Our focus this year has been to ensure that students can talk about the strategies they use when faced with adversity. In simple terms, what do you do when something is hard. We arrived at this focus because during our student scanning we learned that most students could not articulate personal strategies they used to persevere when things were challenging.

Throughout the year, we employed a variety of measures to explicitly teach strategies to students that would support their resilience and perseverance.  We want our students to have the tools to face adversity.

Through collaboration time, we were able to survey students kindergarten to grade 7 about the tools they feel support their ability to face an obstacle or learn something hard.

Students were asked, "When you are doing something that is challenging for you, what are some strategies you use to help yourself?"

Here is what we learned:

K-2 66% of students could name one or more strategies.  For example, "I ask for help" or "I take a breath."

Grade 3-7  88% of students could name one or more strategies.  75% of students could name two or more strategies.

More students are now able to express strategies that they rely on when they are doing something that is challenging for them. Our next step is to have more primary students able to name one or more strategies they use when faced with a challenging task.  We also would like to see intermediate students increase their repertoire of strategies.