Exciting news! Becoming Buoyant: Helping Teachers and Students Cope with the Day to Day is due for publication next month (July 2020). It’s taken me about five years to write this, indeed, I began investigating resilience well before I began writing The Emotional Learner. If you’re a regular visitor to the this site or you’veContinue reading Becoming Buoyant
Re-evaluating Failure
Failure is still seen as something to feel ashamed of rather than a vital component of eventual success. The need to succeed first time and our propensity towards perfection, however, can often lead to either the illusion of success or act as a barrier to it. Failure is ubiquitous, it’s experienced by everybody, from studentsContinue reading Re-evaluating Failure
Academic Buoyancy: Is there something missing?
There’s something that’s been bothering me for little while now. It’s been around seven or eight since I started writing about academic buoyancy (if you’re curious you can read my 2015 Psychologist article here) and I’ve said quite a bit about the 5Cs – the qualities that seem to be more prevalent in students whoContinue reading Academic Buoyancy: Is there something missing?
Resilience: A Love-Hate Relationship
I think Nick Rose hit the nail on the head with his comments on resilience in What does this look like in the classroom? To paraphrase Nick, if you were to ask thirty teachers what resilience was, you would be likely to receive thirty different explanations. I’ve been mulling over the whole issue of resilienceContinue reading Resilience: A Love-Hate Relationship
Five Principles of Academic Buoyancy
1. What is Academic Buoyancy? Academic buoyancy is the ability to successfully deal with academic setbacks and challenges that are typical of the ordinary course of school life (e.g. poor grades, competing deadlines, exam pressure, difficult schoolwork)
From adversity to buoyancy
The Long Read… (Originally published in The Psychologist, September 2015) Despite the growth of so-called non-cognitive skills interventions in schools, such as resilience training, there often exists a degree of dissonance regarding the definition of such terms. Resilience interventions have been found to use the term in different ways, reducing the significance of any measurableContinue reading From adversity to buoyancy