Developing resilience in students is a popular goal in many schools today, as more and more research illustrates that effort and emotional intelligence (EQ) are perhaps more important than IQ in subsequent success, achievement, and happiness.
The article resonated with me because it connected resilience development in students (and the author also include care and compassion as vital habits and attitudes for kids) to the classroom climate qualities we as teachers create.
Robert Brooks (some of you may be familiar with his book, Raising Resilient Children) feels an essential quality in any classroom is appropriate empowerment in students. His research shows that care, compassion, and resilience in students all begin with them believing and experiencing that they make and are making a difference in their lives, in their schools, and in their classrooms.
Brooks points out that often when we become frustrated with our students’ behavior, attitude, and/or academic performance, many of us opt for a more controlling classroom, which doesn’t foster student empowerment and rarely improves student performance.
Brooks talks about how seemingly small things—like a morning hello and smile—can have both short and long-term benefits on students.
Brooks knows how difficult teaching is, but his article is a reminder, especially as we begin the second half of the school year, of how much impact we have and how much we matter and make a difference in the lives and future of our children.
Joe
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Early in his career Dr. Robert Brooks became the principal of a school in a locked-door unit at a psychiatric hospital for children who were severely disturbed and whose behavior showed their turmoil. Within the first few months, Brooks felt demoralized and dreaded work each day.
“I had a very negative mindset,” Brooks said. Brooks is now a psychologist at Harvard Medical School. He has spent his career researching how to help develop resilience in children and adults.
Brooks’ experiences gave him insight and empathy for how difficult teaching can be. When faced with so many challenging students, he felt like nothing he or his staff did would make a difference for how much kids learned or their behavior.
“What I realized is when you feel you are losing control in a classroom, you become more controlling,” Brooks said. But as he and his staff tried to make their students do exactly as they said, they only behaved worse and learned less.
Brooks tries to remember how he felt in his lowest moments. But he has found that often discouraged educators respond to his message about helping students to develop mindsets for caring and compassion when they hear about the research.
The common denominator among kids who overcome great hardship to succeed is the presence of a “charismatic adult” in their lives, an adult from whom children gather strength. And most often that person is a teacher.
“Everything you do in the classroom can have a major impact on a child’s life, not only in the classroom but later, too,” Brooks said.
He stressed that teachers can have meaningful impact with even small gestures of kindness, dignity, and respect for students. Greeting students by name at the door and smiling are two easy things that students themselves identified as making a big difference in creating a welcoming environment. Spending a little time getting to know kids individually also goes a long way.
At the psychiatric hospital, Brooks began to notice some important practices that made the most difference for school climate, student motivation, and the staff’s ability to build relationships with students.
“One key ingredient I found is that students will feel more motivated if they have some say over what happens in the classroom,” Brooks said.
Another major finding: “Kids will be more caring and compassionate and resilient in those environments where they feel they are making a difference,” Brooks said.
Sometimes teachers push back against this idea, wondering why students who haven’t finished their own work should be given jobs helping others. Brooks responds that every student should feel like he or she is contributing to the class, and when that type of environment is fostered, motivation flourishes. “Caring leads to resilience,” Brooks said.
Brooks also began to realize that part of the reason he had been so negative about his students was a tendency to focus on their deficits. He began to look for their strengths instead, what he calls “islands of competence.”
“If you just focus on what’s wrong with kids and you don’t spend as much time on what their strengths or beauty are, kids know that,” he said. It’s hard for a child to have a resilient mindset when he believes everyone thinks he’s bad.
Teachers often complain about a lack of student motivation, but Brooks cautions educators not to jump to conclusions about students. No student wants to fail; humans have a natural “drive for effectiveness,” and the unmotivated affect some students show may really be “avoidance motivation.”
“It’s not that they’re not motivated,” Brooks said, “they’re just not motivated to do what we would like them to do.” Instead, they put all their energy into avoiding work that might lead them to fail, or that they don’t find relevant to their lives. There are lots of reasons kids might be motivated to avoid, but calling them lazy or lacking in perseverance or grit is not likely to improve attitudes.
“Once you say a kid is unmotivated or doesn’t care, you’re already reflecting a mindset in which you’re blaming the child, whether you mean to or not,” Brooks said. It’s far more productive to ask questions about why a student might be avoiding work. Getting rid of the accusatory stance will actually free educators to think more creatively about how to help students find purpose, make them feel like they belong, and help them see their own strengths.
Brooks acknowledges that this is not easy work. Some students take a long time to warm up to adults, often pushing a potential ally away just when it seems like progress is being made. And it’s very difficult for teachers not to take behavior personally, to continue reaching out and finding student strengths. Brooks recommends a few activities to help teacher develop “stress hardiness” and ward against burnout.
Reflecting on why they became teachers in the first place can be an effective way to gain perspective. Try to reflect on the qualities of your favorite teachers. Would your own students describe you the same way?
Resilience in teachers is just as important as it is in students. Teachers who are less stressed are able to see changes in the school as inevitable. They seek opportunities to learn from change, rather than seeing it only as a challenge. Resilient people also tend not to blame other people or themselves when things go wrong. Instead, they look for proactive ways to improve the situation.
“Resilient people basically look at what they have control over and they don’t waste time on what they don’t,” Brooks said. So, for example, a teacher has no control over how prepared students are when they enter her classroom, or what kind of experiences they’ve had at home. But she can control how she interacts with those students, so she focuses there.
“It’s not easy to change mindsets,” Brooks admits, but he’s optimistic about the power such a shift can have on school culture, and on educators’ ability to grow mindsets of caring and compassion in their students. “One of the most important things you can do is model compassion,” he said. “Do you model caring? Do you make every child feel they belong in the classroom?”
He laments what he views as a false dichotomy between social and emotional skills and academics in classrooms. He often hears from teachers that the strategies he advocates take time away from academics, but he firmly believes students won’t learn without attention to these issues. Increasingly, schools and districts are agreeing with him, putting more emphasis on non-academic skills for school and life success.
“You have to have a sense of meaning or purpose because if that’s not there we’re going to have kids who say that achievement and GPA is more important than compassion and caring,” Brooks said.
That may already be happening. One national survey of youth across the country found that they valued their own personal achievement above caring for others and they believed that their parents did, too. Brooks hopes that if every educator and parent focuses on helping students develop mindsets for caring, they can reverse that trend.
