Resilient Learners

Lifelong learners develop resilience capacity, whereas other learners don’t.

I watched with interest when Lucy Hone presented her TED talk titled “3 Secrets of Resilient People.” It’s worth a look.

According to Hone, resilient people, and resilient learners, possess three (I actually counted four during her presentation) skills others don’t have.

The first of these skills is to understand that stuff happens in life. And that not everything that happens in life will be good. So get ready for some bad stuff.

I saw this throughout my school career where strong learners were able to deal with challenges when it came to their learning, whereas weak learners wilted when facing similar challenges. Strong learners were able to take the highs and the lows, and more importantly they were able to learn from the lows. That type of learning sometimes prevented that learner from falling into the same challenge trap that caught them before.

The second skill is something my son’s AAU basketball coach taught him. T.J. Ford, NBA veteran and national college player of the year, told my son many times, “Wes, you can only control what you can control.” Ford’s coaching was extremely valuable while Wes was trying to locate a college basketball team to play for as my son wanted to continue his playing career beyond high school. Wes ended up playing four years at the University of Houston, starting as a walk-on and finishing as a scholarship recipient and a team captain. It could have been a miserable few months waiting for Coach Kelvin Sampson to issue the invite to Wes to play for the Cougars, but it was easier because Wes took T.J.’s advice and focused on what he could control – getting ready for the upcoming season no matter who he was going to play for.

Resilient learners understand how to control what they can control, and then to let the rest of it go. They do this by staying with their learning plan, whether it is actually written on paper or not. Struggling learners spend way too much time focusing on matters out of their control – like a recent bad grade, a teacher who doesn’t like them, or a class they don’t like.

The third skill that resilient learners possess that struggling learners don’t is the ability to “hunt the good stuff.” Resilient learners self-talk is always telling them about events that make that young learner believe in their abilities to achieve, no matter what the task. Struggling learners, on the other hand, tend not to “hunt the good stuff” and therefore their self-talk becomes focused on negative events and, even worse, failure.

The fourth skill I heard during Hone’s TED talk was being able to answer this question – Is what you are about to do going to help you or hurt you? Resilient learners have trained themselves to move toward activities that will help them and stray away from those that won’t.

I remember a high school graduation I attended while I was a region superintendent for a traditional school district. The high school was ranked at the bottom of all high schools in the state. But yet, there sat a valedictorian on the stage – for the worst high school in the state! I thought to myself, “I need to talk to this young lady for sure.” I asked her one simple question – How did you become valedictorian? Her answer was amazing. She told me that she decided as a freshman that she was going to spend all of her time studying with friends who went to a highly ranked suburban high school and not spend time hanging around her low-performing school. She learned early on that spending too much time at her zoned high school was going to hurt her, whereas spending time with her suburban friends would help her. She told me she probably lost some potential friends along the way from the neighborhood, but she wasn’t going to live in that neighborhood any longer, once she attended Harvard University.

Amazing story. Resilience.

Learning organizations need to spend more time working with young learners preparing them to be resilient learners. Training and time spent up front will pay big dividends once the young learners learn how to learn for themselves, including the four skills Lucy Hone outlined in a remarkable TED talk.

Til tomorrow. SVB