Since interdisciplinary classes have proven to be a fruitful practice, teachers of two different subjects have once again joined forces to give their students an unforgettable and extremely useful lesson. Psychology and Business teachers prepared an interdisciplinary lesson about stress and ways to handle it for Year 13 students.

Achieving increased productivity – how stress can become eustress

International School students are no ordinary students. They are truly different, international students who receive education in programmes that meet global standards and use much higher and more demanding criteria than most traditional schools in Serbia.

Those high criteria will give them the upper hand when the time comes for them to apply for university. In other words, International School students are at a huge advantage because they are prepared to meet the requirements and strict criteria of educational institutions all around the world.

Nevertheless, high demands are usually accompanied by high levels of stress, which we have to learn to cope with in a constructive way. Stress can be brought under control and doesn’t have to be our enemy if we develop coping mechanisms for managing it and learn how to transform that anxious state into fuel which keeps us going and helps us work towards our goals with focus.

Developing coping mechanisms and improving our stress management

Students in educational institutions with strict criteria may feel like they are expected to work hard, perhaps as hard as adults or even harder, and that they have little free time to relax or be creative. Stress usually leads to numerous health problems.

That is why International School teachers decided to talk to students about this, find out how they cope with stressful situations, and train them to avoid burnout when working towards their goals. They showed the students what causes stress and how our bodies react to it, what triggers stress at work and school, and how to deal with stress triggers in a functional manner so as not to be hindered by them, but rather to let them help us be more productive and achieve more.

Just as we all expected, this was not an ordinary interdisciplinary lesson – the teachers prepared different scenarios depicting stressful situations, which the students acted out. In pairs, they demonstrated their acting skills and tried to relive such situations.

Having attended this class, our students are certainly going to be even more successful as they are now acquainted with all the potential obstacles and ways to overcome them and use them to their advantage.