Do you really understand what resilience is?

Learning to recover from difficulty

Resilience” – This word is used a lot, especially in reference to children. I challenge you to consider whether you truly understand what the word means. Because if we don’t understand the meaning of resilience, then how can we encourage the development of it?

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We often consider resilience as something we are born with, something that is inherent in us – especially children. “Ah, children are resilient”, we hear a lot! Undoubtedly, there are certain behavioural traits that are inherited via our whakapapa. These traits then interact with our environment to lead us towards or away from resilience. In this equation, genetics does have a role to play, but ultimately the environment is the trump card when we consider resilience development.

As a teacher your ability to influence resilience development is second only to the home environment. For this reason, it is essential that you understand what it is, and how to encourage it.

You are possibly thinking right now – argh! Another thing to fit into my day… I have so much to do already. I don’t need more on my plate!

Fair enough. But what if I told you that you are already doing so much resilience development with your students that really you just need to be more aware of what you are doing and more explicit about the process; especially for those children who display less (or no) resilience?

Resilience is defined as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness”. Recover means to return to a state of calm, where we can be more in control of ourselves. If we can enable our students to be more resilient, we are arming them with the capacity to go through life exhibiting more control, rather than acting impulsively. An incredibly important skill! So how can we learn to ‘recover from difficulty’?

It is the same as when we want to learn to read, or to throw a ball; we learn by practicing. We need to repeat the desired behaviour; within the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD); with scaffolding, encouragement and positive feedback.

But how can we practice ‘recovering from difficulty’? Imagine the student is trying to spell a word, or work out how to unscrew the lid off a container of glue, or is doing running practice for the cross country. During each of these scenarios, they might get frustrated or annoyed, or begin to give up. This is the ‘difficulty’. You as the teacher offer advice, support, and encouragement – whatever is needed for t
he student to calm down again i.e. ‘recover’.

It is important to remember that learning happens much faster when we experience success. So ensuring the student gets support when they are experiencing their difficulty is important. If the student gets over-frustrated and loses their temper, or gives up because they lose faith in themselves, this is not learning to recover. However, it is also important for the student to do as much of the process on their own as possible, as this is the ‘practice’ part of the learning. This is where really knowing your students is going to help.

The last point on how to best create an environment where resilience will be learnt is to encourage the practice. This piece of advice is almost counter-intuitive because the suggestion is to increase the number of times students encounter difficulty. Remember, resilience is learning how to recover from difficulty, and practice is essential. Therefore, we need to increase the frequency of difficult moments in order for the student to get the most practice. Again, I am sure you do this all the time, if you have a bit of a think about it. The point is to be more aware of it and feed back to the student how well they did when they ‘recovered’ from their difficulty.

You as teachers are able to make a difference to our children’s level of resilience. This in turn will make a significant impact on the way they are able to live their lives, and therefore affect the lives around them. So go forth and create difficult situations – but be there to support the practice of recovery!

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Kathryn Berkett


Kathryn is an expert in using neuroscience and physiology to assist us to better regulate ourselves. She is committed to helping teachers and parents to work better with children, youth, colleagues and clients. Kathryn runs sessions around this subject, supporting teachers to understand different ways to assist children to get better at staying calm. www.KBKonsulting.co.nz