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These are articles were very helpful in grounding me in what I can and cannot change. I cannot necessarily change the levels of supports that my students get at home, which is a key factor in resiliency, but I can work harder to build community and supports within my classroom. Further, while I might not be able to change entire school systems, there are things that I can do to advocate for my students with the school system so that they know they have someone fighting for them. I also found Spellman's ideas about systems thinking, metacognition, and scenario thinking.
I do realize being almost done with my first year teaching that I need to work on more explicitly helping my students in their thinking and problem-solving. Spellman's strategies give me ideas for next year.

I also think it's important to realize that I have already been doing some of these things: I give autonomy as much as possible, and I think one of the things I've been most successful on this year has been in providing students with a community within my classroom. This makes me hopeful that even if my students don't leave high school being an English major, or speaking perfect English, they have had a change to bolster their resiliency so they might succeed in whatever they want to do.

Many of the suggestions for how one can improve their students' resilience is through SEL practices. In PPSD, many of our students are lacking several parts of the foundation for resilience, due to their past trauma, and because of studies showing that students of color tend to have fewer resilience supports. It is encouraging to note, though, that encouraging resilience does not have to be something grand, or something that takes hours and hours to plan. Instead it seems that there are small steps that can be taken every day to raise students' self-esteem and help them become students who can be successful in the face of adversity--I know our students have more than their fair share of that.

This also feels like a call to action. I know there are many wonderful, inclusive teachers in my school. I also know there are teachers who make students feel uncomfortable and unwelcome; there are teachers who will say loudly that frequently that they never want to teach ELLs and they never want to teach 9th graders. I've been asked if a student of mine who is a frequent hall-walker contributes to class or just "takes up space." We must do better by our students who have already faced traumas. We must do better to foster self-esteem, value, problem-solved, and community so that our students can go from being defeated to resilient.

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Morrison, Gale M., and Megan Redding Allen. “Promoting Student Resilience in School Contexts.” Theory Into Practice, vol. 46, no. 2, 2007, pp. 162–69. JSTOR, ht

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Promoting Student Resilience in School Contexts

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Promoting Student Resilience in School Contexts

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Morrison and Redding explain five categories of what teachers can do to promote resilience in students. They also give examples of specific interventions teachers can use:

1. Autonomy:
a. adopt learner-centered practices
b. involve students in making rules

2. Sense of Purpose
a. capitalize on student interest
b. provide cultural relevance

3. Social Competence
a. allow students to help each other
b. provide cooperative learning strategies
c. mixed groupings

4. Problem-Solving
a. teach cognitive strategies
b. role play social problem-solving strategies

5. Achievement Motivation:
a. provide student choice
b. make activities in ZPD
c. communicate high but realistic expectations

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Spellman, Katie V. “Educating for Resilience in the North: Building a Toolbox for Teachers.” Ecology and Society, vol. 20, no. 1, 2015. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.

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Educating for Resilience in the North: Building a Toolbox for Teachers

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Educating for Resilience in the North: Building a Toolbox for Teachers

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Spellman argues there are three main subjects that should be explicitly taught as an intervention to promote resilience in students: systems thinking, metacognition, and scenarios thinking.

Spellman defines systems thinking as realizing that events, ideas, and topics are all interrelated to each other and to other topics. This can also tie back to connections between ideas in class and students' personal experience. Spellman suggests using concept maps, systems-drawing, and computer modeling to help with this.

Metacognition and encouraging students to be thoughtful about their own thinking can help them problem solve, and be more self-aware. Spellman suggests using metacognition journaling and images to help students learn how to think about their thinking.

Spellman posits that students tend to have a hard time thinking about events in the future, and suggests that if students can think more about current actions and how they relate to future consequences, they will be able to have more resiliency if they see some positive end in sight. Spellman suggests using backwards and forwards timelines to see how events impact futures, and to use "future wheels" to construct future possibilities based on current events taking place.

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Williams, Joseph, et al. “ACADEMICALLY RESILIENT, LOW-INCOME STUDENTS’ PERSPECTIVES OF HOW SCHOOL COUNSELORS CAN MEET THEIR ACADEMIC NEEDS.” Professional School

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Academically Resilient, Low-Income Students' Perspectives of How School Counselors Can Meet Their Academic Needs

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Academically Resilient, Low-Income Students' Perspectives of How School Counselors Can Meet Their Academic Needs

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In a study of high school students, Williams et al. found that these seemingly simple interventions can help build resiliency in students:
1. Show students you care
2. Challenge personal biases about poor students
3. Be visible and accessible
4. Nurture students' aspirational capital
5. Leverage students' social capital
6. Refer students and family to needed resources
7. Teach life skills

Although this study was specifically geared toward school counselors, I think this has a great deal of relevance for any school personnel. While these seem like things we should all be doing for our students, this provides a helpful frame of what we should be doing with intentionality and purpose.

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What can we do to build resiliency? (Interventions)

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What can we do to build resiliency? (Interventions)

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Resiliency is the ability to adapt when faced with stress or adversity. Resilient students are able to handle stressors and continue moving forward. This does not mean that resilient students never experience stress, or never experience failure; rather that they are able to deal with failure and stressors and still be overall successful. This is important especially in our school district (PPSD) since most students suffer from one form of trauma or another. Our students need to be resilient in order to be successful.

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Downey, Jayne A. “Indispensable Insight: Children’s Perspectives on Factors and Mechanisms That Promote Educational Resilience.” Canadian Journal of Education /

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Indispensable Insight: Children's Perspectives on Factors and Mechanisms that Promote Educational Resilience

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Indispensable Insight: Children's Perspectives on Factors and Mechanisms that Promote Educational Resilience

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This study was very interesting as it asked students directly what factors they believed to contribute to their resiliency.

Downey found three categories of protective factors: personal protective factors, family protective factors, and community protective factors. Downey found eight factors that students believed to contribute to resiliency: intelligence, feelings, behaviors, home environment, family assistance, school support, community connections, and organized programs.

Overall, this study showed 1. that students are capable of the reflection required to identity resiliency factors and 2. the study emphasized the need for meaningful connections in multiple contexts.

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Wasonga, Teresa, et al. “Ethnicity, Gender and Age: Predicting Resilience and Academic Achievement among Urban High School Students.” American Secondary Educati

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Ethnicity, Gender, and Age: Predicting Resilience and Academic Achievement Among Urban High School Students 

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Ethnicity, Gender, and Age: Predicting Resilience and Academic Achievement Among Urban High School Students 

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Wasonga, et al. conducted a study in an urban high school to test whether ethnicity, gender, and age are factors that affect resiliency and academic achievement.

Their study found that ethnicity has an enormous impact on resilience and academic achievement. These differences, according to Wasonga et al are based on availability of nine resources: Home Meaningful Participation, Home High Expectations, Home Caring Relationships, School Meaningful Participation, School High Expectations, School Caring Relationship, Peer Caring Relationships, Peer High Expectations, and Community Caring Relationships.

This study found:
1. Asian students saw themselves as having Home Meaningful Participation
2. Black students saw themselves as having Home Meaningful Participation and Home High Expectations.
3. Hispanic students saw themselves as having School Caring relationships, School Meaningful Participation, and Home High Expectations.
4. White students saw themselves as having Peer High Expectations, Peer Caring Relationships, Community Meaningful Participation, Home Caring Relationships, Community High Expectations, and Community Caring Relationships.
5. There was little variance between genders (females do slightly better on standardized tests)
6. There was little variance between ages.

Wasonga et al. stresses the importance of school purposefully and explicitly building a sense of community, as many students don't feel as though they have this already, and community was found to be a strong predictor for resilience. This is especially important in diverse schools, as students of color tend to have fewer resources to support resilience; instead schools must create these for students who need them.

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McMillan, James H., and Daisy F. Reed. “At-Risk Students and Resiliency: Factors Contributing to Academic Success.” The Clearing House, vol. 67, no. 3, 1994, pp

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At Risk Students and Resiliency: Factors Leading to Student Success

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At Risk Students and Resiliency: Factors Leading to Student Success

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McMillan and Reed name four factors that might affect a student's resiliency: individual attributes, positive use of time, family factors, and school factors.

Individual attributes tend to form in early childhood. Individual attributes that contribute positively to resiliency are intrinsic motivation and a belief that the world is a largely positive place. (This stops students from feeling hopeless even when things do go wrong.) One sub-factor of individual attributes that helps enormously in resiliency is having a growth mindset.

Positive use of time refers to students who are engaging in healthy activities outside of school, such as sports, clubs, or healthy hobbies. These help with resiliency, as they contribute to students' self-esteem.

Family factors refers to students' home lives and their relationships with their family. Although McMillan and Reed note that family composition does not seem to have a significant role, students who are close with at least one parental figure tend to be more resilient.

School factors refers to students interactions with and relationships in school. McMillan and Reed note that while familial supports aid in resiliency, students also need support outside of the home structure. When students have teachers or support staff that they feel are invested in them, and they can talk to, they are more likely to be resilient.