I MOVED

 As of March 17, 2023, my future blog posts will be posted on Get Flourishing, a collaboration with my husband, Michael. 

To see my posts, click here. See you there!

5 Things I Learned from Writing 500 Blog Posts

Moving on--new location, new work, new blog, but still learning and writing

 

Over 10 years ago I began this blog simply to process my summer professional reading—which had started with the book Adolescents and Digital Literacies: Learning Alongside Our Students. My husband suggested the title “Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn,” alluding to a prediction by futurist Alvin Toffler that those would be the essential skills for navigating the 21st century. It certainly rang true with me for navigating all the new ways of teaching I was discovering as I returned to the classroom after a few years away for raising young children, so the title stuck. 

Three schools, 6 grandchildren, 1 pandemic, and 499 posts later, this blog has been both the catalyst for and the witness to a lot of learning, unlearning, and relearning. With this 500th post, I wrap up my 3rd and final year at my current school and move my writing to a joint venture with my husband: Get Flourishing—click here for my posts. (I’ll still be learning, unlearning, and relearning—just keeping the end goal in mind! And because it’s on a different platform, you can actually subscribe to it, if you want.)    

Here are 5 things I’ve learned writing 500 blog posts:

(1) Being a writer who publishes regularly helps me teach writing. I regularly consider audience and purpose, what kind of writing that I find helpful, and how to use hooks, examples, vivid word choice, sentence variety, transitions, conclusions, and a toolbox full of literary moves. So when I coach students in writing, it’s more immediate than a textbook list of do’s and don’ts.      

(2) Being a reader who delights in the benefits of reading is the best way to inspire readers. As I read for my own purposes—to relax, to learn about the world, to understand my neighbors, to understand myself, to deepen my faith, to grow my pedagogy—I model a vibrant adult reading life. I also read to recommend books to my students because I love those little humans, and I love to find books that will help them relax, learn about the world, understand their neighbors, understand themselves, deepen their faith, and develop their interests.    

(3) I am the chief learner in my classroom. The world is a jaw-dropping place—I am so curious about its beauties and its brokenness. I want to understand it more deeply and know how I can help. As I model my interest, questioning, reading, and experimenting (how to teach EFL, how ignite middle schoolers’ reading lives, how to embed grammar instruction in reading and writing, how to be resilient, how to organize class book clubs), learning becomes a normal, human (not just kid) thing to do, and the classroom becomes a community of learners.     

(4) The discipline of writing helps me reflect on, consolidate, implement my learning, and share it with others. Every week I’m thinking, “What is going on in my teaching, in my classroom, that is significant enough to reflect on in writing?” If the answer is nothing, then I’d better do something! Once I’ve done it and wrestled it into words on the page, I have purposefulness to share with students about what and how they’re learning and why it matters, and with colleagues about the excitement of the hunt for what opens students’ hearts and minds.      

(5) Learning is always better with others. It’s better when my students are learning how to ask really good questions, build on classmates’ comments in discussion, share their favorite books, and give and receive feedback on their writing. It’s better when I’m in a book discussion with colleagues, sharing what we’ve tried in class this week and how it’s gone. It’s better when I can articulate it in a blog post and sent it out to find a reader who might need to hear just that thing.

Learning. Teaching. The beautiful, groaning creation we find ourselves in. The gifted, hurting neighbors, students, colleagues God plants us among. Even our own flawed, deeply loved selves. Education is tough yet rewarding work. 

An 8th grade English as a foreign language (EFL) student, reflecting on the experience of preparing for and teaching a 4th/5th grade EFL class this week, sensed it even in that brief exposure: “Teaching is hard because you can’t teach people just with your understanding, and you have to teach it so they can understand. So it was hard. I felt that teachers were incredible. One more thing is that teaching is fun. I had fun when they understand it.”

Writing 500 blog posts has been part of helping me lean into the hard and the fun of teaching—teaching so students understand, and seeing that understanding happen.

How about you? What have you learned over the last 10 years? How do you consolidate and share that learning?

2 Reasons to Write in an AI World

If students understood experientially, deep in their bones, that writing accomplishes these 2 purposes, all worry about inappropriate assistance from artificial intelligence would be laid to rest:   

1. Writing makes my thinking better. I can clarify, connect, develop, evaluate, and apply my thinking.
2. Writing communicates my better thinking so others can benefit. 

I thought about ChatGPT when it first exploded across the public, what it might mean to me as an English teacher, and what it might mean to me as a writer. I decided my first classroom response would be to experiment with explicitly teaching 6th and 7th graders those 2 purposes for writing. 

If students could experience the deep satisfaction of wrestling their thoughts into words and onto paper, of looking at it and saying, “Yes! THAT is what I think!” and if they could then share those words with someone else and see their impact—that would be a good foundation for beginning a conversation about how AI can facilitate or undermine those purposes of writing.   

The writing came after a lot of reading, processing, and discussion had already taken place. This is essential—that students have stuff they want to say. We started with book clubs on novels with resilient protagonists. We learned about resilience, took an assessment for ourselves and for a character in our novels, and set a personal goal for increasing resilience. We did a novel-based hexagonal thinking project in pairs (see below) and a one-pager as individuals (see bottom of page). Then it was time to see how students would pull together all the thinking they’d been doing. 

The prompt was this: "Why is resilience important and how can you increase your resilience? Use resources on resilience, illustrate with examples from your book club book, and apply it to your life." Students wrote a thesis, filled in a graphic organizer, hand wrote a rough draft, got peer feedback (using a rubric-based protocol), incorporated that feedback into a typed revision which I edited (first 10 comments), and finally produced a final draft. Once the final draft was submitted, they self-assessed (using the same rubric we’ve been using all along) and reflected on their learning (using 3 specific questions).

I’m really pleased to see how students were able to make the connections between the concept of resilience, specific examples in the novel they read, and applications to their own lives. This is the kind of reading and thinking and writing that is real and powerful right now and will continue to be throughout their lives. If students understand experientially the power of writing to make their own thinking better and communicate that better thinking to others so they can benefit, the appropriate role of AI falls into place.  

How does it fall into place for me? I used ChatGPT to originate a list of 10 suggestions for improving each of the 6 skills of resilient people, according to the Mayo Clinic website. Then I revised the lists to be sure they fit my students’ contexts and had one or two explicitly faith-based suggestions in each list.

How about you? What do you think students need to understand about writing in order to see AI in an appropriate role? What do you do to help students own that understanding? 

 

Students Assess Resilience: Connected but not Hopeful or Healthy

I want students to be resilient individuals, who aren’t surprised by life’s difficulties or embarrassed by struggle, but who know how to identify their needs and access all the resources God has made available for meeting them.

The good news: All of my students are satisfied with their social connectedness.

The bad news: More than half of them would like to be more hopeful and take care of themselves better.

These were the results from a 6-question self-assessment I created for our resilience book clubs (see this post for the self-assessment), based on an article from the Mayo Clinic website, Resilience: Build skills to endure hardship. The skills are (1) get connected, (2) make every day meaningful, (3) learn from experience, (4) remain hopeful, (5) take care of yourself, and (6) be proactive. (For further reflections on this framework, see my post How Can I More Effectively Help Students Increase Their Resilience?)

I’m glad students were willing to be vulnerable and authentic. I’m glad they feel socially connected—something that is such a big part of resilience that some experts list it as its own category, and then all the other tips for increasing it. And connectedness is not just important for mental health, but even for physical health—lack of it is as detrimental to health as smoking or obesity!  

Connectedness is essential to what it means to follow Jesus. As a Christian school, we believe we are connected to each other as parts of Christ’s body: “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’ .… But God has put the body together…so that…its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it” (I Corinthians 12:21-27).  

I hope that all students witness that kind of connectedness among staff, that students who are Christians deeply experience it, and that students who aren’t yet following Jesus see it as a winsome model of community that they feel invited into. I hope that the very way I structure my class with an emphasis on small group discussion and learning with and from each other echoes and builds this essential human connectedness.

I’m also sobered to realize that as an international Christian school, we haven’t escaped the crisis of hope that American education is sounding the alarm on. I wonder how I as a teacher and we as a school can address this. Can we do an even better job of…  

1. Being living exemplars of joy, gratitude, and affirmation; talking about why and how we can live this way; and giving students opportunities to practice it, too?  
2. Understanding, using, and teaching stress management techniques as well as physical health? 
3. Giving students opportunities in every class to set realistic goals and work toward them?  
4. Choosing some hopeful literature to balance that which addresses injustice, lament, and brokenness?  
5. Teaching by word and by example that instead of staying mad or sad about the past, we can be new people in the present because Jesus forgives us, loves us, and helps us grow into the people He made us to be?
6. Offering opportunities for service in the context of joining God in His work of restoration?     

Finally, I'm wondering why so many students expressed interest in taking better care of themselves. Maybe for some 6th and 7th graders on the later end of making the shift from concrete to abstract thinking, it was just the easiest concept to grasp. Maybe there’s a measure of safety—after all, what middle schooler wants to admit they’re lacking friends (which could smack of failure), when lacking sleep can also be a badge of hard work and importance? What kind of example are we setting when the standard adult answer to my question "How was your weekend?" is "Busy!"    

After assessing their level of satisfaction with their use of 6 skills that increase resilience, students set a goal for improving one skill. I worked with them to make goals specific and attainable—not just “get more sleep” (how much more?) or “get 2 hours more sleep per night” (how about starting with 30 minutes?). One student finally wrote that she would not touch her phone after she want to bed. Not all students got so specific, but they got better. Here are some of their goals:

1. I would like to make every day more meaningful by limiting my screen time and taking breaks from technology, and getting active through physical activities.  
2. I would like to work on learning from my experience. Sometime I couldn’t stop thinking about the past, and when I’m stressed about myself, it’s hard to let go of my past.
3. I want to learn from experiences more for my future. I will write a diary and fill in good spots and things to improve. (Read it, too.)
4. Build up strength, and maintain being hopeful on something I want or a promise I want to meet. While I’m at it, I should improve my mental health.
5. I would like to be hopeful and…obey Jesus, [forgiving] like he forgives me.
6. Learn to regulate and manage my emotions. Sometimes when I get mad, I just want to scream at someone, but I can try to keep my emotions in check by praying and asking God to help and taking deep breaths to try to calm down.
7. I am not proactive as you think. I get hurt easily by words. But I will at least try to pretend it isn’t happening. I will try to…calm myself down.
8. I would like to be more proactive and more hopeful, by writing down good things I did during the week, every week.

Right now, students are writing their response essay: Why is resilience important and how can you increase your resilience? Use resources on resilience, illustrate with examples from your book club book, and apply it to your life. I'm looking forward to seeing what they have to say. 

What about you? How resilient are your students? What skills for increasing resilience are they satisfied with? What skills for increasing it do they wish they were better at? How can we help them?   
________________

Related blog posts:

• Deciding to do book clubs: Committing to a Book Club Experiment
• Running book clubs in my 6/7 classroom: Student Book Clubs: Learning to Learn Together
• Learning about resilience: How Can I More Effectively Help Students Increase Their Resilience?
• Teaching about resilience: Connecting Literature to Life by Focusing on Resilience
• Students reflecting on the book club experience: What Are the Benefits of Student Book Clubs?   

What Are the Benefits of Student Book Clubs?

What did my 6th and 7th graders think of our book club experiment? This week I  surveyed the students on how it went and what they had learned. (See Student Book Clubs: Learning to Learn Together for more on the structure of the book clubs.) They overwhelmingly preferred this format of novel study over the whole group study of A Long Walk to Water that we did last term, and they could clearly articulate what they learned about literary analysis and about discussion skills. 

Bottom line: The experiment was a success, and I would definitely do it again!

Every student but 2 preferred getting to choose from a short list of novels and discussing it with a small group. The following selection of reasons are representative of all the answers given:

• Because you can choose the book that you want to read.
• Because the discussion is better when it’s a small group.
• Because it is easier to ask questions and say responses.
• Because we can think about the story more, and I think I can improve my English talking skill.  
• We can also learn and know the other groups’ novel.

Here are 4 other questions I asked, and a sampling of student answers:

(1) What reading skills or literature analysis skills did you grow in from taking notes on your own and discussing them with your group?

• Connecting things. Not just to yourself but to other books. Also connecting quotes to signposts.
• Being able to identify more foreshadowing in a book, and being able to extend or disagree on others’ ideas more with my own opinion.

• I became able to think of more detailed things in the book.

• I became able to notice signposts while reading.

• Questioning more of why a character wants or does this, and noticing “Memory Moments” has improved.

Note: “Signposts” refers to the 6 flags for significance in Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading by Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst. “Memory Moments” is one. These are excellent ways to give middle schoolers traction on finding patterns of meaning in literature. See this post for my review.  

(2) What role did you play in your group’s discussions? How did you help yourself and your neighbor learn?

• I contributed to the discussion by talking as much as I can. It helped because we were able to get more ideas from the responses to my ideas.
• I tried to understand others and see their point of view while also seeking to be understood, why I think certain things about a complication/character.
• I tried to start good discussions. And I also tried to get everyone participating.
• I usually led the conversation and I made X do his homework.
• I was the one who forgot the homework and I learned that you should do your homework.

(3) How did your group discussions change over the course of the unit?

• At the beginning of the unit we weren’t talking that much. We were just saying our discussion questions one by one. Later in the unit everyone was trying to be in the discussion.
• At the beginning of the unit: Almost no one extending/piggybacking. Dry conversations. Some people didn’t even try to join the conversation. Later in the unit: Lots of piggybacking/extending, and even respectfully disagreeing. Everyone joining the conversation! 
• At the beginning of the unit we were just talking about questions, and no extending and agreeing. Later in the unit we could talk about signposts like “Aha Moments” and we had deeper questions.
• At the beginning of the unit I was just reading the “reading journal” thing, but later in the unit I was ready for the book talk. 
• At the beginning of the unit we just said our summaries and didn’t really have good questions that would lead to a good discussion. Later in the unit we had good questions and also talked about the signposts.

(4) How did you grow in your discussion skills?

• I learned how to respectfully disagree with others’ opinions, with support for why I disagree.
• I learned to include other group members.
• Leading people to talk about their ideas.
• I learned to connect text to text, text to self, text to world.
• I became more thoughtful.
• Asking good questions, and adding on/connecting to others’ response.
• Actually talking.

I have to admit, I was a little nervous before I read the students' answers. Asking for student feedback always carries an element of risk. I wasn’t positive how they’d respond. But I'm glad I took the risk, both on the book club experiment and on the student feedback. Students were motivated to read and discuss, and they grew in their analysis and discussion skills. And that's a big piece of my vision for how ELA prepares students for college, career, and citizenship!

What about you? What experiments have you done recently? Did you ask for student feedback? If you did, what did you learn?

There Are Plenty of Ways to Learn with Others—Use One!

Here's an example of a free 90-minute learning activity you can participate in!

Have you ever felt like you were going it alone in your classroom or role at school? Like you needed someone to give you a couple of their best ideas, and you could give them a couple of yours, and you could cheer each other on? 

I have. And at a time when I deeply needed such a teaching buddy, I found 176,000 of them—colleagues who came along side me with answers to questions from what books are 6th graders reading to what desks work best in upper elementary classrooms! They cheered for my daily success stories and shared ideas that had worked for them.  

I know that I flourish as a teacher when I am learning as well as teaching, when I am growing in my knowledge of pedagogy and my subject area, when I am experiencing and modeling the transformative learning I want for my students. 

I want all staff at international Christian schools to flourish in terms of this kind of transformative learning. And it is not difficult, expensive, hard to find, or hard to get to. All that is needed is internet access. My deep hope is that staff are experiencing participation in professional/virtual learning communities and in professional organizations.    

I wasn’t experiencing learning with others in March 2020 (think the start of COVID).  As the world shut down, I found myself in a new city in a non-English speaking country, teaching at a new school—and new classes, new age levels, and a new subject. 

I felt alone, a little panicky. Facebook saved my life. Well, maybe not my life, but certainly my professional confidence. In a teaching situation where I needed a community and found it thin on the ground for understandable reasons (everyone was flat out scrambling to figure out the online education thing, and in-person meetings simply weren’t happening), I found it thick online in virtual professional learning communities.    

Facebook groups were especially live-giving:

(1) ELA in the Middle (42.2K members) helped get me back in touch with middle school after nearly 30 years away, raising kids and then teaching high school.   

(2) ESL Teachers (10.5K members) helped me find my feet in a new teaching area, introducing me to thought leaders in the field and sharing a plethora of resources.

(3) Not So Wimpy Fourth Grade Teachers (55.5K members) provided a lot of support for my first foray into elementary teaching (4th and 5th grade ELA), including a free mini-course on teaching grammar and a free give-away I won for a class on teaching writing!  

(4) Creative High School English (24.0K members) provided a discussion of the book In Search of Deeper Learning by Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine, and an ed camp on independent reading.  

(5) Christian Teachers’ Lounge by Teach 4 the Heart (31.5K members) offered specifically Christian support. Through it I’ve gotten a free mini-course on elementary classroom management, a useful stack of prayer cards with a verse on one side and a prayer request on the other, and an online conference with sessions by Dave Stuart Jr. and The Redeemed Reader.   

(6) Patterns of Power Community (11.6K members) offered me a supportive place when I decided to experiment with a reading-embedded way of teaching grammar and writing. Here, I could share my little success stories, with both community members and the textbook writers themselves (!) always chiming in with words of encouragement.    

(7) “Awakened” Educator Book Discussion (932 members) is running just for the month of February. It's a discussion of the book Awakened: Change Your Mindset to Transform Your Teaching (2nd edition) led by the author, Angela Watson. You don’t even have to read the book to participate, though it will deepen your understanding. 

Angela daily posts a summary of a section of the book with significant quotes and a prompt about how you’ve seen that principle at work. Today’s was about how the unconscious biases of confirmation, recency, and negativity can distort our thoughts.

These Facebook groups, though private (meaning that you have to apply to be admitted) are easy to join! Joining usually involves just answering a question about why you want to join. 

And I'm confident there's a group for you. I don’t know how many different groups there are, and I have no idea whether these are the best—they’re just the ones I happened across and have found helpful. I know people have mentioned even more specific special interest groups, like ones for teaching AP literature or even a specific novel, like The Scarlet Letter! 

In addition to Facebook groups, I have also found membership in professional organizations helpful. ASCD (Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development) has a wealth of information about educational practice and curriculum in general that is relevant to any educator at any level. It provides a monthly newsletter, publishes books, and puts on webinars. For my teaching area, NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) keeps me abreast of developments. Both of these organizations have annual membership costs.  

There are also organizations without membership fees, like National Write Center. This is an incredible community that offers not only conversation about writing, but also free webinars. I’ve enjoyed an hour with the American poet Taylor Mali and a 90-minute panel of experts on ChatGPT (recording available here). The next webinar (scheduled for March 14) is “Argument in Service of Civic Reasoning and Discourse.”

   

Maybe you think that you can't participate. 

• Because you teach in a small school with no counterpart. 
• Because your community is limited by mobility, language, or health. 
• Because everyone around you is flat out too busy. 
• Because you have limited funding for attending conventions. 

Good news! If you have internet access (and I'm pretty sure you do), you can still connect to colleagues and professional communities that can support transformational learning for you—the kind of learning that you want to experience so that the students at your school can experience it. 

Bottom line? Do one thing: 

• Join one Facebook group that represents a level, area, or topic you teach.
• Join one professional organization.  
• Join something! 

What about you? Have you ever felt like you were going it alone in your classroom or role at school? What professional/virtual communities are you a part of? What professional organizations are you a member of? What can you do to more consistently experience transformative learning?  

Connecting Literature to Life by Focusing on Resilience

6th graders absorbed in Because of Winn-Dixie

I should learn from my mistakes because I do make the same mistakes over and over. —Middle school student

The world of books can be a vast moral laboratory for watching characters encounter challenges, make choices, relate to others, and experience consequences. Sometimes if we watch a character make a mistake, it will save us making it ourselves. Other times, we find a hero to emulate. 

 
One of my goals is to help middle school students realize this opportunity, first in the novels we read in class, and then in the ones they read independently. With that in mind, I created a book club unit on novels with resilient characters (Committing to a Book Club Experiment). In addition to learning discussion skills and literary analysis skills, students have also been learning about resilience—what it is, and 6 ways to increase it recommended by Mayo Clinic (Student Book Clubs: Learning to Learn Together). 

 
This week Wednesday, students reflected on their protagonist’s resilience, assessed their own resilience, and picked a resilience skill that they wanted to work on. Here are some of the goals students picked:  

• I’m not really good in being hopeful. I do accept that things are in the past, but sometimes I still have late night thoughts on past actions that I regret, and I get why I do that. I would like to work on forgiving and if possible to fix the mistake.
• I want to take care of myself better. To do that, instead of blaming myself for everything, I want to try to think about what I can do to fix the problem.
• I should learn from my mistakes because I do make the same mistakes over and over.

If those 6th and 7th graders can really act on those goals, that would be transformative learning! So I want to capture for myself how students arrived at the point of being able to see themselves so clearly, and what I want to do next to continue supporting their learning.

  
First, students learned some content--in this case, Mayo Clinic’s 6 “skills to endure hardships”: (1) get connected, (2) make every day meaningful, (3) learn from experience, (4) remain hopeful, (5) take care of yourself, and (6) be proactive. (For further reflections on this framework, see my post How Can I More Effectively Help Students Increase Their Resilience?)

Then, students to applied the content to the literature, assessing how resilient the protagonist in their novel is in terms of those 6 skills. I gave the following prompt: 

Think about how your protagonist would respond to the following statements that describe resilient people. Which of the following steps in becoming more resilient does your protagonist need to take? Which are they working on? Give evidence for your answer.

1. Get connected: I have at least one close friend, at least one adult I can talk to, and a community where I feel I belong.
2. Make every day meaningful: Every day I do at least one thing that gives me a sense of accomplishment and helps other people. I set goals and accomplish them.
3. Learn from experience: I think about how I’ve dealt with problems in the past–what has helped and what hasn’t. And I use that thinking to guide what I do the next time I have a problem. 
4. Remain hopeful: Instead of staying mad or sad about the past, I think about what I can do now.
5. Take care of yourself: I eat healthy food, exercise, sleep 9-12 hours every night, do something I enjoy, and have strategies for managing my emotions. 
6. Be proactive: I notice when I’m having a problem. (I don’t hide it or pretend it isn’t happening). Then I make a plan and do something about it. (I don’t feel helpless or just wait for someone else to do something.) 

Finally, I asked them to assess their own resilience. I gave them the following prompt: 

How would you respond to each of the following 6 statements? (A) Make your answer bold. (B) Pick one step to increasing your resilience that you do well. Type it in the box below, and explain what you do well. (C) Pick one step to increasing your resilience that you would like to work on. Type it in the last box, and explain one thing you will do to work on it.

(1) Get connected: I have at least one close friend, at least one adult I can talk to, a relationship with Jesus, and a community where I feel I belong.

• I feel connected.
• I do not feel as connected as I would like.

(2) Make every day meaningful: Every day I do at least one thing that gives me a sense of accomplishment and helps other people. I set goals and accomplish them. I know God made me for a purpose.

• My days are meaningful.
• My days are not as meaningful as I would like.

(3) Learn from experience: I think about how I’ve dealt with problems in the past–what has helped and what hasn’t. And I use that thinking to guide what I do the next time I have a problem. 

• I learn from experience.
• I don’t learn from experience as much as I would like.

(4) Remain hopeful: Instead of staying mad or sad about the past, I think about what I can do now. I can do this because I believe that Jesus forgives me, loves me, and helps me grow into the person He made me to be.

• I am hopeful.
• I am not as hopeful as I would like.

(5) Take care of yourself: I eat healthy food, exercise, sleep 9-12 hours every night, do something I enjoy, and calm my heart by praying to God. 

• I take care of myself.
• I don’t take care of myself as well as I would like.

(6) Be proactive: I notice when I’m having a problem. (I don’t hide it or pretend it isn’t happening). Then I make a plan and do something about it. (I don’t feel helpless or just wait for someone else to do something.) I know the world is broken and sinful, but when I ask, God gives me inner strength, wisdom, and people I can ask for help.

• I am proactive.
• I am not as proactive as I would like. 

I was pleased with the thoughtful discussions of their characters, and with the honesty of their self-assessments. With 2 more weeks left in the unit, I need to plan follow-up activities to help students really implement their goals.

What about you? How do you help students connect literature to life and experience transformative learning?
______________________

P. S. Blog posts related to this one:

• How Can I More Effectively Help Students Increase Their Resilience?: some of my background thinking on resilience
• Student Book Clubs: Learning to Learn Together: how I run the book clubs 
• Committing to a Book Club Experiment: the books I picked

How Can I More Effectively Help Students Increase Their Resilience?

Photo by Hello I'm Nik on Unsplash

A season-ending injury. A friend’s move. A rejection letter from the dream college. A parent’s death. Disappointments, setbacks, and tragedies—some people encounter a truly staggering succession, and no one is exempt. My faith confirms that as fallen people in fallen systems in a fallen world, we don’t escape adversity. It also affirms that God’s original and final intention for his people is wholeness and joy.

Meanwhile, as a teacher I’ve marveled my entire career over how one young person can encounter several large crises and recover while another crumbles under a seemingly smaller crisis. What is it that contributes to that resilience or fragility? What resources does God provide for not just enduring, but thriving in the midst of life’s inevitable challenges and hurts? I want students to flourish in terms of resilient well-being, and part of that is experiencing personal durability in times of crisis.

How can I help students build personal durability? The Internet is rife with advice—a Google search on “becoming more resilient” yielded nearly 60 million results in under a minute, including 1 from Mayo Clinic which lists the following 6 steps:

1. “Get connected.”
2. “Make every day meaningful.”
3. “Learn from experience.”
4. “Remain hopeful.”
5. “Take care of yourself.”
6. “Be proactive.”

These 6 steps fit with what I believe as a Christian:

(1) Get connected: Created in the image of the triune God, humans are made for connection, and as believers, we are deeply, organically connected to each other in the Body of Christ. 

 
(2) Make every day meaningful: Each day is imbued with meaning because God created us with purpose: to love Him, to love our neighbors, and to care for creation.  

(3) Learn from experience: In our walk with God, the Bible frequently urges us to learn from God’s work in the past in order to bolster our faith for today and for the future.  

(4) Remain hopeful: Learning from God’s work in the past gives us a reason for hope. As Timothy Keller says in Hope in Times of Fear, “When we unite with the risen Christ by faith, that future power that is potent enough to remake the universe comes into us” (loc 780).  

(5) Take care of yourself: We care for the whole selves that God has made us, so that our body, mind, and spirit will be ready to do the good works He has prepared for us to do.  

(6) Be proactive: While trusting God, we can also be proactive in doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God. We can do this because we know that God is good though the world is broken, so we are not surprised by trouble, but access the spiritual, social, and physical resources He provides.

As I thought about how these 6 steps fit with my beliefs, I realized that I do incorporate the 6 steps into my classroom practices:

(1) Get connected: I put a high value on healthy relationships with students (A) because they are my neighbors who I have the opportunity to love and (B) because such relationships support learning (see What Type of Relationship with Staff Helps Students Flourish?). I also emphasize collaborative learning because it produces more durable learning and develops the “soft” skills that employers are looking for—and now I also know it builds and strengthens social connections among students that will increase their personal durability.

(2) Make every day meaningful: I choose literature that will help us love our neighbors, and I share case studies of what that looks like in real life—like my family’s adoption of a grandchild. I also try to make daily learning challenging, attainable, and significant—which also helps make every day meaningful.

(3) Learn from experience: Students reflect whenever they finish a major project and also write memoirs about a time they learned something important. My 6th and 7th grade ELA curriculum includes a unit on success and failure (available on Common Lit) which has short stories, poems, and nonfiction about learning through challenges. I also share experiences I’ve learned from. 

(4) Remain hopeful: I think of the reading conference I had earlier this year with a student who had loved A Wish in the Dark by Christina Soontornvat. She was excited about the book’s theme of never losing hope. In response to her excitement, I said, “Hope is so important to humans, isn’t it?” Then I reminded her that Jesus is the one who gives us hope that never lets us down. Psychology counsels optimism because it’s healthy, but psychology can’t give a foundation for hope. And I wonder, “Do I live and talk about that hope that Jesus gives in a winsome way?”

(5) Take care of yourself: I remind students to eat healthy food, go outside, exercise, sleep (9-12 hours for elementary/middle schoolers, 8-10 hours for high schoolers), savor something that gives them joy, still their busy minds before God in prayer. Like a well-watered garden that can withstand a dry spell, a human being whose heart, soul, strength, and mind are healthy can weather stress and recover from it more quickly. I know this has been true for me in stressful times.      

(6) Be proactive: This means identifying problems (rather than denying or minimizing them), making a plan (rather than feeling helpless), and carrying it out. I acknowledge students who take initiative to solve problems—from identifying the spot in the reading that confused them to drawing up their own double-entry journal when they left the print I gave them at school. I use some goal setting for students, and I’d like to use more.  

And now that I’ve identified and reflected Mayo Clinic’s 6 steps, I find that I can now incorporate them into my classroom more intentionally, more articulately, and more frequently in order to help students build their personal durability. For example, right now my 6th and 7th grade ELA class is doing a book club unit on resilience, looking at how the characters in 4 different novels get connected, make every day meaningful, learn from experience, remain hopeful, take care of themselves, and are proactive. As part of this unit, I showed a counter example of proactivity—the “stuck on a broken escalator” video:

Students were whisper-shouting at the screen, “You have feet!” and “Just walk!” At the end of the unit, students will assess the level of their personal durability and identify how they can increase it. 

Note 1: While I chose Mayo Clinic’s 6 steps to resilience to think about, there are many others you could investigate, such as…

• The 7 Cs from Fostering Resilience (A program particularly designed for young people)
• What Is Resilience? Your Guide to Facing Life’s Challenges, Adversities, and Crises (Amit Sood, MD, Everyday Health, 14 Jul 2022)
• Ten Ways to Build Resilience (Kendra Cherry, Very Well Mind, 6 Oct 2022)

Note 2: Part of being proactive is also knowing when professional help is needed and reaching out for that.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay 

What about you?  What’s your perspective on adversity? What helps students build personal durability? How do you help your students build personal durability? How can you more effectively help students build personal durability and flourish in terms of resilient well-being?