Episode 63: Building Academic Resilience

Available October 1, 2024

Resilience is a hot topic in education. We wonder whether our students display enough of it, how we can help them build it, and whether resilience alone is enough to help kids thrive in an increasingly demanding and uncertain world. But what if we need to expand our thinking beyond building resilience in individuals, and start considering a systems-based approach instead? That’s what Megan Kennedy is exploring with her team at the UW Resilience Lab.

Guest: Megan Kennedy

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “These skills and mindsets have a primary kind of effect on their own ability to cope with stress and cope, like have some resilience, both individual resilience and to build sort of team or organizational resilience in the work. Because oftentimes I'll teach these groups to organizations as a whole. For example, an entire school or college, or to a full team, so that they're learning these skills and mindsets in community. And then that gets reinforced in their like team meetings and in their relationships. And if you can imagine that to scale, all of a sudden, you have all these schools and colleges across campus that have learned these skills and mindsets in community, and then that grows.” (16:54)
• “We could still maybe explore this concept of how do we not just spiral up the social and emotional learning from kindergarten to 12th grade, but how do we actually extend that into the university? So what's happening in the K -12 system helps support students as they transition into college. And what we are teaching in college is really building off the skills and mindsets that the students have been learning kind of all the way up. So I've spent some time in my career really interested in a collective impact approach. How do we work together around common issues and be working in a really aligned and coordinated way? So this idea of having the K-12 system and the university system more seamless around social emotional learning is, I think, a really interesting and cool opportunity.” (24:29)

“I don't suggest that that's an easy thing. Collective impact never is. But I think that on the table would be a lot of conversations about the competitive nature of things. And it's interesting that we're in a time where the need to be collaborative and work across differences and come to the table and be able to manage our emotions when we have different perspectives and different ideas, because the issues are really challenging, is more important than ever.” (30:57)

Related Episodes: 60, 59, 51, 48, 29, 22, 19, 3

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