Rising When We Fall - Fostering Perseverance & Resilience

Sometimes it’s hard to keep going

Last month at CSHA I gave a presentation about fostering resilience. It’s so important, I thought I would do a bit of a series on this super important aspect to our work.

Let’s start with some definitions:

perseverance

✨ The ability to persist in pursuing a goal despite facing obstacles, setbacks, or difficulties.
✨ It involves a determined effort to overcome challenges and achieve a specific objective. 💪
✨ When students demonstrate perseverance, they show commitment, focus, and resilience in the face of adversity.
✨ Perseverance is about staying focused and determined on a particular goal. Both qualities are super important, and help us be our best and reach our individual potential.

resilience

✨ The capacity to adapt and bounce back from adversity, stress 🥵, or difficult situations.
✨ It involves recovering from and moving through failures.
✨ Resilient students demonstrate flexibility, emotional coping, and a positive outlook that allows them to navigate life's ups and downs with adaptability and strength.
✨ resilience involves being flexible and adaptable in response to life's changing circumstances.

Let’s look at ways to foster perseverance and resilience in our sessions. Starting with, animated videos!! For this example, I used one of my favorites – Soar, by Alyce Tzue. We started by laying the groundwork of comprehension:

Working Goals

1. Establishing some general understanding of the characters

2. Integrating MSV and feelings

3. Focusing on perspective-taking

4. Maximizing visual supports

Tools

1. Pausing and re-watching ⏸️

2. Adding text boxes onto freeze frames 💭

3. Building complex language in text boxes

4. Combining screen shots to minimize jump cuts

I combined screen shots with added feelings and thoughts in PowerPoint to simplify processing this complicated scene. Jump cuts, when we don’t see ALL the relevant context, makes understanding harder, so this is a way to get around that. We added language explaining the social complexities:

A lot happens very quickly that is important! When you slow things down and make the right visual support, it’s so much easier to understand!

💙 LOVE 💙 the example of changing one’s mind – that often happens when we are in the process of first meeting and getting to know someone!

This last pic let us set the scene for the rest of the animation.

From here on, Mara and the boy will work together. They will feel discouraged. Very discouraged. 😔But they won’t give up. They will persevere and…succeed. 💪

Tune in next time to see Part 2 of this activity. Do you have students you think would benefit from this activity? Follow my steps above, ⤴️ and next time I will tell you how I dealt with the discouragement.

Happy Spring!