zlacker

If you were starting from scratch and looking for a way to teach people to deal with stress/anxiety/deadlines, what would you do? Setting up a realistic, consequential-feeling but ultimately not too consequential, environment with stress/anxiety/deadlines where they would practice and learn seems like the common-sense way to do it to me. Even if you had specific things to teach (coping techniques etc.), you'd probably still want to have that kind of environment to test them out in practice.

>>lmm+(OP)
Well, if I'd start from scratch I'd try to run experiments in different classes and see what works out best. Perhaps with a slight bias toward no grades because of the people in my life, there's a strong correlation between "cares a lot about grades" and "stress is psychologically harmful".

But fortunately I'm not starting out from scratch. People have made those experiments already. Grades suck.

Among other things that do work, guided retrospectives are one idea I would be tempted to implement. (Hell, we software developers know that too: when we want to get better, we hold retrospectives, we don't ask the scrum master to assign a letter grade!)