Building Resiliency

The ability to overcome adversity and challenging circumstances, brought about by early conditions and experiences, by successfully adapting and making constructive changes, is termed resiliency. While educators can’t control the family conditions or social demographics that their students experience, they can implement educational policies and practices that promote resiliency. This comprehensive resource offers a proactive, preventative approach within an educational paradigm that is based on the premise that resilience can be taught, and that factors can be altered to facilitate resiliency among at-risk students. Fundamentally it serves to implement the strategies needed to reduce risks and strengthen protective factors. It provides a unified set of practical learning opportunities that seek to help adolescents develop and enhance protective mechanisms and to offset risk factors. This resource provides background information, implementation guidelines, and targeted student activities in relation to eleven core resiliency competencies.