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?   
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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?