The question is about resilience-how to build in our older students? Resilience is our ability to bounce back from challenges and quickly adapt to adversity. When faced with seemingly insurmountable problems, do we regress or move forward? Supportive relationships build resilience and we need adequate social and communication skills to have positive relationships with others. Resilience is associated with social competence. If you work with students with disabilities, focusing on social and SEL skills that build resilience is one way to support them.
What social skills can we teach children to foster resilience?
Resilience: how to build through targeting specific social skills such as the following:
1.Active listening skills: teach students how to actively listen but make sure that components of active listening, such as eye contact, are within their control before you decide to teach them.
2. Conflict resolution: included here is the importance of staying calm during a conflict. If we are emotionally dysregulated, it’s a challenge to effectively resolve a conflict.
3. Empathy: be compassionate with yourself and others.
4. Choosing friends: what makes a good friend? Teaching about how to choose friends is applicable to all ages.
5. Communication: Teach the differences between passive, aggressive and assertive communication.
6. Flexible thinking: flexibility is crucial for resilience and rigid thinkers can get stuck on ineffective beliefs. What aspects of a problem are in your control? Is there any part of your own behavior that you can change?
7. Problem Solving:
- Regulating emotions,
- Defining the problem,
- Listing possible solutions,
- Reflecting upon how the outcomes worked.
8. Growth Mindset: mistakes are opportunities to grow. Provide examples of successful people who have failed but went on to learn and grow from their mistakes. Don’t diminish the challenges they face but reinforce that they can grow from them.
9. Gratitude: when we express or receive gratitude, our brains release dopamine and serotonin, the chemical messengers responsible for making us “feel good.”
Materials for Cultivating Resilience
I have bundled together my BOOM learning products that focus on the social skills that support resilience. Click on the image below to see the products in the bundle. These materials are also sold separately on BOOM learning and in my teachers pay teacher’s store. Each product contains:
- audio directions,
- real photographs
- scaffolded learning (read here about why this is an effective teaching method for social skills),
- a full lesson on the topic with vocabulary reviews, knowledge checks and self-ratings.
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When you subscribe to my newsletter, I’ll let you know when I have sales and launch new products. That includes the monthly half-off sale on TPT and sales on BOOM learning. You will also get access to my subscriber’s library of free materials! Click below to join.
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