How to Improve Self-Control in Schools

Make school more demanding for all students

In its coverage of U.S. secondary education, the popular press tends to focus on two relatively small groups: students headed for elite colleges (many of whom are under tremendous stress and pressure) and students at risk for dropping out (many of whom come from the most disadvantaged communities).

These stories are important to tell, but they leave out the vast majority of students, who don't fall into either of these extremes. These high school students tell us they're bored. Schools don't routinely push them beyond their current capabilities—that is, the students don't always get the sort of stimulation necessary to develop brain regions that support higher-order cognitive skills and self-regulation. And more instruction aimed at the rote memorization of facts won't help. Research shows that repeating the same task, without additional challenge built into the practice, does little to stimulate brain development. Brain development is stimulated by demanding more from the brain than had previously been asked (Hulme, Jones, & Abraham, 2013).

Attend to students' physical health.

Despite considerable research showing that aerobic exercise is one of the most important contributors to healthy brain development (Verburgh, Konigs, Scherder, & Oosterlaan, 2014), many school districts have eliminated physical education from their daily curriculums. In many high schools, the only students who get regular exercise are those who are talented enough to play on competitive interscholastic teams.

Given what we know about the importance of exercise for brain development, one hour of each school day should be devoted to physical education. This will likely raise students' test scores more than additional instruction will. As with academic stimulation, the type of physical exercise that students are asked to do matters. Team sports, because they're often demanding mentally (with respect to strategy); psychologically (with respect to cooperation and teamwork); and physically, may be especially beneficial. Team sports don't have to be interscholastic or limited to the most athletically able students to provide these benefits.

Bring in mindfulness programs

There's growing evidence that mindfulness training stimulates the development of brain systems that support self-regulation and strengthen self-control (Davidson et al., 2012). A small number of schools around the United States have incorporated mindfulness exercises, such as meditation, into their daily routines, and preliminary evaluations of these efforts have shown improvements in student learning as well as reductions in problem behavior (Steinberg, 2014). Other ways of teaching mindfulness, including yoga, may also be beneficial.

At a time of shrinking school budgets, I realize that any call to add meditation and yoga to the high school curriculum won't be warmly embraced and may be ridiculed as extravagant. To this resistance I can only say that our persistently mediocre record of secondary school achievement, despite the relatively long school days we force our adolescents to endure, suggests there's plenty of room to rethink how students might spend that time more profitably.

Strengthen students' working memory

There's some evidence that providing training on certain demanding cognitive tasks, especially those designed to strengthen working memory, may contribute to the development of other skills and capabilities, including self-control (Morrison & Chein, 2011). Working memory refers to how we retain information in our minds and use it—like keeping the first part of a long sentence in mind while you finish reading it so the end of the sentence makes sense, or holding a set of directions in your head as you drive so you know what landmarks to look for. Working memory is essential to things like planning ahead, considering multiple possible actions at the same time, or comparing the short- and long-term consequences of a potential decision.

One effective training exercise is the "n-back" task, in which students are presented with a sequence of items (like letters) one at a time and asked to indicate whether the letter shown is the same as the letter that appeared n letters ago.

Offer an SEL program

There's good evidence that social and emotional learning (SEL) programs contribute to the development of self-regulation, as long as they follow the SAFE principles (Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor, & Schellinger, 2011): They should be sequenced, active, focused, and explicit.

Anyone interested in bringing SAFE SEL programs to their school should consult the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, a nonprofit organization that conducts systematic evaluations of SEL programs, as well as the U.S. Department of Education's What Works Clearinghouse, which maintains lists of school-based social and emotional learning programs with proven track records of success. Although we tend to think of SEL programs as geared primarily toward students with emotional problems, like aggression, SEL programs benefit all students.