Topic 11: Resilience
What is a teacher's role in supporting resilience in general?
Resilience is the ability to continue, endure, fight, in the face of adversity.
Resilience has many benefits for a teen: it teaches independence, persistence, perseveration, and is also high correlated with higher likelihood of maintaining healthy relationships (Bernard, 1995). So how can a teacher support and foster this quality in his students?
One way that resilience can be nurtured is by showing high expectations, as illustrated by Dr Sam Goldstein's TedTalk video.
It is clear that my role as a teacher is not to teach resilience but to rather nurture it; studies show that resilience is a trait most prominent in children with positive relationships with parents (Bernard, 1995) which suggests that it is something which is acquired through building trust. Then maybe, having high expectations of students simulates positive encouragement not unlike the kind that encouraging parents give to their kids to build trust.
Ultimately, as a teacher, my role in supporting resilience is simply that: to support its propagation through the core of my students' personalities by showing my students I have high expectations of them. Resilience is a useful tool for not only later in life but also, more pertinently, now in their adolesence where they need it most to emerge from their troubles in a healthy and constructive manner.
Additional Resources
1. Article about the development of resilience: http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=search.displayRecord&UID=2007-07583-001
2. YouTube video about positive mental health: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v9XeApSYNY
3. YouTube video about teen resilience stories: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJCF-yyMHCo
4. Article about predictors of resilience in adolescent mothers: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J039v10n03_02
References
Benard, B. (1995). Fostering Resilience in Children. ERIC Digest.
The Power of Resilience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isfw8JJ-eWM