Give a gift...

As we begin another school year, I spend my days reflecting on what we can do differently. How can we grow, evolve, and adapt to meet the ever-changing needs of our students? What do they need from us? How will we support them?

What I’ve landed on is simply giving the gift of protective factors.

As we emerge from the hardship the last two years has bestowed upon us and enter a period of reconstruction, post-pandemic, I realize what our kids need more than ever is to develop resiliency. Resiliency to overcome adversity. Resiliency to stay the course even when things are tough. Resiliency to see the beauty and good that is still in this world.

But how do we achieve that? The answer is surprisingly simple - by building positive relationships with our students.

While there are a whole slew of protective factors that positively impact a person and help foster resiliency, the single most important one is to have one caring adult in your life and THAT is something we can do.

We have entered an age of teaching where our students come to us with such a wide-range of needs, where the government has put so many restrictions on what we can and can’t do and say in our classrooms, where the academic standards, rigor, and test results take priority above all else. But what I know is, that in the long run, students aren’t going to remember all that you taught them, what grade they got on the test, or if their school made AYP (annual yearly progress). What our students will remember is how we made them feel.

Did we cheer them on? Did we empower them? Did we show them we care? Did we get to know them as more than just a student in our classroom? Did we ask them what THEIR goals were and how we could help them achieve those?

Josh Shipp, a true example of resiliency, says “Every child is one caring adult away from being a success story.”…. This year, let’s take the focus off the standards, off the politics, off the many barriers currently impacting the world of education and let’s put our focus on that. Let’s go out there and do anything and everything we can to ensure that every single student has a positive relationship with at least one adult in our schools. I truly believe if we do that, we will succeed in better preparing our students for their future and a life of greater success. #FosterResilience