1. How to Promote Academic Resilience in your Student Tammy Joy Burnham
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How to Promote Academic Resilience in your Student
Tammy Joy Burnham

2. Academic Resilience
The heightened likelihood of educational success despite personal vulnerabilities & adversities brought about by environmental conditions & experiences.
Dynamic set of interactions between the student & resources in his or her environment that work together to interrupt a negative trajectory & support academic success.
NOT a personality trait or single adverse situation
Wang, Haertel, & Walberg, 1997

3. Characteristics of Youth At-Risk
Poor Self-Concept
Poor Academic Achievement Performance
Non-traditional family life
High Absenteeism
Low Parental Expectations
Low SES status

4. Characteristics to Encourage
Strong work ethic
Persistence
Internal Locus of Control
Emotional Intelligence

5. Culturally Responsive Teaching
Gloria Ladson –Billings: Educational Debt
Start of School Year:
Get to know your students
Create positive classroom environment
Encourage student photos, artwork, writings
Ladson-Billings, 2006

6. Strategies to Employ Teacher- Student Rapport Classroom Climate
Build positive relationships
Set high expectations
Focus on student’s strengths
Classroom Climate
Develop a meaningful, caring community
Encourage personal goals
Instructional Strategies
Student-centered
Collaborative learning groups
Allow students to tutor peers
Student Skills
Teach life skills
Encourage extracurricular activities
Downey, 2008; Dunn, 2008

7. A Focus on Hope: The Resilience Cycle
Spoke One: The student recognizes his or her major risk factors.
70% of students felt “street smarts” helped them in not feeling so marginalized.
70% of students attributed their family’s constant struggle in aiding their work ethic & persistence.
Spoke Two: The student finds protective factors that have the potential to help with negative effects of risk factors.
Strong emotional intelligence: Being likable, positive, & friendly were qualities that attracted assistance.
Morales, 2008

8. A Focus on Hope
Spoke Three: The student manages his or her own protective factors to work toward academic achievement.
Risk Factors are complex & numerous.
Need multiple sets of protective factors.
Spoke Four: The student recognizes the effectiveness of the protective factors & is motivated to implement them.
Students build self-efficacy: Belief student has the ability to achieve.
92% of students identified this belief as crucial to their success.
Morales, 2008

9. A Focus on Hope
Spoke Five: The constant refinement of protective factors, along with future goals & visions, sustain the student’s progress.
72% of students referred to their study habits & work ethic as habitual, automatic, & routine.
Morales, 2008

10. The HUB
At the Hub of the five spokes is the notion of emotional intelligence present in the student.
Of the 50 students interviewed, 46 exhibited high degrees of emotional intelligence.
Qualities that facilitated emotional intelligence:
Friendly Ability to channel emotions
Persistence Ability to delay gratification
Morales, 2008

11. Emotional Intelligence: Goleman

12. Problem: Why study academic resilience?
The Achievement Gap (Educational Debt) remains expansive between students of color and whites, urban and suburban students, and low and high- socioeconomic students.
(Harris & Herrington, 2006)

13. Reflection Puzzles of Practice
Attitudes for productive reflection: openmindedness, responsibility, & wholeheartedness
Zeichner & Liston, 1996
As teachers, do we focus on failure or success?
Discuss with your group the successes you have experienced in promoting academic resilience.
Ask: What? So What? Now What?

14. Changing Lives

15. References
Downey, J.A. (2008). Recommendations for fostering resilience in the classroom. Preventing School Failure, 53, (1),
Dunn, T. (2004). Enhancing mathematics teaching for at-risk students: Influences of a teaching experience in alternative high school. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 82, (2),
Goleman, D. (2006). Emotional Intelligence. Bantam.
Harris, D.N. & Herrington, C.D. (2006). Accountability, standards, & the growing achievement gap: Lessons from the past half century. American Journal of Education, 112,
Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). From the achievement gap to the educational debt: Understanding achievement in US schools. Educational Researcher, 35, (7), 3-12.
Wang, M.C., Haertal, G.D., Walberg, H.J. (1997). Fostering educational resilience in inner-city schools. The Mid-Atlantic Regional Educational Laboratory. Temple University.

16. References
Morales, E. E. (2010). Linking strengths: identifying & exploring protective factor clusters in academically resilient low-socioeconomic urban students of color. The Roeper Review, 32,
Morales, E. E. (2008). The resilient mind: The psychology of academic resilience. The Educational Forum, 72,
Morales, E. E. & Trotman, F. (2004). Promoting academic resilience in multicultural America: Factors affecting student success. New York: Peter Lang.
Zeichner, K. & Liston, D. (1996). Reflective teaching. Lawrence Erlbaum Ass.