After our initial surveys of staff and students, it was determined that we needed to focus our efforts on lessons and experiences that focused on explicitly teaching language and strategies about persevering at challenging tasks.

One structure we used to meet this goal was collaboration time.  During one teacher's prep time, I would release another teacher and those two teachers could meet to plan core competency and social emotional learning lessons.  

I planned a series of lessons that could be used with students in Kindergarten to grade 7 that would incorporate resilience language and strategies. 

For example, in Kindergarten to grade 3, I used the book The Thing Lou Couldn't Do to have students think back to a time when they learned a hard thing.  Through this reflection, we brainstormed the strategies they used to help them learn that hard thing.  The strategies were displayed on the white board.  Each student then used writing and pictures to share and reflect on their hard thing.

For students in grade 4-7, I showed two short videos that exemplified and defined resilience and then had students complete a reflection about resilience in their own life.

The feedback about this collaboration time was very positive.  Teachers appreciated the time to plan together, I appreciated the opportunity to work closely with students. Please see our evidence blog post to see if what we did made a difference.