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?

Student Book Clubs: Learning to Learn Together

I’m reading over 6th and 7th graders’ reflections on their book club discussion reflections, and I’m delighted. The Winn-Dixie group has noticed all on their own that Winn-Dixie’s “pathological fear” of lightning is a strange contrast to his usual calm disposition, and they’re predicting that it is going to come up again later in the book. The Wonder group comments that they did a better job of piggybacking on other member’s comments. 

The Caterpillar Summer group noted that Macon’s words about half of life being just showing up are coming up again and again, so it might be connected both to the past mystery of what happened between the mom and her father—and to the current mystery of why Macon seems so gruff. And the Dan Unmasked group said, “We had such a great discussion today that we weren’t even finished when our time was up!” 

We are 2 weeks into our first book club experiment, and it’s going well! Students are half-way through their books, and they are growing in their discussion skills, their literary analysis skills, and their understanding of resilience.

Their first task was to work together to divide their book up into 18 assignments and report their decision to me. Most of them took the total number of pages and divided by 18 and said they were done. I said, “If that's what you want. You’re really going to just stop randomly in the middle of a chapter?” “Oh,” they responded, and went back to discuss it some more. I think they’ll appreciate the work teachers put into dividing up assignments a little more!  

Since then, we start each day with a 10-minute lesson on the day’s topic. It might be... 

• A discussion skill (like piggybacking, or respectfully disagreeing).
• A literary analysis skill (such as a Notice and Note signpost like “Again and Again” or a literary term like conflict or foreshadowing). 
• Content on how to build resilience (like getting connected or being proactive). 

Next they take their books and journals (see below for the generic journal page and examples of how different groups used it) and move into their groups. There, they apply the focus lesson in their discussion and talk about the thinking on last night’s reading that they held in their journal. After that, they reflect on the day’s discussion (see end of post for reflection) and turn the journal page and the reflection in to me. 

Finally, they have 10 minutes to get started on their next reading. (For this daily schedule as well as for the discussion lessons and reflection sheet, I am indebted to Lesley Roessing's Talking Texts: A Teacher's Guide to Book Clubs across the Curriculum.)

What do I do while students discuss? The first week I wandered around the classroom, listening in to various discussions, noting what was going well, what misunderstandings were happening, and what skills needed more guidance, intervening on the spot or in the next day’s focus lesson. The second week I spent a whole discussion sitting in on each group. I’d meant to just observe, but I found it was a really important time to give some specific instruction and modeling. Next week I hope to wander again.

In addition to watching the students grow in their discussion and analysis skills, I’ve been kind quietly geeking out about how amazingly well the novels are illustrating what I’ve been learning about resilience. You see, I just picked them to go with Wonder, which half of the class this year had already read. So I thought that resilience is a topic that interests me, I picked a bunch of really good books with protagonists that overcome challenges, and I did some research (see Mayo Clinic’s “Resilience: Build skills to endure hardship”). It seemed like it would fit the books pretty well. 

Then came the actual lessons. The first week we learned about the importance of social connectedness to resilience. This week we learned about the importance of being proactive. I showed students the “stuck on a broken escalator” video as a counter example. Before class the next day, I was reading the assigned section from Dan Unmasked, and both skills—getting connected and being proactive—are mentioned on the same page (202)! 

Here's how it happens: Ollie, Dan, and Courtney have brainstormed a list of possible endings to the story they are writing, and now they are winnowing down the choices. When they are down to the last 3, they eliminate the ending where a new group of characters shows up out of the blue, because, Ollie says, “You can’t always wait for somebody else to fix your problems, you know?” (Bing-bong: proactivity!) Then they eliminate the ending where the protagonist goes it alone because Courtney and Dan simultaneously reach the conclusion that teamwork is required. (Bing-bong: social connectedness!)  

We have 2 more weeks left. I’m really intrigued to see how the books continue to fit with the 4 more steps to resilience that I got from Mayo Clinic: make every day meaningful, learn from experience, remain hopeful, and take care of yourself. I’m also looking forward to mixing the groups together to discuss connections among their books, especially as to how their characters build resilience.  

What about you? Have you tried book clubs with your students? If so, what have you and your students learned through the experience?

P. S. Here's an example, mentioned at the top of the post, of the discussion reflection students do each day:

Detecting Patterns

Thursday I got to regale my 6th and 7th graders with a grandkid tale while reading them a picture book. It was hilarity with a point: the middle schoolers realized they were much more sophisticated readers than a preschooler. Then I told them about my adult daughter's chat message about a novel she’d just finished: “No one to discuss it with! Just finished and I have questions!!” Literature has a variety of levels of complexity—some challenge preschoolers, some challenge middle schoolers, and some challenge adults. Meeting the challenge can be fun. And there are tools for helping meet the challenge at every level. Here’s how those levels came together for me last week and culminated in a good reading lesson.

Different book, but you get the idea of what our reading times look like

Preschool Level:
Earlier in the week I was reading Getting Dressed with Lily and Milo to my grandson. (Though living on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean, we have regular online reading times using Readeo.com.) The interesting thing was how much scaffolding it took for my grandson to notice and understand the contrasting pattern of the simple story. 

It starts with Milo, the little brother mouse character, fully dressed and ready to go outside. The text narrates Lily, the big sister rabbit character, choosing (for example, green, pink, or striped socks) and putting on each item of clothing, page by page. Meanwhile, the illustrations also show, without any text, Milo taking off an item on each page, so that by the time Lily is ready to go outside and play, Milo is not.

At first, my grandson didn’t even notice the Milo illustration, being fully focused on the Lily illustration that was described by the text. When I asked him what Milo was doing, he answered, “Putting his coat on!” “Hmm,” I said, “it does look like he could be putting his coat on. But if we look back at the page before—look he has his coat on already. So what is he doing here?” “Taking his coat off!” 

The second time he didn't notice the Milo illustration on his own either. I prompt him again, and again he answered, “Putting his boots on!” After repeating the same procedure of looking back to the previous picture where Milo has his boots on, my grandson recognized that Milo is taking them off.  The third time I had to prompt him to look at Milo, but he had the pattern then—“He’s taking his socks off!” And the fourth time, he went straight to the Milo illustration, shrieking with laughter. 

It fascinated my how much coaching it took for a preschooler to notice a pattern that had seemed so obvious to me at first glance, how gradually he mastered it, and how delighted he was once he did.

Expert Level:
My phone lit up with a message from my adult daughter: “Have you read Night of the Living Rez?” I knew it was a collection of short stories set on a Penobscot 

reservation in Maine that had made many "Best Books of 2022" lists. I couldn’t pass up an opportunity like that, so I got the book and tore through it. It was a tough read. I struggled to find the hope and compassion reviewers mentioned finding in the midst of trauma, dysfunction, and despair—though I do believe that love listens to all the stories of all our neighbors. It took me over half of the book to even realize that the stories shared the same main character as a child, young person, and adult (though not in chronological order, and called by different names). Then I had to look back for the patterns: What was the chronological order, and why did the author decide to put them in this order?

Middle School Level:
As my students returned from Christmas break for a new term, I wanted to introduce them to their fourth signpost from Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading by Beers and Probst (one of my professional books from last summer): Again and Again. When you notice a word, phrase, image, or event coming up over and over, stop and ask yourself, “Why might the author bring this up again and again?” You’ll probably learn something about character, conflict, and theme. I’d planned to use Langston Hughes’ short story “Thank You, M’am” as the whole-class lesson to prepare students to use the signpost in their book clubs on resilience which will begin this week. 

Suddenly I put it all together. What is so fantastic about Beers and Probst’s signposts is that they give readers with some sophistication in reading—like my middle schoolers who could easily recognize the pattern in Getting Dressed with Lily and Milo—the tools that more sophisticated readers--like my daughter and me--naturally use, possibly without being able to articulate what it was that alerted them to stop and notice and note. After the hilarity of the picture book and grandkid story, students did a good job searching out the Again and Again patterns in “Thank You, M’am,” and I look forward to seeing how they do with it as they begin their book clubs this week.

How about you? What kinds of questions do you ask when you are reading challenging material? What patterns do you notice? How does it help? How do you help less sophisticated readers ask good questions and notice important patterns?