that, and so it doesn't have to be an elaborate hike or visiting Niagara Falls.
Speaker 3:It can be just going out in your backyard, but nature is great, lisa and I my wife and I had the same experience last week. It was the first warm day in Minnesota and the birds were just. They were just singing and we just had such a beautiful moment out there, but to me there's nothing like a walk in the woods. I think that's just so restorative yeah.
Speaker 2:Brad's a big fan of forest bathing as well.
Speaker 1:We talked about that on an earlier podcast. Oh, that's great, yep. There's a lot of research articles on that.
Speaker 2:Well, there's something nice too, Like you mentioned the starry sky, and I always find it helps put things into perspective when I stare up at the sky and sort of think about my place in the universe and my worries, you know so.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and there's a whole big body of work on awe and awe is most reliably evoked in nature experiences. I have a co-author of my emotion and motivation textbook, lani Shioda, and that's her whole research program. She's one of the top researchers on awe and there is there's something about understanding the vastness of experience and time and nature and humanity, and then remembering how small you are in this present moment is that is deeply reassuring.
Speaker 2:I mean I can feel that going into, like you know, a cathedral in Europe. I think they're designed to elicit that feeling, but certainly nature. I get it less often at the office, I find On Zoom.
Speaker 1:You don't get a lot of awe on Zoom.
Speaker 3:Yeah, not a lot of awe here. No, I mean yeah.
Speaker 2:So let's take this back into the classroom. In the spark of learning. You argue that emotion isn't just a nice to have in education, it's a game changer for how students learn. So why is that?
Speaker 1:Right? Well, we think that emotions evolved to highlight what's most important to us and most important to our goals, to our well's. Most important to us and most important to our goals, to our wellbeing, to our survival. And what that means is emotions really focus our attention, they draw our attention to things that are emotional, they tag what's important for us to remember in the future, and they also motivate behavior. They decide what we should spend time on, motivate behavior. They decide what we should spend time on, and so they pull us toward our goals and push us away from things that are negative or bad for our goals. And so if we want our students to pay attention to the material that we're teaching them and we want them to remember some of what we're teaching them, and we want them to be motivated to engage in application, whether on an assessment or in their future careers, then emotions are crucial for learning right. They're an amazing tool to draw attention and enhance memory and also motivate behavior.
Speaker 3:You talk about emotions as contagious. So, I want to start there maybe and think about we show up as instructors and how that might affect not just the tone of the class but actually the ability students have to learn in that class. But of course there are some of us in the classroom in that position who aren't comfortable or natural or gifted at coming to the classroom with a certain kind of emotion.
Speaker 2:Asking for a friend. Asking for a friend Asking for a friend.
Speaker 3:I can't fake joy or enthusiasm. I'm dragging myself into the classroom today or I'm just, you know, I'm very you know kind of. My practice is one that doesn't, you know, open me up to having students come into my office hours crying, for instance.
Speaker 1:You know, we all have our own personas.
Speaker 3:Is there a way to bring the right thing into the classroom while respecting my authenticity as an educator?
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and I think if we all think back to our favorite instructors and the ones that we found the most motivating, I think sure we have some who are super extroverted and jokey and things like that, but some of my favorite instructors, you know, were very quiet English professors, you know, who were very quiet, spoken and reserved. Some of them were like fiery Freudian psychologists who are kind of angry all the time. I think that coming to the classroom space as our authentic selves is what's important, and I think that passion can be conveyed in a lot of ways. So I think it's important for most instructors to be deeply engaged and interested in the material and to convey that to the students. But that's going to vary person to person, right, and so I don't think you need to worry about suddenly becoming someone different than yourself. I think that we just need to come to the space engaged and authentic.
Speaker 2:Maybe just picking up on that a little bit, I feel like I just saw a cat pass through. Oh there he is.
Speaker 1:This is so unprofessional. This is the worst he ever is. What's his name? I?
Speaker 3:think we should just introduce him. Yeah, rogue, rogue.
Speaker 1:Yeah, perfect, absolutely enough.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Very good, very good.
Speaker 3:Well, we'll have to announce our extra guest on this podcast.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what are maybe some practical or even unexpected ways that educators can weave sort of more joy, curiosity, emotional engagement in their classrooms, even if as Brad sort of poking at the day themselves are maybe struggling or not having the easiest day themselves?
Speaker 1:Right. Well, I think I don't know if it's unexpected, but I think one of the easiest things that we can do is, when we're sitting down to devise our syllabi, thinking really straightforwardly about what are the things that I want to talk about, what are the readings that I want to read, what are the discussions that are really occupying my mind, what are the current controversies in my own field that I haven't quite figured out my position on? I think that thinking through the syllabus and the assessments and the assignments and even the module topics through that lens is an easy way to make sure that you're interested, right, you don't have to fake it if you actually are interested. And so I think we sometimes feel like we have to follow every letter of the department standards or you know what, the march through the 16 chapters of intro bio or intro psych or whatever we teach. But I think that we can instead think a little more creatively about those things and in that way we'll be able to show our authentic enthusiasm.
Speaker 1:There's a whole literature on emotional labor and some applying that to teaching, and that suggests that surface acting or pretending to be really enthusiastic and engaged is deeply taxing physically and emotionally. But deep acting. If you can actually connect with your own values and your own interests and bring that to the surface, that that is both more effective and less exhausting, and so I think the more that we can do that in the classroom, the better off we'll be.
Speaker 3:I love that. I think a lot of us are sort of inclined towards selecting our textbooks in that way Like we look for yeah, hey, I haven't read this.
Speaker 3:I'm interested in reading this. I'll select it and, like the joke was always, have you read this book yet Read it? I haven't even taught it right. So, so a lot, so a lot of us, a lot of us. I would certainly spend my time in the summer when I was dissatisfied with the textbook I was using. I would read and discover textbooks that this is really interesting I love the way they're approaching this and whatever.
Speaker 3:So I would make make a selection and be looking forward to leveraging that content in in my conversations with my students. I do think there's, you know, taking that further the way you're describing is a really interesting and not too difficult sort of way to go forward. I did have a mentor in grad school who would sometimes say I use, you know, the time in the classroom as an opportunity to think out loud. So he maybe took a little too far, but or maybe not, I don't know Maybe not, maybe not.
Speaker 1:And I worked with Paul Castle, who is a dean of a visual and performing arts school, I think, University of Illinois, and he has a wonderful book on acting and he says something in it that I was always struck by, where he says the tension and the interest of the audience is all in the moment of is the actor going to jump? Like once he's jumped, everyone knows he's coming back down to earth. But where you get that arousal and the interest and the engagement is that tension point. And so I think your friend, you know, trying to figure out what he thinks out loud, that probably is very engaging for students, right, Because that's the moment is's going to jump. And I certainly have found that in my own teaching in psychology that the students seem much more kind of alert and interested when I'm presenting something that I haven't made up my mind completely about yet.
Speaker 2:You're kind of getting into the curiosity realm or priming students. I'm wondering if you could say a little bit more about using curiosity as a tool in the classroom to get students to kind of perk up.
Speaker 1:Yes, Well, you'll love this, because using digital tools to ask students to make prediction is a big part of Jim Lang's chapter, one of his chapters in small teaching. But I think, for that jumping moment, that if you get students to try to predict or guess an answer to something before you present material on it, then that triggers curiosity and they're going to be so much more interested. They want to find out. We all want to know if we're right or wrong. Right, we all want to see if we predicted correctly, and I think that is a really easy, low stakes way to evoke curiosity in the classroom.
Speaker 2:That's wonderful, Brad you're going to say something.
Speaker 3:Well, just that. We're veering, you know, sort of a little bit into the space of the classroom as theater, which I think is really a useful lens into how to think about the design and delivery of management in real time of the classroom and without being overly dramatic or thinking you have to become an actor or whatever, Right? So I think there are, you know, thinking along those lines. Are there any other sorts of recommendations that you have that are, you know, relatively easy to implement?
Speaker 1:Sure, I think so many. There's so many commonalities between face-to-face classrooms and theater, and I think it's partly what I love about teaching and what drew me into teaching. So I was in my childhood neighborhood. I was always making people be in plays. I would write plays and then cast people.
Speaker 1:And then I did theater in high school and now I'm in my daughter's theater program and I think there's so much. There's all the things that we've talked about already. There's what you just raised, but also, you know, you can think about the semester as a performance. You can think about an individual class as a performance and thinking, taking the individual class as one example of that thinking intentionally, you know, not just picking up on whatever slide you left off on from the last class. I think sometimes that we have that tendency. But to think about openings and closings, to think about foreshadowing some things in the beginning of the class, to think about the pacing of the hour hour and a half, three hours, whatever it is to think about the emotional highs and lows and is there a climax and is there resolution, and closing things off with a tidy loop, are all things that make for a good theatrical performance but also make for a good class session. Vocal tone, movements, use of space, all of these things, I think, have real relevance for the classroom.
Speaker 3:I was known to occasionally break into a Dylan song now, and again. It was relevant. It was relevant, yeah.
Speaker 1:I believe it.
Speaker 3:Sarah, as we record, this higher ed is in an extraordinarily difficult moment. I know a number of my colleagues and friends are really struggling with budget cuts, policy changes, even open hostility from the public over what they have committed their lives to. What's one message that you want them to hear right now?
Speaker 1:Well, I hope that I think we saw some of this during the COVID-19 pandemic that sometimes times of crisis can be a moment where everything breaks wide open and it is terrifying and alarming and it then coming out of the worst of the pandemic. Times of crisis also are times of opportunity and are times to really shake things up and do things a little bit differently, and so my hope is that higher education has been suffering some of these things, especially the public turning of sentiment against higher education for a lot longer than the last year, and maybe with this crisis time we can turn that tide. I'm an eternal optimist.
Speaker 2:Me too. So what do you hope educators take away from your work? Not just about the role of emotion in education, but happiness as well, Right?
Speaker 1:Well, I hope what they take what I would like best if they took is is a kind of license to think about what makes them have fun in the classroom, what makes them happy about teaching, and to prioritize putting themselves first you know the kind of filling their own bucket and prioritizing their own relationships because I really do believe that it both is important for our individual well-being, but then it's also important for our students and for our institutional health in general. And occasionally people have said that, after especially Spark of Learning workshops, that they said well, you just gave me scientific justification for all the things I love to do, and that makes me very happy to hear that.
Speaker 2:So if you could design and maybe you're already doing this a happiness 101 syllabus for educators, what's one must read, must watch or must try, activity that you would include.
Speaker 1:Well, I think this is another theme amphibians of our interview today. So I'm part of a writer's group with two great friends, jim Lang and Mike Land, and we recently had a writer's group where I was workshopping some of my happiness material, and they both are English professors. I have it here so I get the title right Some Thoughts on the Common Toad by George Orwell, and it is a must read. It is about our responsibility really to enjoy a new spring, the birth of a new spring, even in times of political upheaval and threats to human rights, and how, in the common toad, we can find inspiration for happiness. It's a very short essay. It's really gorgeous. I recommend everyone read it and then go outside and listen to the peepers, if you have them.
Speaker 2:That's wonderful advice, sarah. Thank you so much for joining us today. Oh, thank you, thank you so much.
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