Is resilience the key to student success? How to promote resilience in our students is a hot topic in education and health at the moment and for a good reason. Resilience is the ability to cope with negative life events and challenges. It has been described as the capacity to 'bounce back' from difficult situations and persist in the face of adversity. Developing resilience in young people is considered by many as the antidote to the epidemic of mental ill-health across our society today. The rate of students with anxiety and depression is of growing concern (Sawyer et al, 2000; Mission Australia, 2009) and schools are uniquely placed to contribute to healthy student attitudes and self-awareness.

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For children and young people who live in uncertain family situations, who do not trust easily and who do not have positive role modeling for taking responsibility, this may be like asking them to fly to the moon.

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When students don’t listen or follow directions, or they roll their eyes when you speak, or they talk while you are talking, it can seem as though they don’t care what you think of them. This is a misconception. Young people do care what adults e.g. parents and teachers think of them. They care very deeply even when they don’t show it. The more it seems they don’t care, the more they do care.

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Social and emotional learning is a vital element of student development with clear research showing the positive impact on academic results. However, with all the curriculum content teachers need to cover, many teachers are asking how they can possibly add social and emotional learning to their load. Here are 8 easy ways.....

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Focus on teaching the skill of listening (yes those acronyms do help). Break the skill into identifiable components for students and then practise, role play, make posters and dramatise scenarios. Use positive reinforcement to help with this and/or reward students for using the skill appropriately.

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While we cannot eliminate all change from a student’s school day, we can put some strategies in place that help students to cope and hopefully prevent difficult behaviour or meltdowns that may result from their anxiety.

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While you may already give a lot of thought to increasing academic results by improving your instruction, providing better resources and designing better units of work, have you given any thought to the social and emotional development of your students? Here are 3 steps outline how you can improve academic results through a social and emotional curriculum

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School is a social environment and student learning is dependent on relationships. It is important for students to get along with each other as well as build relationships with teachers. Positive, supportive relationships are essential, because students need to feel safe to make mistakes within the learning environment

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If I told you there was a research-based, well proven strategy that was low cost, took little time and energy to implement that would greatly improve student concentration, focus and achievement, would you do it? The answer seems pretty obvious, yet the approach may be controversial and challenge your long held beliefs and attitudes.

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While as educated adults we know that to lead a healthy lifestyle we should drink less red wine, eat less chocolate, exercise regularly and have plenty of sleep, we don’t always do it! That’s because we are all continually developing our self-regulation skills. Your students are the same. They may know what to do, but lack the self-regulation skills to always act appropriately.

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How well you listen can impact your relationships greatly. Here are 6 areas where better listening can create a shift in your effectiveness in and out of the classroom.

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Have you ever decided to use group work in one of your classes only to have it very quickly turn to chaos? When I first started teaching Year 1 I had just this experience. I was so excited to use group work because I had read all the literature on how students learn better in social situations. I was convinced my students were going to benefit so much because of this wonderful cooperative learning strategy. Of course what ended up happening was just a mess! There were kids rolling around on the floor, some of them were bossing the others around and some went off on their own to read in the reading corner. It was an unmitigated disaster!

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