Building resilience in your students during hybrid and distance learning in 2021

Resilience is more important than ever during this turbulent year as we continue to fight our way through a pandemic. The landscape of education has turned on its head, and you may be noticing that your students are struggling with motivation self-esteem, and other aspects that can affect their resilience. It's important that your students are given the opportunity to reflect on their own resilience and how they might be able to improve it during these challenging times. Keep reading for some ideas on how to improve your students resilience during hybrid, distance or face-to-face learning.

Why is teaching resilience so important during this pandemic:

Education has had to take a drastic transformation since the pandemic. Whether you are still in distance learning, moved to face to face learning or a combination of the two with hybrid learning, the educational experience has undoubtedly changed for everyone. School is somewhere for students to have that consistency and routine, and since everything changed last year, this has thrown their lives up in the air. Now, more than ever, students need to be taught how to develop their resilience to deal with changes such as this.

Sadly it is challenging to teach content let alone crucial life skills like resilience, so an effective way of incorporating character education and SEL, is through self-directed self-assessing online lessons. These types of ready to go lessons make teaching these topic much more manageable. They don’t even require teacher input from you, yet will teach your students all about resilience and help them determine the best strategies for how to manage their stress in an effective way.

Ready to go online lesson for teaching resilience:

If you would like a ready to go resource to give to your students, this resilience lesson is completely remote and hosted online. Students go through each slide at their own pace,  reading the content learning new information and then they get an opportunity to answer questions on the topic to check their understanding. They will work through realistic scenarios that young people often face and reflect on the possible ways they can choose to react.

There is a range of different question styles to keep the lesson interesting and it also provides immediate feedback to all students; the correct answer is confirmed automatically, which means no more grading for you!

​This activity can be set as classwork, home work or remotely for distance learning. It’s fully interactive and so easy to use; there are absolutely no resources required – you don’t even need to grade it as it is self-assessing. Students are able to learn by repetition as they can redo the activity as many times as they need to increase their score. 

DOWNLOAD RESILIENCE FROM TPT

DOWNLOAD RESILIENCE FROM TRF

To conclude:

Resilience has always been an important skill to teach students, and in this current climate it is more important than ever as students are experiencing a whole other level of stress. Giving students an opportunity to work at their own pace to learn about resilience in an interactive way and test their responses over and over again, will give students the opportunity to embrace different strategies for developing resilience. Not to mention, the fact that no teacher input or assessment required, makes for a much less stressful teaching experience as well - win, win!

A freebie for you:

If you are looking for another effective way of building resilience, you can use these resilience colouring affirmations. These cards help you encourage your students to think of examples of resilience to help foster self-belief. You can download them for free below: