A startling truth
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. Without a willingness to stay engaged research tells us that we tend to revert prematurely into defensive mode which, although it maintains our security it does nothing to increase mastery. Loss of resilience breeds a brittle and impatient attitude.
All these beliefs and anxieties can affect anyone. The massive disruption to life caused by COVID 19 will have affected all students in one way or another. So, regardless of a school’s home-learning offer or students’ learning attitudes before lockdown, all students will have been affected; they will be different on returning to school.
This resource is designed to help teachers to enable their students re-energise and secure those learning behaviours that contribute to being a Resilient learner.
The resource draws on ideas teachers have developed for building their students’ resilience. It offers you rapid access to classroom-focused material that will help to re-energise, revive and develop students’ emotional learning behaviours.
A simple framework for a wide range of activity
Re-energising Your Learners’ Resilience addresses four aspects of Resilience in students. For each of those aspects, it offers four practical packages of ideas and activities; the packages focus in turn on four aspects of teaching practice.
This four-by-four framework is presented in a simple grid, illustrated below.
Clicking on one of the sixteen yellow cells will take you into the corresponding package: there you will find five activities to choose from. The pattern of the five activities is consistent across all sixteen packages, so you will quickly become familiar with the approach.
The four aspects of Resilience are
- Dealing with being stuck
- Managing distractions, ensuring continuing engagement with learning.
- Rising to challenge
- Working towards goals
Aspects of teaching and classroom culture are described as
- Things to give away: transferring responsibility for learning to students, offering them more control
- Things to say: using language that helps pupils understand learning as a process rather than a performance, and take more control of their own learning
- Things to do every day: examples of the kind of classroom routines and activities that will nurture resilient learners
- Things to display: the look and feel of a classroom, its walls and reward systems, that can serve to strengthen students’ resilience in learning.
How the resource is designed.
Take a closer look at the framework for re-energising you learners’ resilience
Download the image, click ‘enable editing’ to see more detailThe framework also gives hints about monitoring what you are doing and how students are reacting and changing.
Possible changes in classroom practice (green cells at the bottom) summarise the sort of things you will be doing. Worth checking now and then.
What you want learners to be like (blue cells on the right) summarise the sort of changes you will want to look out for in your learners over the next few months.
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