Teaching resilience
All students face challenges, but some are more resilient while others give up easily. At-risk students who operate under a learned helplessness mentality demonstrate different behaviors than high achievers who tend to have a growth mindset.
What researchers are finding is that students’ intellectual ability accounts for only about 25% of their success while effort results in 75% of their academic achievement. How hard students try in school determines in large part how well they perform.
When students want to give up, teachers can increase their resilience by offering growth mindset skills. Mindset is a function of cognitive beliefs while learned helplessness is a function of reinforced behaviors. Student achievement increases when teachers address students’ beliefs about intelligence and failure. When students do not believe their actions can produce desired outcomes, their academic achievement decreases. A learned helplessness experience can cause students to give up even in situations where they could have control of the outcomes if they tried.
Simple tools can be used to develop a growth mindset in students which helps them succeed. One way is to praise effort, not intelligence so that students learn to work hard. Teachers can also assign students projects that advocate the power of effort and persisting in the face of difficulty as a means to grow their intelligence.
Another way is to counter negative student selftalk by reminding them that they may not know it yet, but if they persevere, they’re more likely to get it. Sharing quotes from famous people who failed before succeeding also shows the power of perseverance.
Students with fixed mindsets believe that they were born with a certain skill level and that their efforts will not improve their intelligence. Fixed mindset students behave like those with learned helplessness because both give up in the face of failure.
Students respond differently to failure. Students who see failure as devastating give up more easily so their performance deteriorates. Their lack of effort results in poor academic performance. They believe that intelligence is fixed, so they are less motivated to learn from their errors because they see them as proof that they aren’t good at learning.
Successful students commonly respond to failure with resilience and more effort. Growth mindset students see errors as an opportunity to learn. They look at what went wrong in order to learn from their mistakes. A sense of helplessness can be changed when students are empowered to affect their outcome.
When students overcome challenges rather than shrink from them, they demonstrate resilience. Knowing that what they do makes a difference encourages students to put forth more effort so they can grow their brain. Students achieve more when they feel confident and optimistic.
Dr. Spencer Kagan in his online magazine this month cited studies that measured the level of optimism of freshman at the University of Pennsylvania and Virginia Tech. Optimism was found to be a better predictor of academic achievement than the grades they got in high school or their SAT scores.
Students can be taught to dispute pessimistic beliefs. Optimistic students believe failures will be overcome shortly and they see obstacles as opportunities for more learning so their grades increase.
Teachers can also influence student achievement by teaching the growth mindset skill of neuroplasticity. Students can learn that the brain is like a muscle which can grow new connections between brain cells when challenged. Difficult tasks grow neurons even when they don’t get the right answer. Knowing how the brain works helps motivate students to try harder which improves their grades.
If life experiences have not taught students that effort makes a difference, then teachers can provide more opportunities to show that effort improves outcome. This helps prevent children from falling into that helplessness mentality by training them to be resilient.
To improve school achievement, teachers can promote resilience. Confident optimistic students are more likely to succeed in school. Fostering resilience empowers students not only to do well in school, but also to reach their goals in life.