Emotionally, he was not. This year, Derrick succeeds not at writing the creative stories he tells in his head or at reading or math—he succeeds at temper tantrums and fist fights. Often, Derrick is not in class but in the school office or at home as a punishment for his misbehaviour. As a result, he is in remedial reading classes and struggles academically. There are systematic issues in the United States that need to be addressed on a national level for Derrick’s sake; but we—as teachers, administrators, parents and school leaders—must also re-evaluate the skills we teach and foster in our classrooms. Derrick had the academic skills to thrive. But academic skills alone are not enough to succeed. I succeeded at teaching Derrick how to read and write, but I failed to help him develop the non-cognitive skills all students need to pursue their dreams in and outside of the classroom.

Evolving my vision to influence my planning

My vision for my kindergarteners profoundly changed after reflecting about Derrick and our class, and reading Paul Tough's How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (read my summary here). I am convinced that it is not enough for my kids to succeed on tests and to write, read and reason at high levels. Without the ability to navigate their emotions and the social climate in which they live, they will struggle in academic and professional settings. Research from diverse academic fields—psychology, economics, education and neuroscience—shows that non-cognitive skills can help students overcome the institutional barriers such as racism, classism or poverty, as well as the resulting stress in their lives. In fact, such non-cognitive skills—or character traits—predict success better than cognitive excellence.

And the good news is that character is not permanent. It can be cultivated—and it must be for students to have truly transformational learning experiences.

Putting my planning to work

The evolution of my vision prompted the evolution of my planning. Scientific research shows that a number of character traits can be path-changing for kids: grit, self-control, the ability to work in a team, optimism and zest. I set these as long-term goals and planned backwards in order to give my students opportunities to build these characteristics in themselves. I asked myself what each characteristic would look, sound and feel like in my class, and then thought of specific indicators to track. I created measurable steps to help myself implement routines and activities which integrate character development. I raised money to purchase materials that would foster this integration in a powerful way, including a class set of digital cameras.

In order to ensure my five year-olds exhibit grit, self-control, teamwork and zest, my classroom utilises the Toolbox Project into our everyday learning and interacting. There are 12 tools such as the Breathing Tool, Quiet/Safe Space Tool, Using Our Words Tool and the Apology and Forgiveness Tool. I taught these tools through role plays, skits, children's books and by modelling them myself and putting them into practice every day. My students carry each of these tools inside themselves; they know that no matter where they are they have the choice to use them. Students can use their Taking Our Time Tool when they are frustrated with an assignment. They can use the Breathing Tool and Using Our Words tool to calm themselves and reach out for the help of a partner. This helps them exhibit self-control and grit.

What’s more, character development is not divorced from the academic activities we do every day. Every successful collaboration, conflict and challenge requires using one's tools, which in turn fosters the development of character. My role is to coach when certain tools might be useful and give students structures for reflection. For example, when we debrief team workshop time, students talk about tools they used. They praise their teammates. In times of conflict in or outside of the classroom, students discuss how a tool could help solve the problem. These days I often hear parents ask their children, “What tool can you use?”

The importance of results

I know that my students’ pathways have been transformed from this approach. How? They can stick with an assignment even when it's hard. They can tell themselves, “This is difficult, but I am smart and I CAN do this.” They can breathe and think before they act—throwing a hurtful comment away, speaking up and telling their stories, patiently pointing each word in a book while their partner reads. These are the daily indicators of grit, self-control, zest and teamwork in my students. * name changed

Why emotional literacy is important

On the surface, four year-old student Sarah* seemed fine. She was a good and able student, but when confronted with situations she could not handle, she would often get frustrated and lash out: crying, screaming or becoming physically violent. Sarah’s outbursts resulted from stress and trauma in her life—a characteristic of many students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Jenny Pennell-Tan (Teach For America ‘07), a pre-Kindergarten teacher in New York City, tells the story of Sarah to illustrate the need for emotionally responsive and therapeutic practices in the classroom. Academic research (such as this CDC report) taught Jenny that toxic stress on the brain negatively affects cognitive flexibility, working memory and impulse control. “If we want to promote academic achievement,” she says, “we also need to address the social and emotional aspect and integrate it into everyday practice.” Jenny began to push and test the efficacy of classroom practices that could nurture and help heal her students.

Nivritti Tandon (Teach For India ‘12) similarly used her counselling background to inform the way she structured her second grade classroom. Nivritti wanted to see students master important social skills and develop into independent individuals, so she created a classroom environment in which her students felt comfortable talking about their character development and were not hindered by emotional issues.

Both teachers created strategies that addressed the following social and emotional skills in students:

• Recognising themselves as people with interests and emotions;
• Regulating their emotions/feelings;
• Being able to adapt to change;
• Moderating their social interactions with others;
• Building relationships between themselves and adults.

These were the skills that Nivritti and Jenny felt their students most needed in order to experience success in academic settings over the next few years.

How to teach emotional literacy

Having something concrete to hold on to really helps these concepts stick with them.

When discussing how she developed specific strategies in the classroom, Jenny provided the framework of the Teaching Pyramid. “If you can master its foundation,” she says, “there’s often no need to resort to the specialised interventions.”

Building a warm and positive teacher-student relationship is the first step. Jenny says it’s necessary for the teacher to wear many hats in the classroom to create that bond: nurturer, instructor and limit-setter. Once trust has been developed, the teacher can focus on classroom layout and instructional approaches. The classroom should be arranged to accommodate social interaction and play. Instruction should explicitly address personal and emotional development. For example, Nivritti designs units around specific character traits such as demonstrating respect. To support this, she brings in objects with which students can interact, asks students to discuss the character trait during morning meetings and relates content back to those character traits so that students internalise them.

Social and emotional interventions can take a variety of forms with a single goal: helping students voice their feelings and thus learn how to use them productively. Teachers can facilitate this by asking students reflective questions, promoting complete honesty, and by using strategically selected read-aloud books that model key emotions. The arts are also helpful—students can express their feelings through puppet shows or drawing pictures, for example. To make the most of these strategies, students need a vocabulary to help them put their feelings into words. Teachers should support this vocabulary development, too.

Doing the following in the classroom helps promote the development of emotional literacy in students:

• Build trust between you and your students by modelling the character traits you want them to develop.
• Feel confident to set limits in the classroom: you can be warm and supportive while at the same time providing firm boundaries.
• Look at the layout of your classroom and make sure it makes it easy for students to interact with each other.
• Create teaching resources and units of work that specifically address key character traits and encourage students to discuss them openly and reflectively.
• Develop and display a vocabulary list around social and emotional attributes

Teaching emotional literacy in an environment focused on other success criteria

Not everyone believes in the importance of explicitly teaching social and emotional skills. However, you can positively impact your school and your students, regardless of your school’s culture and the ages of your students. Jenny and Nivritti have three key pieces of advice to get you started:

1. Even if the system opposes you, keep at it. Jenny and Nivritti admit that others have been sceptical about the value of prioritising character development in an academically-focused environment. Yet they found a way to do this without sacrificing academic progress. Nivritti recommends the SEAL curriculum as especially helpful here.
2. Develop your own knowledge. Jenny recently went to India and says the experience helped her deepen her practical understanding and grow as person by pushing her outside her comfort zone. Nivritti suggests asking experts to visit your classroom and give advice. Both teachers recommend reading literature around the traits you want to build.
3. Use clear, calm language without emotion or judgement. “If developing confidence is important to you,” Jenny says, “don’t shame them.” For example, instead of saying to the class, “I see Tyrone doesn’t have his book out,” you might lean in and quietly remind Tyrone to take out his book so he can take part in class. Always strive to be inclusive.

You really have to work to raise the awareness of how important this is, and model it!

Read more of the conversation between Jenny and Nivritti, and access a whole list of resources they have shared, by clicking here.

They share as their parting words, a key takeaway:

“There are a lot of strategies out there. Find the ones that are true to who you are as a person, and give yourself time to sort it out.”

My vision for my students is that when they leave school they will be independent individuals: resilient enough to overcome the challenges they are likely to face because of their socio-economic background.

My vision for my students is that when they leave school they will be independent individuals: resilient enough to overcome the challenges they are likely to face because of their socio-economic background. Katie needs to show confidence, determination and a willingness to take on challenges ten years from now. So how am I defining, teaching and tracking resilience?

 How can we define ‘resilience’?

I surveyed my classes and discovered:

• All students identify that resilience is a good thing;
• Students do not agree on what ‘good’ resilience looks like;
• Students give ‘not giving up’ as the most common definition of resilience.

 I have the privilege of working with the Synergies Transformational Teaching Fellowship, and we defined resilience by dividing it into four characteristics, or faces. For my classes, I added a fifth.

• Face 1: Resilient students seek challenging situations/problems.
• Face 2: Resilient students explain the positive process of failure, learning and improvement. They ask for feedback, appreciate and implement feedback. They are not ashamed of sharing failure with others.
• Face 3: Resilient students stick to a task (short and long term), commit to it and follow through with it.
• Face 4: Resilient students use language that exhibits a belief that they can and should complete a task, and commit to following it through.
• Face 5: Resilient students manage distractions effectively.

What do we know works?

Few studies have actually measured resilience in classrooms. We know that resilient students are more likely to achieve higher grades, show self-motivation, participate in extra-curricular activities and are less likely to drop out of school (H. Waxman et.al., Review of Research on Educational Resilience. 2003). Given this, I have chosen to focus on the two intervention strategies that are shown to have the greatest impact on student academic achievement (Sutton Trust, 2013):

1. feedback and coaching
2. metacognition or ‘thinking about thinking’

My assumption is that resilience is required for enduring academic success, so academic achievement indicates that students have practised resilience.

The tracking tool

Baseline tracking has informed me that students have a poor idea of what resilience is. My assessment tells me they give up easily, and parental assessment suggests they manage distractions badly. To improve, students need to understand what resilience is and be able to self-assess in order to take control of their own path. To achieve this, I created a rubric to support student assessment of their own resilience. Each face of resilience has a definition of (1) Inadequate, (2) Needs improvement, (3) Good, or (4) Outstanding behaviour. You can download the full tool here.

What follows is an example from Face 5, ‘Managing Distractions.”

• (1) I can be a distraction. I am often distracted in lessons, and can sometimes be the one who distracts others. If set a long task, I give up easily because of this.
• (2) I am easily distracted. If there is something distracting going on, I find it difficult to ignore the distraction. I will try a long task, but regularly break as I lose concentration. There is a big difference in how I work if my teacher is away.
• (3) When I am distracted, I am able to re-focus. Sometimes I am aware that I am being distracted, but normally I can remind myself to focus. Re-focusing is normally successful. If the teacher is not present, I work nearly as hard.
• (4) I am nearly always absorbed in learning. I often find myself completely absorbed in what I am doing. Time goes quickly. Even if other people are being distracting, I ignore it. If the teacher is not present, I work just as hard.

The tool is used as for self-assessment, peer assessment, teacher assessment and parental assessment. I am currently in the midst of a 6-week implementation plan:

• Week 1: Students assess their own resilience. Teachers and parents also assess students, using the same tool.
• Week 2-5: Pupils pick one of the five faces to focus on each week. Pupils assess themselves at the start of each lesson, and set a goal for how they want to improve. They give this goal to a partner at start of every lesson and, at the end, pupils reflect on whether they’ve demonstrated an improvement. The partner then provides feedback based on lesson observation.
• Week 6: Second data collection from self-assessment, teachers and parents.

Throughout this time, I am also giving students direct feedback on their resilient behaviours, much as I give them daily feedback on their academic progress. It is my hope that in this initial 6-week period, pupils will better understand the faces of resilience and realise the probability of improvement. Katie and her classmates will improve their capacity to complete long tasks, better manage distractions, and ultimately approach life with an “I can” attitude.

1. Aaron’s presentation for the webinar.
2. KIPP’s Character Education Approach. A summary with great resources at the end.
3. Video of KIPP Teachers from New York City. Teachers talk about character growth in their schools.
4. A great NY Times Article by Paul Tough.
5. A concrete example of a Character Report Card, from Angela Ducksworth at UPenn.
6. As a counterpoint, some critiques about the character development proposal: social structure and submission and the problems of measuring and grading character
7. BONUS TRACK (only for the bold and gritty):“The Rebirth and Retooling of Character Education in America” by Russell Sojourner. A historical review of character education, mostly focused on America’s education system.

This is counter-intuitive to many social entrepreneurs. I meet many who are on their way to launching their ventures. They are confident, resilient and optimistic. They are in neat suits or artfully distressed jeans, with business cards and a ready grin. There’s a lot of talk about “my idea” and “my vision”—we all know that in this sector people invest in people—and passion for what you do is often more persuasive than any business plan.

And for social entrepreneurs, it’s seen as okay to promote yourself, because you’re working to maximise the greater good.

I’ve realised that there is another character trait that is as equally important to the success and sustainability of a venture as its leader’s confidence, resilience and optimism; it’s the desire to let go of “my vision” and to share in a collective one instead.

Spark+Mettle—the youth aspirations agency I founded in 2011—launched its latest project earlier this year: Discoverables. It’s a digital solution to address youth unemployment in the UK, by enabling young people to identify, articulate, develop and showcase key character strengths and soft skills needed to succeed both in work and life. In the very early stages of developing the idea, I particularly struggled with the tension between my collaborative nature and my single vision. It was my idea. Although that sense of ownership was important at the start, it quickly became a hindrance to getting the right things done well. Yet I didn’t want to let go. I feared that my idea might be watered down or taken in a direction I hadn’t intended.

I realised that an alternative to taking control of the problem I wanted to fix was to lose control of finding my solution and instead work with others on a shared idea.

I once again adopted an approach that had worked when I first founded Spark+Mettle: co-creation. Co-creation—and this is my fledgling definition—is about providing an early-stage opportunity for a variety of stakeholders in different fields to design and develop an idea simultaneously. It can be fast, but it can also be hard, and it is definitely messy. For Discoverables, our core team consisted of young brains—experts in youth outreach and social media—as well as a seasoned designer, and then me. We had other people—employers as well as potential clients and partners—to feed in what they knew when we needed it.

Ultimately, working on a project co-creatively is a bit like working on a complicated Venn diagram. The bit where everyone’s knowledge and skills overlap in the middle is where the interesting, rigorous, motivating and most sustainable solutions lie.

The co-creation approach benefitted me and Discoverables in two important ways:

• Diligent development: We had up to 30 brains working on the idea simultaneously. It meant we took longer to develop our product at the start than a lean start-up. But it also meant we didn’t have to scrap it, or pivot. We were able to execute multiple ‘minimum viable products’ to determine the best one. The same business plan we wrote, slowly, at the start is still valid now. That has saved a lot of time.
• Integrated learning: The combined knowledge of our individual areas of expertise stopped us making too many expensive mistakes. We were testing hypotheses and strategies within our invested group, without having to conduct market research (which more often than not doesn’t work) simply by asking our various team members.

Here are five tips I’ve learned on making the jump from singular vision to co-creation:

1. Uncover your shared purpose: If people do stuff that they like and they feel a sense of that shared purpose, then it all ends up falling together. The purpose has to be rooted in a problem big enough that everyone in the group can relate to it, albeit with their own access points.
2. Create one master to-do list. There’s no need for heavy handed management. With space and respect, stuff gets done. Saying that, I’m deeply indebted to online collaboration tools such as Asana.
3. Develop a genuine sense of ownership. Co-creation is not about just asking a few more questions, pretending to give a voice to your ‘customers’ and then going away and processing those answers in your own private personal space. It’s exposed work—with true transparency. With Discoverables, we ended up sharing both the risks and rewards: all the key co-creators are now co-directors of the organisation.
4. Remember that co-creation is not collaboration. Collaboration is often managed by a central hub or person. I’m not much of a manager. BUT, as I’ve learned, that doesn’t matter. People self-manage. They do it. They do it all the time.
5. Embrace the mess and the unknown. Co-creation works well for people who enjoy (or who can tolerate) a project being a bit messy and disorganised with the picture only becoming clear quite slowly.

What does this mean? An typical student in one school is barely able to locate one piece of explicitly stated information in a text. Yet the typical student in the second school can demonstrate an accurate understanding of long and complex texts, even when the content or form of the text is unfamiliar for the student. In both schools, students share a similar socio-economic background, when taking into account the education and occupational status of their parents and their family wealth.

Teachers can help disadvantaged students become more resilient by challenging false perceptions of inability.

This gap is evident not just among individual schools, but across continents. It is fascinating that in some countries more than 50% of disadvantaged students are ‘beating the odds’ to achieve strong academic results, while in other countries the proportion of resilient students is less than 10%.

Can education policy make students more resilient? This article provides a brief summary of the research that OECD has recently published on this topic, as well as links to further reading.

What is resilience?

Before discussing how education policy can have an effect on student resilience, it is useful to mention that there is no consensus about what resilience really means or what its causes are. The common feature of various definitions is that ‘resilience generally involves the study of individuals who succeed despite encountering significant adversity’ (‘Against the odds’, page 16). Two definitions are used by OECD in the PISA studies, one with an international perspective, and the other with an in-country perspective.

1. Resilience in the international context. A student is resilient if she or he is among the bottom third in their own country in terms of socioeconomic background, and in the top third across all countries in terms of academic performance, among students who share a similar background.
2. Resilience in the context of one country. Resilient students are those who fall in the bottom third of their country’s socioeconomic background distribution and the top third of their country’s performance distribution (‘Against the odds’, pages 22-25).

When analysing resilience in the international context, the question naturally arises whether the socio-economic background of students is comparable. For PISA, the main tool for comparing the background of students is their index of economic, social and cultural status. Three components of this measure are occupational status, education and wealth. When students took the PISA test, they were asked, among other things, whether they had a desk where they studied or a room of their own (for more details, see page 29 of ‘Overcoming social background’). Such factors help PISA compare the background of students.

This data allows PISA to compare the academic results of each school, while taking the socio-economic background of students into account. Most countries represented in Teach For All have a wide variation of academic performance, even among schools whose students share a similar economic, social and cultural status. As an example, see graph below where the performance of each school is plotted against the background of students in that school. (See pages 106-121 of ‘Overcoming social background’ for more data about other countries, as well as guidance how to interpret this data.)

Summary of findings

According to PISA, two factors appear to be strongly associated with successful academic performance among disadvantaged students.

• They spend more time in class. In Chile, for example, disadvantaged students spend 41% less time in science class, when compared to all other students. When exploring which disadvantaged students are most likely to ‘beat the odds,’ it appears that more time in class does lead to better learning outcomes. PISA 2006 was focused on science, and they found that in most countries, ‘the average resilient student spends more time studying science in school—on average, between one and two hours per week—than the average disadvantaged low-achiever.’ In the United States, compulsory attendance in science class leads to about a full year of learning progress among disadvantaged students.

• They develop self-confidence and motivation. The second main conclusion from recent PISA studies is that the more self-confident students are, the greater the odds of being resilient. Schools can and should encourage the adoption of teaching methods that foster motivation and confidence. For example, evidence shows that high quality mentoring programs can have a significant effect. Also, teachers can challenge the false perceptions of inability among their students. PISA analysis suggests that it is important to focus efforts specifically on disadvantaged students, because they often receive less support elsewhere (‘Pisa in focus’, ‘Against the odds’).

Both these factors can be improved in students by focusing on building resilience. Students need high levels of resilience to spend more time in class, and they need resilience to develop self-confidence and to stay motivated when undertaking challenging tasks and activities.

More detailed policy implications are discussed in the report ‘Overcoming social background’. What is clear is that on an international level and an in-country level there is now a growing body of evidence for the impact of student resilience. The conclusion from PISA is that smart policies, if implemented effectively, can increase the proportion of students who come from a disadvantaged background and ‘beat the odds’ to achieve good academic results.