Resilient Teachers: Building Strengths for Work and Play

Course description

Resilience can be described as a set of strengths we can employ to drive us towards achieving a balance between the highs and lows that we experience, in life and work.

Well-being and resilience are two components that allow us to make teaching and learning sustainable and meaningful during times of change, crisis, and challenge. While we cannot maintain a constant level of wellbeing, we can lead students and teachers to recognize when a state of wellbeing exists, and when drawing on resilience strengths is useful or necessary. Some people thrive in a crisis. Other people flourish in a state of well-being. Neither of these two states can be maintained consistently. We are constantly in a state of flux and change, perhaps now more than ever.

In this course, we will share and discuss the importance of teachers’ understanding and taking responsibility for developing their resilience strengths to help them navigate their way towards a heightened and more stable state of wellbeing. By identifying and analyzing the strengths necessary for achieving wellbeing and behaving resiliently, we can collaborate to navigate the highs and lows in ways that promote mental, emotional, and physical health.

Course structure

Topic 1: Wellbeing and Resilience: Using terms we understand …what are we talking about?

In this module we will:

• Describe and understand the nature of wellbeing and resilience
• Explore the connections and correlations between wellbeing and resilience

Topic 2: The look and feel of wellbeing and resilience; some helpful analogies

In this module we will:

• Consider the power of analogies to share conceptual ideas and understandings.
• Experience some analogies to help communicate how wellbeing and resilience work and feel

Topic 3: Telling Wellbeing and Resilience Stories

In this module we will:

• Experience a personal story, tracking moments of varying levels of wellbeing and the activation of resilience strengths in challenging times.
• Value the power of stories to illustrate and share personal experiences.
• Compose a personal wellbeing and resilience story to share with others.

Topic 4: The Strengths of Wellbeing and Resilience

In this module we will:

• Analyze and classify the shared Wellbeing and Resilience strengths.
• Reflect on the differences and correlations between Wellbeing and Resilience, using strength-based vocabulary

Topic 5: The I and WE of Wellbeing

In this module we will:

• Consider aspects of wellbeing: emotional, physical, societal, workplace, and societal.
• Decide on some strategies to focus on to cultivate and strengthen your sense of wellbeing in various aspects of your life.

Topic 6: Realising Resilience

In this module we will:

• Explore possible actions you can take in your context to strengthen and develop resilience behaviors.
• Select a “Resilience Strengthening” strategy and create a plan of action for implementing it…at work and/or play.