Mindset Interventions & Individual Skills-Building

Foster Resilience

Resilience is the capacity to recover or bounce back from stress in the face of challenging life events (Southwick & Charney, 2012; Bonanno, 2005; Smith et al., 2008). Students with higher levels of resilience tend to have better mental health as well as academic outcomes (Johnson et al., 2015). Resilience can be understood as strategies, skills, and mindsets that can be built up and strengthened over time, and you can serve as an effective model for bouncing back from failure for your students. The Academic Resilience Consortium provides a large set of resources for instructors and students themselves to draw upon.

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Example practices

The strategies below are organized along the timeline of a course: from development and syllabus planning, to early weeks of the semester, to ongoing.

Course Development and Planning

  • Consider including links to resources on resilience in course website, syllabus, or on Canvas.
  • Use exams and other assignments as formative assessment and teaching tools, rather than merely summative assessment or the end of learning.
  • If possible, in writing-intensive courses, utilize the revision structure that students learn in their writing seminars.
  • To reduce stress and anxiety associated with performance and to increase learning, assign frequent, low stakes assessment rather than few high-stakes exams.

Early (First Two Weeks)

  • Talk about times that you’ve failed, how you worked through those failures & what you learned.
  • Explicitly teach strategies you use to reframe and overcome setbacks, feeling stuck, and failure. See this example on how to have a successful failure.
  • Use exams and other assignments as formative assessment and teaching tools, rather than merely summative assessment or the end of learning.
    • For example, 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.
  • Convey optimism about students’ capabilities to learn and achieve in your class or cohort and, where necessary, improve. Make clear that everyone in the course or group has the capacity to succeed.
  • Prompt students to look for and take note of topics, ideas, etc. they find interesting and use those when they have a choice about course assignments. Curiosity, passion for a subject, fascination, interest, self-improvement and other intrinsic motivations are a major wellspring of resilience.

Ongoing

  • Talk about times that you’ve failed, how you worked through those failures & what you learned.
  • Explicitly teach strategies you use to reframe and overcome setbacks, feeling stuck, and failure. See this example on how to have a successful failure.
  • Use exams and other assignments as formative assessment and teaching tools, rather than merely summative assessment or the end of learning.
    • For example, 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.
  • After exams are returned, prompt students to reflect on why they did or did not perform well, how they will prepare differently for the next exam, and what resources could help them address difficulties and gaps in their learning and performance.
  • Encourage students to utilize your office hours and explain how that time can be used.
  • Prompt students to look for and take note of topics, ideas, etc. they find interesting and use those when they have a choice about course assignments. Curiosity, passion for a subject, fascination, interest, self-improvement and other intrinsic motivations are a major wellspring of resilience.