The promise and the caution of resilience models for schools

Abstract

Resilience is a very useful construct for framing school mental health services to children and is particularly applicable to mental health services in school settings. Still, resilience perspectives should not be overgeneralized to school mental health practice because risk and resilience wax and wane over time and daily decisions about students' needs for support must remain flexible and responsive to these changes. This article describes shifts and changes in early indicators of school success for third‐ through fifth‐grade students in a Midwestern elementary school as one example of the power and limitations of resilience models' applicability. The example is used to argue for caution in interpreting early indicators of risk as predicting subsequent poor student outcomes. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Degrees of resilience: profiling psychological resilience and prospective academic achievement in university inductees

“…Resilience has predicted academic attainment in high school students (Capella & Weinsten, 2001;Gonzalez & Padilla, 1997;Martin & Marsh, 2006;Nota, Soresi & Zimmerman, 2004) where the conceptual frameworks of academic resilience and academic buoyancy have been developed to identify factors which may protect against stress (Martin & Marsh, 2008. Personal attributes including relatedness, a sense of mastery and spirituality (Prince-Embury, 2011;Kim & Esquivel, 2011) and support from parents and teachers (Bryan, 2005;Mullis, Rathge & Mullis, 2003;Prince-Embury, 2008) have contributed to resilience being used to underpin mental health services and academic success in school settings (Esquivel, Doll & Oades-Sese, 2011, Doll, Jones, Osborn, Dooley & Turner, 2011. In contrast, resilience has been less prominent in HE; limited understanding may have reflected inadequate pedagogy and support, especially for new groups of students with distinctive needs beyond those of the stereotypical HE learner (Walker, Gleaves & Grey, 2006).…”

Homeless in Observatory, Cape Town Through the Lens of Max-Neef's Fundamental Human Needs Taxonomy

“…A participant referred to his "pad familie" or "street family". Makiwane et al (2010) also refer to the "family units" created among the homeless that they interviewed in Pretoria and Rustenburg, which "filled the vacuum" left by their own families (Makiwane et al, 2010:44 Diener andSeligman (2002), Hartling (2008), Smith (2008), Smith (2010) and Doll, Jones, Osborn, Dooley and Turner (2011) found that the supportive relationships are major contributors to the resilience of people and were important for the subjective wellbeing of the homeless.…”

Resilience in Children, Adolescents, and Adults

“…A smile, a warm greeting, a note of encouragement, a few minutes taken to meet alone with a student, and an appreciation of and respect for different learning styles are but several of the activities that de fi ne a "charismatic teacher" (Brooks, 1991 ) . These and other factors, which help children and adolescents to deal more effectively with stress, to overcome adversity, and to become resilient have received increased emphasis in the research literature in the past 20 years (Brooks, 1994 ;Brooks & Goldstein, 2001Doll, Jones, Osborn, Dooley, & Turner 2011 ;Goldstein & Brooks, 2005 ; .…”