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Are your learners flagging?

Are they finding learning tough?

Is it possible to re-energise your learners’ resilience?

A startling truth

Did you know, learning is impossible without resilience: that tendency to be ready, willing and able to lock onto learning – knowing how to work through difficulties when the pressure mounts or the going gets tough.  Loss of resilience breeds a brittle and impatient attitude.

All these beliefs and anxieties can affect anyone. The massive disruption to education caused by COVID 19  and the growing hardships from the rising cost of living has meant many children have become disconnected from their former patterns of learning. Even the keenest are likely to have lost their edge of concentration while others are feeling adrift and appear unwilling to learn at all. Signs of stress such as anxiety, recklessness, depression and self-doubt, are likely to show themselves, and learning for many will have become a challenge – their Resilience being a casualty.

We know from research that resilience is the foundation of emotional tolerance and that without resilience in one form or another, learning is impossible. Time lost to learning cannot easily be recovered, catch-up is proving elusive.

But research also shows that a resilient frame of mind can be nurtured and developed by engaging classroom cultures tended by thoughtful teachers. It takes time but the sooner it starts the sooner the benefits start to show, with often surprising quick wins.

To help bridge the resilience gap we have recently put together a resource dedicated to  building students’ resilience.

Re-energising Your Learners’ Resilience

Based on a simple framework offering a wide range of activity

Re-energising Your Learners’ Resilience addresses;

• four aspects of Resilience in students, across
• four levels of growth, with
• practical packages of ideas, across
• four aspects of teaching practice.

This four-by-four framework is presented in a simple grid, illustrated below.

How the resource is designed.

To help a school make the most of the ‘Re-energising‘ resource leaders will need to think about not only its potential in the classroom but how, at an operational level, it will best marry with the school’s beliefs and operating systems; how they can manage the why, the how, the where and the when questions to make it work across the school.

So we have also put together a resource for school leaders titled:

Re-energising resilience, support for leadership teams

Seven questions (and answers)

1. How many activities/ideas does the teachers’ resource give access to?

➡️   The resource has 110 big ideas. 25 to 30 for each of the four aspects of re-energising resilience.

2. Is this just a load of worksheets?

➡️   Not a worksheet in sight! These ideas are about deeper and more exciting ideas rather than disposable child-friendly worksheets. They touch on the whole culture of the classroom

3. Who can use the resource?

➡️   At the school’s choice, we will enrol every classroom practitioner (teachers and support staff) in the school.

4. Are the ideas practical for all age groups across the school?

➡️   Yes, all the ideas come from and have been tried out in schools. All age ranges are catered for as there is also a Secondary school version.

5. Will my school be able to afford it?

➡️   Yes, we think so — the price starts at £250 for a typical single-form entry primary school. The leaders’ support package is available at no extra cost.

6. How long will we have access — is it an annual subscription?

➡️   The resource will be made available for 2 years, after which you can renew for a reduced fee.

7. If we like these ideas, are there more of the same?

➡️   Yes indeed, this is just the tip of a big iceberg. Browse the ‘About BLP‘ and Professional Development pages for the big picture, or dip into Publications for more tasters.

But where do you start and which order of 7-S features/questions work towards the best answer? Here are our ideas:

Question 1. What’s worrying us at present? What’s happening in school that doesn’t fit with our Shared values.

• this itch of concern or dissatisfaction might include both students’ and teachers’ be

• haviours. E.G. A lack of resilience in students; Teachers hanging on to their ‘lockdown teaching behaviours’; Teaching largely from the tape denoted square at the front.

Question 2. What do we want things to be like? Which shared values do we need to restore or even amend?

• can we describe to ourselves how we want students to be? What does robust resilience actually look like? How can we enable teachers to better engage with and extend the learning of students?

Question 3. How can we solve/right these issues and move forward? Is this basically a staff development issue? Is there any advice/guidance out there that would be worth tapping into?

Question 4 What are our existing systems for organising CPD?

• How do we use directed time? Are these systems delivering desired outcomes?

Question 5

Question 6

Question 7

My suggestions

Question 1. Do we have an agreed understanding of the problems we face and a shared vision for how we would like things to be different? How do we achieve buy-in to these changes? Do these changes sit well with our existing whole-school values?

Question 2. What will be our strategy for achieving these changes? How will we go about it? What resources will we need? What will be the timescales?

Question 3. What current systems would we use to accommodate this change strategy…directed time, meeting patterns, agendas? Are there any tweaks we need to make to our current systems?

Question 4. How will our existing leadership structures support this? Which structures might need adapting? Who will lead on these changes?

Question 5. What sort of leadership / management and teaching styles will be needed to support these changes?

Question 6. Do all of our staff and students have the skills to achieve the necessary changes in classroom practice? How do we get a baseline measure of these skills on which we can build?

Question 7. How will we ensure that our approach to staff development supports these changes?

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This resource is a companion to the online resource for teachers. It is designed to help senior leaders draw up an appropriate change management plan to ensure success.