“How do you like my school?” asked María.

“I’m very impressed by how friendly everyone is,” said I.

“More importantly, they really trust me here,” said María.

María is saying a lot about the relationship she has with adults at her school. She is saying that she feels welcome and safe at the school. Of equal importance, she feels valued, respected and known by the adults at the school.

• Fostering resiliency is about the passionate belief in the potential of all students and what it takes to foster that potential.
  
  
• More than any other single factor, it is the lack of a deeply held belief in every child’s ability that leads to students achieving at levels lower than their potential.
  
  
• Most teachers enter the profession believing that every student can be successful, but few experienced teachers hold on to that belief.
  
  
• One should not hold individual teachers or administrators primarily accountable for this. Our society clearly does not believe in the potential of every individual. Our financial priorities as a nation clearly demonstrate our lack of commitment.

Resiliency

• We all want to live and work in a community that is based on Resiliency Theory (RT) – the belief in the ability of every person to overcome adversity if important protective factors are present in that person’s life.

• RT is founded on the proposition that if members of one’s family, community, and/or school care deeply about you, have high expectations and purposeful support for you, and value your participation, you will maintain a faith in the future and can overcome almost any adversity. It is the theme of this module that when the school community works together to foster resiliency, a large number of students will overcome great adversity and achieve a bright future.

This is not a simple fix!

• As you work through the sessions in this module, hopefully you will understand the depth of change in school practice and in school culture required to foster resiliency for all students.
  
  
• Fostering resiliency starts by challenging our underlying beliefs about student potential and about how students learn. This strikes at the heart of not only who we are as educators, but, more importantly, who we are as people.
  
  
• Thus, fostering resiliency involves far more than altering the discipline policy, adding social service support to the school, adopting a new curriculum program, buying computers, or having teachers go through a new staff development program.
  
  
• What we teach, how we teach, and how we assess are all central to fostering resiliency. How we organize the school and how we group students are central. Likewise, expecting and supporting all students to be literate and to demonstrate the habits of mine to think critically are directly related to fostering resiliency.
  
  
• RT serves as a lens to guide school redesign. Looking critically at school practice – How does this practice demonstrate caring for every student? How does this practice demonstrate high expectations for every student and support students’ efforts to meet these expectations? How does this practice demonstrate valuing student participation?

Children spend approximately 15,000 hours in K-12 schooling. Michael Rutter (1979) asked whether a child’s experiences at school have any effect. Does it matter which school the student attends? This question led Rutter to study twelve inner city London secondary schools in depth. He used four main measures of student outcomes: attendance, pupil behavior, examination success, and delinquency. His research indicates that the school attended did make a difference. He found that schools differed markedly in the behavior and attainment shown by their pupils, and schools that performed better on one of the four student outcomes generally performed better on the others.

Few people make it through childhood, adolescence and adulthood without many ups and downs. Everyone experiences periods of serious suffering. As Weissbound writes, “children described as resilient are often simply children who have not yet encountered an environment that triggers their vulnerabilities.” (1996, p. 40) Nothing is fixed. Children who are in trouble at one point in their lives often right themselves at some later point. In fact, it is difficult to predict which children in high school will thrive as adults. Often, those selected as “most popular” and “most likely to succeed” in high school struggle as adults, while others who struggled socially as teenagers appear to adapt very successfully as adults.

“Can our students really meet our expectations for each of the six exhibitions for graduation?”

“Well, who are you concerned about?”

“How about Jill? She is a special education student.”

“I work with Jill every day. She is doing well in all of her classes. She is coachable and is motivated. She will be intimidated at first, and she’ll need extra help, but if her advisor and I work closely with her, she‘ll pass all exhibitions.”

“How about Louisa? Her English language skills are still weak.”

“We’ve already agreed that students can do the oral part of the exhibitions in their primarily language as long as they do a major part of one in a second language. Louisa can choose to present in Spanish as long as one substantial presentation is in English. We have a rubric in place for second language.”

“You’re right. Louisa will do fine.”

“How about Jack?”

“Jack is my advisee. We all know him well. He is lazy and a behavior problem, but capable. We will work with him and with his parents. Hopefully he’ll choose to take this seriously in order to graduate. If he does, he’ll do fine!”

This discussion and ones like it take place regularly at Anzar High School. Anzar is a small, rural high school, founded on the principles of the Coalition of Essential Schools. Due to its small size and its commitment to a strong student advisory program, all students are known well by teachers. Conversations like this one occur often and typically involve the entire staff. The conversation above included comments from six teachers.

Definitions

Resiliency - the ability to bounce back successfully despite exposure to severe risks. (Benard, l993, p. 44)

Resilient community - a community that is focused on the protective factors that foster resiliency for its members: (1) caring, (2) high expectations and purposeful support, and (3) ongoing opportunities for meaningful participation.

Schools, in general, are terrible at being resilient communities. Most schools and most classes are too large and the school day too harried for teachers or administrators to know each student well and therefore to care deeply about each student, to set high expectations, to offer purposeful support, and to value the participation of each student.

Children have a need for social affiliation and, in most cases, choose peer relationships that are constructive rather than destructive. Richard Weissbourd writes (1996) that children’s peer groups tend to become destructive when children lack a basic ingredient of healthy growth: positive sources of recognition, especially meaningful opportunities that extend into relations with adults. Children have to believe that they can create a better life. If they have this belief, they will strive. Without the perception of meaningful opportunities, children have less reason to be afraid of the repercussions of their destructive behavior.