Building Resilience in Students

This week's article summary is Building Resilience in Students, and it's a continuation of the past two summaries about developing student character.

As this week’s article attests, developing executive functioning skills in students is less about the direct teaching of skills like self-control and more about creating a classroom climate/culture that is nurturing, challenging, and consistent.

Infant brains naturally develop within an environment of warmth, care, and safety. Just as we discussed during Preplanning, the need to belong and be cared for is innate. Within a safe, caring environment an infant’s brain begins to develop its parts that govern executive functioning skills like resilience. As we know, this is a low process, and the brain’s prefrontal cortex isn’t fully formed until  late teens (for girls) and early 20s (for boys).

Equally important, classrooms need the attributes adults crave in the workplace: a sense of purpose, opportunities to grow and learn, a collaborative community, and the latitude to be autonomous and independent. With these qualities, non-cognitive skills needed for success develop.

We talked in Preplanning about embracing a both/and mindset in the classroom. This article supports the interrelation between cognitive and non-cognitive skill development in kids—an enduring strength of Trinity!

Joe

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Academic achievement researchers have been studying a set of personal qualities—often referred to as non-cognitive skills, or character strengths—that include resilience, conscientiousness, optimism, self-control, and grit.

These capacities generally aren’t captured by standardized tests, but they seem to make a big difference in the academic success of children.

Yet nobody has found a reliable way to teach kids to be grittier or more resilient.

And those teachers who are best able to engender non-cognitive abilities in their students often do so without really “teaching” these capacities the way one might teach math or reading—indeed, they often do so without ever saying a word about them in the classroom.

What is emerging is a new idea: that qualities like grit and resilience are not formed through the traditional mechanics of “teaching”; instead, they are shaped by several specific environmental forces, both in the classroom and in the home.

 For most children, the skill-development process leading up to kindergarten generally works the way it’s supposed to: Calm, consistent, responsive interactions in infancy with parents create neural connections that lay the foundation for a healthy array of attention and concentration skills.

Early warmth and responsiveness send the signals: You’re safe; life is going to be fine. Let down your guard; the people around you will protect you and provide for you. Be curious about the world; it’s full of fascinating surprises. These messages trigger adaptations in children’s brains that allow them to slow down and consider problems and decisions more carefully, to focus their attention for longer periods, and to more willingly trade immediate gratification for promises of long-term benefits.

The guiding theory behind much of the school discipline practiced in the United States today—and certainly behind the zero-tolerance, suspension-heavy approach that has dominated since the 1990s—is behaviorism, which is grounded in the idea that humans respond to incentives and reinforcement. If we get positive reinforcement for a certain behavior, we’re likely to do it more; if we get negative reinforcement, we’re likely to do it less. On some level, behaviorism works. People, including children, respond well to behavioral cues, at least in the short term.

But researchers are coming to understand that there are limits to the effectiveness of rewards and punishments in education.

If we want students to act in ways that will maximize their future opportunities—to persevere through challenges, to delay gratification, to control their impulses—we need to consider what might motivate them to take those difficult steps.

Students will be more likely to display these positive academic habits when they are in an environment where they feel a sense of belonging, independence, and growth.

These teachers are able to convey deep messages—perhaps implicitly or even subliminally—about belonging, connection, ability, and opportunity. And somehow those messages had a profound impact on students’ psychology, and thus on their behavior.

The environment those teachers create in the classroom, and the messages that environment convey, motivate students to start making better decisions—to show up to class, to persevere longer at difficult tasks, and to deal more resiliently with the countless small-scale setbacks and frustrations that make up the typical student’s school day.

A teacher may never be able to get students to be gritty, in the sense of developing some essential character trait called grit. But you can make them act gritty—to behave in gritty ways in your classroom.

Messages that teachers convey—large and small, explicit and implicit—affect the way students feel in the classroom, and thus the way they behave there.