Too often schools are filled with students dealing with serious stresses, even trauma, but through a positive school environment they are able to overcome these conditions and succeed in life. Social worker, Mary, overcame significant wounds from her alcoholic, abusive and violent home. However, within the protective school environment, Mary found her safe haven, her solace, and an alternate universe of relief. We know school settings cannot remove the adversity in the lives of our students but awareness can empower us as educators in providing and influencing powerful protective factors while building resilience.
 
Think of resilience as a balance between adversity and protective factors. So long as the balance is manageable, people can usually cope with adversity and stresses. Yet, for some students, the stresses can be overwhelming and the protective factors few and far between. A student’s resilience is cultivated when his or her internal and environmental protective factors are strengthened.

Schools are filled with conditions to promote resilience including caring, encouraging relationships, role models and mentors. You can provide clear, fair boundaries and structure while providing opportunities for students to explore other worlds and possibilities. You can use stories of successful people overcoming adversity through quality literature, films, and history. In providing these real-world protective factors, students can be exposed to positive characteristics of basic human respect and dignity that too many kids like Mary do not find in their troubled homes.
 
How does a student become more resilient? How can schools more effectively capitalize on their power to promote resilience? Educators and caring adults can observe and reinforce those protective factors by engaging in conversations helping students to recognize and grow traits supporting good reasoning skills, self-esteem and temperament. Providing quality relationships appears to be the cornerstone of resilience. It may seem building relationships requires enormous amounts of time, but brief on-going encounters can provide the basis for supportive relationships.

One of the most effective resilience-building actions educators can engage in is to dig for and reflect back with a student regarding his or her strengths – the internal protective factors that students have often honed during times of stress. Optimally, the environmental mirrors that students build throughout their lives are mirrors of caring, kindness and affirming relationships. In testimony – when many students reach adulthood they mourn the loss of the one or two educators who had made the biggest difference for them during extreme adversity and stressful times of their lives. They feel the loss because these one or two educators looked beyond outward experiences, such as their behavior or unkempt appearance – and saw the promise and hope in their futures.
 
Katie Couric interviewed a young man named Brian who had grown up in a troubled and abusive environment. He had struggled in school and had been picked on regularly at a young age. Now, Brian is a successful and well-adjusted adult. When Couric asked him, “What made the difference?” Brian responded without thinking twice: The defining moment in his life occurred when a grade school teacher simply told him that she cared about him and believed in him. This one small interaction turned Brian’s life around.
 

All of us have more than 20,000 individual moments in a waking day when we can make a strong memory for someone. In some cases, as with Brian, a single encounter can change a life forever. Be the change for someone!

 

“Dignity—the word itself—has come to mean different things to different people, as many words do. It doesn’t just mean always being stiff and composed. It means a belief in oneself, that one is worthy of the best. Dignity means that what I have to say is important, and I will say it when it’s important for me to say it. Dignity really means that I deserve the best treatment I can receive. And that I have the responsibility to give the best treatment I can to other people.”      -Maya Angelou