Teaching Resilience

Resilience: ability to recover readily from illness, depression, adversity, or the like; buoyancy.

It is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, fears or significant sources of stress. 
Resilience is not a trait that people either have or do not have. It involves behaviours, thoughts and actions that can be learned and developed in anyone.
A combination of factors contributes to resilience. The primary factor is having caring and supportive relationships within and outside the family. Relationships that create love and trust, provide role models and offer encouragement and reassurance help reinforce a person's resilience.
Several factors are associated with resilience:

• The capacity to make realistic plans and take steps to carry them out. 
• A positive view of yourself and confidence in your strengths and abilities. 
• Skills in communication and problem solving. 
• The capacity to manage strong feelings and impulses.

All of these are factors that people can develop in themselves.
But, how can we teach Resilience to our kids/students?
Here there are ten useful phrases that you can use!

How to Correct... That is the Question

As a future English teacher for me is very difficult to perceive how is the best way to correct so I have thought in main “tips” to take into account: 

- Focus on the correction: as teachers, we have to be focus on what we correct and not correct every single detail because students can feel frustrated and they do not want to participate in order to not commit mistakes.

- Wait until the students have finished intervening: mainly in oral productions we must not interrupt our students because as a consequence they can lose their fluency.

- Help students understand what the mistake is by repeating, paraphrasing or underlining the mistake: it is better for students if they realise which are their mistakes so they can understand why they are wrong. This implies giving them the necessary time. 

- Have students correct each other: this activity will improve our students' knowledge because they learn from the mistakes of their classmates.

Keep Calm and Make a Change!

Nowadays there is a reality: students do not like English classes. But, why?

Some years ago I was on the other side, I was a student but, unlike my classmates, I loved studying English. However, something that I shared with them was that I used to hate English’s classes too.

How can a student love learning English but at the same time hate English classes? I have three hypothesis:

1) Are the topics that students are learning useful?

Sometimes teachers feel comfortable following a book, without changing anything. I do not want to say that this is wrong but, does the book have any relation with our students’ reality or daily life? Is meaningful for them knowing about the routine of Peter or Sarah? Or is more interesting knowing about the routine of a famous person?

2) Do we encourage our students about making mistakes?

We are not English native speakers, so speak another language that is not our make us feel uncomfortable, insecure, and ashamed of reading and speaking. Most of the time students do not want to make mistakes so they say that English is not for them. If we as teachers make a lot of mistakes, why not them? It is a must for our students know that we are learning all the time. Our mistakes from today are lessons for tomorrow.

3) Do students know that learning English is important for their lives?

Nowadays we are surrounded by information. We can know about everything in only one “click” so we have to choose the information that is necessary and useful for our daily life. As a result, is not weird that students make us this question: Is learning English important for my daily life?

Personally, I think that saying them that someday they can travel to another country is not a good reason. Students need to know that they can use English at any moment. For example, when they buy a t-shirt, listen to a song on the radio or when they are watching a movie. English is there!

Teachers are intermediaries between students and learning English, we can make a change, let’s do this!