Much is praiseworthy from a learning-design perspective. The units are consistently structured, with clear learning outcomes presented at the beginning and a review at the end. Each session starts with helpful “you are here” signposting, showing how the session fits with the others. Information is concisely presented in text or video. Multiple choice quiz questions are interspersed throughout to check learning, and there are reflective activities, too. A couple of criticisms here. Firstly, the questions sometimes suffer from having some obviously wrong answers. Secondly, I would have valued some example answers for the reflective questions. Nevertheless, citations are frequent and each session has a reference list. The overall user experience is very smooth, and I completed the course in two sittings, receiving a PDF certificate.

I found the sequencing of course content refreshing: individual differences, neurodiversity, and mental health are not tacked on at the end. With this content coming before the practical classroom interoception activities, it acts as a frame for what comes later. However, at times I sensed loose ends and missed connections between early and later modules. In a classroom setting, this is where a teacher steps in to remind learners of previous content. In asynchronous courses, the developers need to work especially hard to do so, and I think this was lacking in places. 

I also felt the absence of a teacher’s explanation and signposting in Module 5, which combines information on the effects of trauma with content about emotional dysregulation. Rather than lack of linking, here the problem is lack of differentiation. Not enough was done to separate trauma from other causes of emotional dysregulation, such as autism. Nurturing parents of autistic children might feel that they are being lumped in with the neglectful or violent parents whose actions have traumatized their children. The module could be redesigned as “Emotion dysregulation: causes and consequences”, with subsections on trauma and autism spectrum disorders as possible causes and then a subsection on responding to dysregulation, regardless of its cause. 

The course content on interoception draws on Dr Emma Goodall’s work, which formed the basis of a Master’s degree thesis in 2021 and her book Interoception and Regulation: Teaching Skills of Body Awareness and Supporting Connection with Others, co-authored by Charlotte Brownlow. 

Interoception is the ability to notice bodily markers of emotions, which is key to monitoring and managing them. The premise here is that we can experience a feeling without conscious awareness, only to have it take us by surprise. Have you ever not noticed hunger until you started eating, or tiredness until you sat down? This anecdotal evidence, combined with research on the misattribution of arousal, suggest that, in the words of the psychologist Daniel Gilbert in Stumbling on Happiness, “Just as the decoupling of awareness and visual experience can give rise to blindsight, so the decoupling of awareness and emotional experience can give rise to what we might call numbfeel. Apparently, it is possible—at least for some of the people some of the time—to be happy, sad, bored, or curious, and not know it.” 

So it seems possible for us to experience a feeling without realizing we are doing so. Last year, in the middle of a weekend morning I developed the sensation of butterflies in my stomach. It took me a moment to realize that this was connected to an imminent football (a.k.a. soccer) match between my team and our local rivals. Similarly it’s possible for us to experience a feeling and mislabel it. For a brief period in my teenage years I’d awake in the night with a feeling of dread. After a few nights I realized that my dread was alleviated when I went to the toilet. In both cases, my interoception skills were being tested. My hypothetical student, Akira, has well-developed interoception skills, while my daughter currently does not. 

The Student Wellbeing Hub course proposes that interoception skills can be deliberately practiced and trained, resulting in improved engagement and better classroom behavior. This is where the course offers the most promise for teachers trying to help learners develop their autonomy. Unit 4 links to activities for younger and older students, letting you try them before the general structure of the activities is explicitly explained. First, the learner completes a physical movement intended to cause a change in body state, such as a stretch or a breathing exercise, for 30 seconds. Then comes scaffolded reflection on how the activity felt using adjectives such as “cold,” “hot,” “hard” and “soft.” The next question encourages reflection on the location of the change, using nouns for parts of the body. The movement is then repeated, with the learner paying attention to the sensations described in the previous questions (an activity referred to as “active noticing”). The simple productivity of the format is very well-established by the course, enabling teachers to devise their own activities or to download some from the library of activities provided.