In Part I, we looked at some educational-based aspects of instilling resilience. How about some ideas further afield?…

Nurture a positive view of yourself

So often have I heard of children and young adults being told ‘they can’t do this’, or being made to believe they are poor at something through a combination of poor teaching and poor educational structuring in school.

One example comes from one of our very own students, who was put in an extra Maths class because he had fallen behind.

However, this reinforced a negative view of himself, because he very quickly realised that all the other children in this extra Maths group had been put in it because they too, were struggling at Maths.

This is an example of poor educational structuring which reinforced a negative of opinion of this student’s abilities in Maths.

However, his tutor at NN recognised early on that he was sharp and incisive in Maths (when he wanted to be!) and immediately worked to change the way he was thinking regarding his abilities with Maths, through positive affirmations and confidence building with techniques.

With the guidance and assistance of his tutor at NN, we have helped reverse his mindset about his Maths; he now approaches Maths with a positive, ‘can-do’ attitude and most importantly of all, he believes in himself!

Keep things in perspective

This is an important aspect of resilience that can be nurtured through tutoring and in the classroom.

It is essential to keep everything in perspective, which can often be very hard as a child, teenager and young adult, as at this stage of our lives we have little past experience from which to reassure ourselves and keep ourselves balanced (dare I say it, ‘based’).

A good tutor becomes a great tutor by relating to students through their own past struggles and how they overcame these hurdles and succeeded in hitting their goals.

Being relatable in this manner was paramount to my own success as a tutor, particularly for my GCSE and A-Level students, many of whom constantly doubted their own abilities and struggled with confidence.

Simply by having a friendly, yet relatable voice in your corner helps keep things in perspective and allays fears and panic around learning and replaces it with confidence and positivity.

Framing learning in a way that relates to each student

On the subject of relatability, one thing that is often rarely discussed in terms of strategies for nurturing resilience in students is framing learning in a way that gets them to respond to it from a personal perspective.

The most common way of doing this, particularly as students progress through school, is by finding out what their goals are in life beyond academe and classroom study, or also what they want to study at University.

With many of my tutees, I did this not only to get a better sense of their interests, but also so that I could incentivise and motivate them by getting them to view their subject and/or exam we were working towards as one small, yet crucial step in getting to where they wanted to be.

Further Reading: Matt Zalaznick – Reading as a remedy: One of the best ways to build resilience in students (District Administration)