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?