Navigating Stress: Fostering Student Well-Being Through Adaptive Coping Strategies

What does it really mean to “cope”? This interactive session explores coping as a dynamic, system-wide process that influences how individuals and communities adapt and thrive. Drawing on thousands of student responses to the Challenge Success–Stanford Survey of Student Experiences, we will share data that highlights the critical link between students’ coping skills, their engagement with learning, and their overall well-being and sense of belonging.

Participants will gain a grounding in the basics of coping—how we encounter stressors, appraise them, and choose responses, consciously or unconsciously. We will distinguish between everyday stress, chronic stress, and traumatic stress, and examine the “spaces between” stressor, appraisal, and response where cognition can take precedence over emotion. Together, we will consider how coping is developed through right-sized challenges and reflection, and how scaffolding from educators and peers can support growth.

This session emphasizes that coping is not a fixed trait but a toolkit of strategies shaped by experience and context. By understanding coping as both an individual skill and a system-level process, participants will leave with practical ideas to support healthy coping in schools.