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PREVENTION

How we can foster resiliency in children

Bethann Berliner and Bonnie Bernard

One of our greatest challenges today is helping our youth avoid adverse outcomes such as school failure, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, and delinquency. In this article the authors, from the Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development, offer a conceptual tool for rethinking the way solutions are framed – and thus how these problems are best addressed. At its heart is the notion of resiliency: the potential for youth to develop into healthy, productive, competent adults despite experiences of severe stress and adversity.

Traditional prevention efforts have focused almost exclusively on identifying the so-called risk factors in a child's life (poverty, abuse, and community violence, for example) and then attempting to provide services that would eliminate or mitigate those conditions.

While no one disputes the urgent need to improve conditions for many of our children, the approach has inherent limitations, chief among them the labeling of children as “at risk" which often results in lowered expectations based on a child's perceived deficits. Moreover, identifying the risks in a child's environment does not necessarily result in the introduction of appropriate services or in successful mitigation.

By contrast, the notion of resiliency emerges from a focus on the positive aspects of a child's life rather than the negatives.

Resiliency has long been associated with surviving trauma and other stressful life events. To better understand the phenomenon, a number of researchers have chosen to look not at why some children succumb to the negative influences of their environments, but why other children thrive despite the same general conditions. Rather than identifying the “risk factors" contributing to failure, researchers have identified some common “protective factors" that help youth survive risky environments. Their findings argue for the development of policies and programs that aim by design to foster resiliency in children and youth.

In the realm of education, there is emerging consensus that this can best be achieved by enacting policies that build upon the strengths and life experiences of children and youth, their families, and their communities.

For decades, scholars and practitioners from psychiatry, anthropology, education, sociology, psychology and, more recently, prevention, have described the successful adaptation and transformation of children and youth who confronted high-risk situations and extreme adversity. Their studies, many of them cross-cultural, have looked at children and youth who have grown up in a variety of adverse conditions, including concentration camp internment; abusive, criminal, or substance-abusing parents; poverty; and gang participation.

From these studies several of which followed youth well into their adult years emerges one consistent finding: nearly two-thirds of those studied did nor develop high-risk behaviours.

Qualities of resilience
What was unique about these individuals? Collectively, these studies yield an understanding both of the personal traits possessed by these resilient children and youth and of the environmental characteristics that fostered or reinforced those traits well into their adult lives. The personal traits commonly associated with children and youth who overcome risks in their lives are:

• Social competence: The ability to establish and sustain positive, caring relationships; to maintain a sense of humour; and to communicate compassion and empathy.

• Resourcefulness: The ability to critically, creatively, and reflectively make decisions; to seek help from others; and to recognise alternative ways to solve problems and resolve conflict.

• Autonomy: The ability to act independently and exert some control over ones environment; to have a sense of ones identity; and to detach from others engaged in risky or dysfunctional behaviours.

• Sense of purpose: The ability to foresee a bright future for oneself; to be optimistic; and to aspire toward educational and personal achievement.

The research shows that these traits, which make up an individual's resilient nature, are fostered or reinforced by:

• caring relationships that are trusting, compassionate, and respectful;

• high expectations that are explicitly communicated and adequately supported; and

• meaningful opportunities for engaging in valued family, school, and civic activities.

The rationale for formulating educational policy with an eye on resiliency is compelling. Research shows that the link between the protective factors in a child's environment and the child's healthy development, social success, and good academic outcomes, is stronger than the link between specific risk factors and negative outcomes.

Moreover, risk-focused policies label children and youth as deficient, tracking them as consumers of needed services rather than as producers of their own well-being. The emerging understanding of resiliency offers educational policymakers a new paradigm for formulating policies rich in possibilities for our youth.

Clearly, the greater the number of positive relationships or experiences in children's lives, the greater their chances of overcoming adversity. Yet resiliency research reveals that just one positive relationship, whether at home, in the community, or at school, can make a major difference for a child whose life is otherwise traumatic. So while local policymakers may have little influence on what goes on in a child's home or in the larger community, they can adopt policies ensuring that a child's school relationships and experiences contribute to his or her resiliency.

Educational practices
What follows is a discussion of some of the many research-based educational practices that foster resiliency. As shown in the table at the end of this article, a new environment is created when schools move from a risk focus to a resiliency focus in teaching, learning, and leadership practices, as well as in the nature of relationships among and between students, parents, and teachers.

There are five central factors:

1. Foremost in this type of learning environment is educators recognition that schooling is about caring and respectful relationships.

Students motivation to participate actively in learning activities and to achieve academic success is clearly linked to strong support from teachers, involvement by parents, and co-operative activities among students. Schools in your district can foster resilience through relationships by:

• Supporting teacher collaboration. Giving teachers the time and opportunity to work collegially correlates directly with student achievement.

• Limiting the number of students in each class. Smaller class size is associated with establishing close personal and working relationships.

• Increasing opportunities for parents to be involved in the school community. This can reduce absenteeism and behaviour problems as well as in crease school-family communication, student motivation, and achievement.

• Encouraging the use of peer learning activities. Mixed-ability and other small co-operative learning groups, including the restructuring of large schools into smaller families of learners, promote relationships among students in which everyone contributes to the learning process.

2. Curriculum should be designed with an understanding of the various ways children and youth learn, and it should build upon what they already know and are interested in.

Activities can be integrated across multiple subject areas and can allow students to discover answers through inquiry, experimentation, and discussion. Schools in your district can foster resiliency through curriculum by:

• Supporting curricular enrichment opportunities such as art, music, vocational training, school-based enterprise, apprenticeship, and community service for all students. Experiential learning encourages students to express their creativity as well as contribute to the well-being of others.

• Promoting a curriculum that values racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity and promotes gender and cultural equity. Giving voice and recognition to multiple perspectives is fundamental to sustaining a democratic society.

• Resisting efforts to “dumb down” learning activities. Having and conveying high expectations for learning are associated with higher levels of achievement.

3. The instructional strategies teachers use, whether lecture, drill, discussion, or discovery, send powerful messages to students about how they are to learn the material and who possesses the knowledge.

Schools in your district can foster resilience through instruction by:

• Promoting increased opportunities for teachers to facilitate lessons rather than to teach didactically. Facilitative instruction is associated with motivating students to learn and helping them develop a sense of responsibility for their own learning.

• Supporting teachers efforts to individualise instructional strategies to accommodate the broad range of student learning styles, life experiences, and personal strengths and interests. Varying instructional strategies can make learning an engaging and meaningful process that builds upon every child's strengths and fosters every child's success.

4. The way schools track and group students by perceived abilities tells students what's expected of them.

Educational practices such as remedial “pull-out" sections or homogeneous grouping can create negative labels for students assigned to low-ability group labels that often become self-fulfilling prophecies in terms of academic and developmental outcomes. Schools in your district can help foster resiliency through grouping practices that include:

• Ensuring inclusionary group practices such as mainstreaming, co-operative learning, and peer tutoring. These practices are associated with academic improvement; social benefits such as lower rates of vandalism, drug and alcohol referrals, and school dropouts; and personal gains in confidence and relationships.

5. Standardised tests usually assess only one or two areas of student knowledge, and they do so imperfectly, relying on test items that lack a meaningful context.

More authentic assessments link learning and acquisition of knowledge to contexts and experiences that are relevant to students lives. Schools in your district can foster resiliency through evaluation by:

• Supporting teachers use of various types of performance assessments. Teachers may infer more about student knowledge from portfolios or demonstrations than from standardised tests, and these assessment tools give students opportunities to demonstrate what they learn in meaningful ways.

• Encouraging students to develop personal assessment skills such as self reflection and to participate in their own performance reviews.

• Including students in the evaluation of their academic accomplishments encourage them to take responsibility for their learning.

Policymakers imperative
These are troubling times for policymakers. With society clamouring for solutions to seemingly intractable social problems, policy makers must find or develop effective tools for long-lasting solutions. And they must do so in exceptionally tight fiscal times.

As we approach the 21st century, demands upon national and regional budgets continue to outpace revenues, further stretching already thin discretionary budgets such as education.

To meet their imperative, educational policymakers need timely, accurate, objective, and research-based information. To be effective, educational policies must not only be comprehensive and practical to implement, but they also must promote a combination of strategies and must contribute to positive developmental and academic outcomes for children and youth.

The findings from resiliency research offer a new paradigm for defining problems and framing solutions. This paradigm emphasises caring, support, and high expectations for youth, as well as opportunities for meaningful participation in school and civic activities. It is also a paradigm that relies less on infusing more money into the educational system than on changing existing beliefs and practices.

The notion of resiliency brings more than a message of hope; it brings the real possibility for positive developmental and academic outcomes for all children and youth.

Bibliography

For additional background information, consult the following documents:

Benard, B. (1991). Fostering Resiliency in Kids: Protective Factors in the Family, School, and Community. San Francisco: Western Regional Centre for Drug-Free Schools and Communities, Far West Laboratory.

Garbarino, J. et al. (1992). Children in Danger: Coping with the Consequences of Community Violence. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Gardner, H. (1985). The Frames of Mind: Theory of Multiple Intelligences. NY: Basic Books.

Garmezy, N. (1991). Resiliency and vulnerability to adverse developmental outcomes associated with poverty. American Behavioral Scientist, 34. 4, pp.416-430.

Haggerty, R. et al. (1994). Stress, Risk, and Resilience in Children and Adolescents. Rochester, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Meier, D. (1995). The Power of the Ideas. Boston: Beacon Press.

Noddings, N. (1992). The Challenge to Care in Schools: An Alternative Approach to Education. NY: Teachers College Press.

Rutter, M., et al. (1979). Fifteen Thousand Hours. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

Wang, M., et al., eds. (1994). Educational Resilience in Inner-City America: Challenges and Prospects. Hillsdale, N1: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Werner, E. and Smith, R. (1992). Overcoming the Odds: High-Risk Children from Birth to Adulthood. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.