Education Shortform
Resilience
In a nutshell…
R is for resilience. Also called buoyancy or grit, this means how well a person can recover from setbacks and tough it out through difficult situations.
For any given stressor or problem, one person is likely to cope better and recover more quickly than another person does, and it could be argued that this trait — their resilience — is something that can be both measured and improved through training.
However, a criticism of the concept is the tendency to view resilience as a fixed ability that some children possess and others do not (and perhaps even to write off younger generations as ‘lacking resilience’).
It is also easy to neglect the fact that people’s behaviour and motivation can change radically as a result of a temporary social situation or according to judgements they make about their own group memberships and social roles (a basic tenet of social identity theory).
Read more about resilience here.
Previous Article >> Index >> Next Article
This is one of a series of shortform education articles. You can download a simplified summary of my ‘A–Z of Educational concepts’ here.
And why not sign up to get my weekly memory and metacognition newsletter? Do that right here!
