Communities play a huge role in fostering resilience. Bernard  identifies three characteristics of those types of communities.  Community-school relationships are very important to give extra resources to meet even basic psychological needs of students and families.

Fostering resilience in children requires family environments that are caring and structured, hold high expectations for children’s behavior, and encourage participation in the life of the family. Most resilient children have a strong relationship with at least one adult, not always a parent, and this relationship helps to diminish risk associated with family discord. Bernard  found that even though divorce produces stress, the availability of social support from family and community can reduce stress and yield positive outcomes. Any family that emphasizes the value of assigned chores, caring for brothers or sisters, and the contribution of part-time work in supporting the family helps to foster resilience

Resilience is different for every child because every child is developing at a different pace. That means that we cannot expect children to use the same model and techniques to form resilience but we help children learn resilience similar to the way we teach a child how to play soccer or how to play a musical instrument.  

Mrs McKenzie, Behaviour Support Service has been working alongside the pupils in Mr Troons class on resilience trainiing.  THis has been very successful and I would encourage any of the pupils to email me with any comments!

Session 1 February 2010

Introduction - Why are we here?

                         Attendance is not compulsary

                         Why have you chosen to come?

In groups think what we mean by resilience?  Please discuss

Follow up questions

Why would we need resilience training?

Why do people need to be resilient?

How can it help us as a group?

What would it look  / feel  like?

Session 2 February 2010 - Feelings

Effect of our feelings on our actions spiral - Group provided with diagram, discussion about individual diagrams

Enact a scenario to illustrate the spiral

How could the problem be resolved before it reached extreme levels

Discuss in group if you can recall a real life incident that happenned to you.  What could we have done to achieve a better outcome?

Session 3 March 2010 - De-escalation

Work in pairs and discuss a time when you or others have lost ther temper and either you or they have not dealt with it well?

Feedback

During feedback list things that we could have done to stop things from getting any worse!

Pepsi Challenge

Session 4 March 2010 - Support

Rope Challenge

• Why did we succeed in this challenge?
• What worked well?
• What was not so good?
• How could we do better next time?

Strategies for dealing with adversity

Discuss and make a list of strategies

Plenary

Recap - discuss with shoulder partner three things that you will take away and remeber from this training.