Resilience

Commitment to Learning

Positive Values

Social Competencies

Positive Identity

Resilience is the ability to recover from stress despite challenging life events that otherwise would overwhelm a person’s normal ability to cope with that stress (Smith et al., 2008). Students with more resilience tend to have better mental health and wellness and academic outcomes (Johnson, Taasoobshirazi, Kestler, & Cordova, 2014). Being able to bounce back from difficult experiences can mean coping after a bad grade or recovering from a stressful life event like the loss of a loved one. Fortunately, resilience seems to be a malleable psychological factor that, with work and time, can be strengthened. Studies have shown resilience is linked to mindfulness, a sense of purpose in life, an optimistic outlook and active coping styles (Smith, Epstein, Ortiz, Christopher, & Tooley, 2013).

• Talk about times that you’ve failed and how you worked through those failures.
• Teach students how to use mistakes/failures to their advantage.
• Use exams and other assignments as teaching tools, rather than the end of learning. Examples include:
  • Instead of simply giving students their grades, go over the exam or assignment and discuss areas of common struggle, what these mistakes mean for thinking and learning, and how they connect to new learning.
  • Allow students to correct mistakes and redo assignments to demonstrate continued mastery and learning.
  • Provide students with individual feedback on assignments, and model how to use this feedback to improve on future assignments.
• Explicitly teach strategies you use to overcome failure.
• Teach students how to self-assess accurately by modeling your own self-assessing behavior.
• Focus less on competition and performance and more on learning and mastery.
• Be optimistic about how students are doing in your class.

In Fall 2017, I instructed a mandatory second-year undergraduate course for the eighth time, adopting a distinct approach. I shared with the students that I had faced challenges with specific topics in the same course during my undergraduate studies. I informed them of my decision to reorganize the traditional presentation of the topics, aiming to facilitate a better understanding of the more challenging concepts. Throughout the semester, I received expressions of gratitude from students repeating the course who found the adjusted order beneficial, especially in tackling one of the more difficult topics.

- Brian Evans, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering