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MATTHEW PHILLIPS
Cultivating resilience Resilience has been one of the most important skills for educators and students alike to nurture during the pandemic. School leaders have had to adapt quickly to changing circumstances and to deliver high quality remote learning for their students, while also making alternative arrangements for exams and assessments under significant time pressure. Many students have also completely changed the way that they work, having to become far more self-directed in their approach to learning. Although the ability to effectively respond and react to change and uncertainty cannot be taught overnight, the pandemic has shown the true value of harnessing resilience in the education sector. At OneSchool Global, we have been working on this for a number of years as a way of growing students’ explicit skills and routines for self-direction. It is essential that we teach our students how to be resilient, life-ready learners that can take on the challenges of the world once their formal education has finished. Our approach has been inspired by a variety of research. Notably John Hattie (2012) makes some significant observations about the role of error in learning. He says that feedback and learning thrive in conditions of error or “not knowing” – not in environments where we already know and understand. As you will see later in this article, James Nottingham’s work around the Learning Pit (Nottingham, 2007, 2010, 2017) has also been fundamental to our work in developing effective dialogue between teachers and students and building resilience. Firstly, students who have rehearsed and internalised routines for self-directed learning can better face challenges and uncertainty head on, opting to embrace a difficult situation as opposed to running away from it. This mindset is necessary for success both
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in education and in life. Self-directed learners also become more self-confident each and every time they encounter a challenge which they do not know how to solve. Solving a complex problem and navigating uncertainty can give an individual the confidence to know that the next time they are put in a tricky situation, they will be able to reason through it, and find a solution to the problem which they face. This self-confidence snowballs and compounds over time as students face up to and overcome increasingly difficult situations. As the challenges presented to self-directed learners increase in quantity and difficulty over time, so too does the perseverance of these students. It is the very vision of our school ‘to develop life-ready students who learn how to learn, and achieve.’ Our aim is that graduates from our school can utilise and develop their initiative, making them more self-sufficient and able to approach and solve tasks by themselves. This, in turn, develops their leadership skills, as they start to automatically look to themselves for answers and
“In today’s changed world resilience is vital for success and extends well beyond simply being ‘career-ready’ or ‘work-ready’. It makes our students genuinely ‘life-ready’.”
