Does Your Classroom Cultivate Student Resilience?

Portrait of Booker T. Washington (1916) (Wikipedia)

by Marilyn Price-Mitchell PhD, Developmental Psychologist, Researcher, Writer, Edutopia: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/8-pathways-cultivate-student-resilience-marilyn-price-mitchell

Over 100 years ago, the great African American educator Booker T. Washington spoke about resilience: "I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles overcome while trying to succeed".

Research has since established resilience as essential for human thriving, and an ability necessary for the development of healthy, adaptable young people.

It's what enables children to emerge from challenging experiences with a positive sense of themselves and their futures.

Children who develop resilience are better able to face disappointment, learn from failure, cope with loss, and adapt to change. We recognize resilience in children when we observe their determination, grit, and perseverance to tackle problems and cope with the emotional challenges of school and life.

The Capacity to Rebuild and Grow From Adversity

Resilience is not a genetic trait. It is derived from the ways that children learn to think and act when faced with obstacles large and small. The road to resilience comes first and foremost from children's supportive relationships with parents, teachers, and other caring adults.

These relationships become sources of strength when children work through stressful situations and painful emotions. When we help young people cultivate an approach to life that views obstacles as a critical part of success, we help them develop resilience.

Many teachers are familiar with Stanford professor Carol Dweck's important work with growth mindsets, a way of thinking that helps children connect growth with hard work and perseverance.

Educator David Hochheiser wisely reminds us that developing growth mindsets is a paradigm for children's life success rather than a pedagogical tool to improve grades or short-term goals. Simply put, it's a way of helping children believe in themselves -- often the greatest gift teachers give to their students.

Resilience is part of The Compass Advantage™ (a model designed for engaging families, schools, and communities in the principles of positive youth development) because the capacity to rebuild and grow from adversity is a key factor in achieving optimal mental and physical health. Linked by research to happiness and the other abilities on the compass, resilience is one of the 8 Pathways to Every Student's Success.

Image Credit: Marilyn Price-Mitchell, PhD

The ability to meet and overcome challenges in ways that maintain or promote well-being plays an essential role in how students learn to achieve academic and personal goals.

Resilient young people feel a sense of control over their own destinies. They know that they can reach out to others for support when needed, and they readily take initiative to solve problems. Teachers facilitate resilience by helping children think about and consider various paths through adversity. They also help by being resources, encouraging student decision-making, and modeling resilient competencies.

Five Ways to Cultivate Resilience

1. Promote self-reflection through literary essays or small-group discussions

Short written essays or small-group discussion exercises that focus on heroic literary characters are an excellent way, particularly for younger students, to reflect on resilience and the role it plays in life success. After children have read a book or heard a story that features a heroic character, encourage them to reflect by answering the following questions (see the Heroic Imagination Project for additional resources and videos).

• Who was the hero in this story? Why?
• What challenge or dilemma did the hero overcome?
• What personal strengths did the hero possess? What choices did he or she have to make?
• How did other people support the hero?
• What did the hero learn?
• How do we use the same personal strengths when we overcome obstacles in our own lives? Can you share some examples?

2. Encourage reflection through personal essays

Written exercises that focus on sources of personal strength can help middle and high school students learn resilience-building strategies that work best for them. For example, by exploring answers to the following questions, students can become more aware of their strengths and what they look for in supportive relationships with others.

• Write about a person who supported you during a particularly stressful or traumatic time. How did they help you overcome this challenge? What did you learn about yourself?
• Write about a friend that you supported as he or she went through a stressful event. What did you do that most helped your friend? What did you learn about yourself?
• Write about a time in your life when you had to cope with a difficult situation. What helped and hindered you as you overcame this challenge? What learning did you take away that will help you in the future?

3. Help children (and their parents) learn from student failures

In her insightful article Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail, published in The Atlantic, middle school teacher Jessica Lahey touched on a topic near and dear to every teacher's heart: How do I teach students to learn and grow through failure and setbacks when their parents are so intent on making them a shining star? The truth is that learning from failure is paramount to becoming a resilient young person. Teachers help when they:

• Create a classroom culture where failure, setbacks, and disappointment are an expected and honored part of learning.
• Establish and reinforce an atmosphere where students are praised for their hard work, perseverance, and grit, not just for grades and easy successes.
• Hold students accountable for producing their own work, efforts from which they feel ownership and internal reward.
• Educate and assure parents that supporting kids through failure builds resilience - one of the best developmental outcomes that they can give their children.

4. Bring discussions about human resilience into the classroom

Opportunities abound to connect resilience with personal success, achievement, and positive social change. Expand discussions about political leaders, scientists, literary figures, innovators, and inventors beyond what they accomplished to the personal strengths they possessed and the hardships they endured and overcame to reach their goals. Help students learn to see themselves and their own strengths through these success stories.

5. Build supportive relationships with students

Good student-teacher relationships are those where students feel seen, felt, and understood by teachers. This happens when teachers are attuned to students, when they notice children's needs for academic and emotional support. These kinds of relationships strengthen resilience. When adults reflect back on teachers who changed their lives, they remember and cherish the teachers who encouraged and supported them through difficult times.

Do you have a teacher who played this role in your own life? What do you remember about him or her?

 

Marilyn Price-Mitchell PhD's Profile

A Taste for (Academic) Danger

by Thesis Whisperer: http://thesiswhisperer.com/2015/05/20/a-taste-for-academic-danger/

 

This post is by Lara Corr, a research fellow from the Centre for Health Equity at Melbourne University

With three months to go before completion, I found myself watching a YouTube presentation of a scholar I deeply respect and admire.

Queue thesis meltdown #476. My heart raced and my chest constricted as I listened to her rattle off all the theorists and scholars that influenced her work - I hadn’t read most of them. I sensed potential thesis failure and it felt suffocating.

But then I remembered that I was not trying to be her - a post-humanist educational sociologist. I was instead drawing on a wide range of disciplines and approaches that were demanded by my thesis aim and objectives. Her research was just one facet of the diamond I was revealing through my endeavours.

However the questions lingered. What was I trying to be? Where do I fit in? Whose rules do I abide by and what happens if I break them?

Identity work has been a big part of thesis production for me and has been written about by Pat Thomson, Barbara Kramler and on the Thesis Whisperer. Interdisciplinary theses present a range of challenges and identity work is one of them. We are confronted with having to break rules and make our own thesis creation out of different academic pieces that are relevant to our research.

I was a kid who excelled at not breaking rules, always coloured in the lines and was brought up to meet unspoken expectations and not to cause a stir. Most of us who have done well academically have learnt to follow written and unwritten rules to the letter.

This socialisation made the necessary rule breaking of interdisciplinary work particularly confronting, but held promise of bringing something fresh and vital to problem solving and a bit of liberation. A noble pursuit!

On the tail end of recovering from thesis meltdown #476, I happened to watch the Lego movie and as fate would have it, it helped me bring together and begin to resolve these issues of identity and rule breaking in interdisciplinary research.

In the Lego movie universe there are worker bee type citizens, who meticulously follow the construction and social rules set out by the ruler, Lord Business. Then there are an elite group of renegade ‘master builders’ who conceive and construct incredible creations from their imaginations using any Lego pieces in the vicinity.

The messiness and creativity of the master builders are a threat to the evil ruler, ‘Lord Business’, who seeks perfect order, predictability and obedience. Lord Business sets out to prevent creativity and rule breaking forever.

Enter our accidental hero, Emmet, a construction worker who feels anything but special when he is chosen to fulfil the prophecy and save the Lego universe from Lord Business. Emmet admires but never dreams that he could become a master builder.

You can see where this is going.

When thinking about theses, some projects more than others demand that you become a master builder. They ask you to consider, but throw away, the plans and dare to mix disciplines and methods. Dare to be creative. We don’t imagine when we set out to do a PhD that we will be able to become master builders, but just like Emmet and the other Lego people, it might be in us all along!

My friend Dr Gemma Carey often remarks that no one talks about the creativity involved in thesis production. Maybe that’s because this creativity is hard to articulate. It involves much discomfort, self-doubt and head banging but is ultimately exciting and inspiring as it can help answer questions of the world in rich, innovative and satisfying ways.

If you have found yourself evolving into a master builder, whether dragged kicking and screaming like my (former) rule loving self, these tips may help sustain you in your journey:

• Give yourself permission to play with breaking the spoken and unspoken rules. Exploit the disciplines you are dipping into and exploring; acknowledge, but ignore, the boundaries that constrict your research unnecessarily.
• Find other apprentice and experienced master builders. People who are open to go where research takes them and are not bound by traditional rules of methods and disciplines.
• Start to view your thesis production as a creative process and one of becoming.
• Think - ‘What would I do if I wasn’t afraid?’
• Learn to sit with the discomfort of working across areas.

If you are lucky enough to have a thesis topic that wants to drag or propel you through many different world views and fields, and you are able to follow that path, you might just end up with a thesis that is more rich, risky, alive and useful. More than that, you may end up more inspired and energised than when you enrolled and with a taste for academic danger!

How about you? Are you colouring inside the lines or outside of them? Does academic danger make you uncomfortable, or do you relish it?