This workshop will explore how instructors can help their students to become more resilient learners through the use of what Gregory Walton (2014) terms “wise interventions”—stealthy and focused interventions whose aim is to change specific psychological processes that inhibit students from thriving. Among parents, teachers, and university administrators, there is a growing concern that today’s undergraduates are lacking resilience—an essential academic skill that allows students to become fully empowered learners. This session will begin by introducing Stanford’s “Resilience Project” and the Resilience Research Consortium to which Stanford and other universities across North America belong. These schools believe that resilience is skill that can be taught and have undertaken the important work of finding ways of teaching resilience to undergraduates. By helping our students to become more resilient, to help them see resilience as a skill that can be learned, we are not only empowering our students for the duration of their academic careers, but we are also effecting lasting and life-long change. First, I will briefly discuss my own “Bounce Project” and my SOTL research (funded by my university’s Learning and Teaching Centre) that uses Walton’s study of “wise interventions” to increase resilience in undergraduates through short writing exercises in a first-year Intro. to Academic Writing class. Next, I will ask small groups of participants to work together to share their understandings of what it means to be resilient and to behave resiliently. We will then come back together to share our ideas and to better understand what we mean when we discuss resilience in the context of an academic environment. What kinds of resilient behaviours do they as teachers model in the classroom? What kinds of “wise interventions” could they include in their own curriculum? What kinds of “wise interventions” have they tried? We will then once again engage in a group discussion and share our findings with each other in an effort to find ways to teach resilience to our students and to help students to “learn to bounce.”
