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BOLSTERING STUDENT RESILIENCE
Bolstering Resilience Many educators can relate to Mrs. Newbacker’s experience with a classroom full of students who bring a range of backgrounds and life experiences to school, and the corresponding task of figuring out how best to support them. While some may refer to this ability as grit (Duckworth, 2016) or growth mindset (Dweck, 2006), we use the term resilience. In this context, resilience is a student’s ability to manage and cope with life’s stressors (Doll, Brehm, & Zucker, 2014; Goldstein & Brooks, 2013). We selected this term because it’s commonly used, and it captures this book’s focus succinctly: creating a structured, supportive classroom that helps bolster students’ abilities to cope with stress. We’ve also selected the term bolstering because we feel all people, adults and students, have a range of resilience that can be nurtured. By creating a classroom environment that supports students’ emotional growth and ability to navigate stressors, teachers can meet students wherever they are to bolster their resilience. School leaders ask teachers to use all sorts of approaches to support students, and there’s no shortage of acronyms for them to learn: RTI (response to intervention), MTSS (multitiered system of support), and the previously described PBIS, RP, TIP, and SEL, just to name a few. All of these can be helpful, but unfortunately, the piling up of these approaches can fill teachers’ plates. In turn, teachers feel overwhelmed (Van Droogenbroeck, Spruyt, & Vanroelen, 2014), and schools can become fractured places in which things feel disorganized and misaligned (Elmore, 2000; Jimerson, Burns, & VanDerHeyden, 2016; Newmann, Smith, Allensworth, & Bryk, 2001;
©️2022 by Solution Tree Press
Mrs. Newbacker couldn’t fault the school for a lack of help, but she was also feeling the burden from all of leadership’s requests. She was trying to implement the school’s student supports, teaching classroom expectations that reflected the school’s positive behavioral interventions and supports (PBIS) framework. She was also trying to use the morning circles that a restorative practices (RP) trainer shared last year. She was conscious of trauma-informed practices (TIP) and knew they were important for several of her students, though she was confused as to how this was different from the resilience in school environments (RISE) strategies that she learned several years ago. She knew that her principal wanted to add social and emotional learning (SEL) instruction after winter break. She wondered if that would create a calmer classroom—and when all the new approaches would end. Mrs. Newbacker wished for a single approach to support all of her students and find ways to bolster their resilience. “Does that even exist?” she thought as she pulled into a parking spot at school and shut off the engine.
