“More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person’s level of resilience will

determine who succeeds and who fails. That’s true in the cancer ward, it’s true in the Olympics and it’s true in the boardroom”

Dean Becker, CEO Adaptive Leaning Systems, Harvard Business

Review, May 2002

What comes to mind when you think of resilience? You can view resilience as an elastic ring that can bend and change shape before coming back to its original form. Or a bamboo bending in the wind and then standing strong again. Resilience, in a nutshell, is our ability to bounce back from difficult experiences.

In the teaching context, resilience is defined as a quality that enables teachers to maintain their

commitment to teaching and their teaching practices despite challenges and setbacks (Beltman et al., 2011). Resilient teachers are known to be less susceptible to problems associated with stress due to their mindset that helps them adapt and thrive despite problems they come by in their personal and professional lives.

What contributes to teacher resilience? In this article, I will look at the SPARK model of resilience used in resilience programs throughout the world (Boniwell et al., 2023). In the model, “s” stands for situation, “p” for perception, “a” for affect, “r” for reaction and “k” for knowledge. The model tells us that, in fact, we all have our own individual perceptions of everyday situations. Interestingly, we perceive life events very differently because of our unique life experiences, culture, upbringing, agenda and mood. What happens then is our perception of a situation tends to trigger an emotion or affect (i.e. an automatic emotional response). This leads to subsequent behavioural reactions and a certain learning or knowledge gained from the experience.

Let’s take a common situation with a disengaged English student that we all come across on a regular basis. Seeing a student stuck to his phone, not engaging with anything during a class, looking tired and bored, might cause frustration, annoyance and uncertainty in teachers. We might perceive it in all sorts of ways from our poor teaching ability to him being disrespectful or lazy. This, in turn, can trigger a negative emotional response that will lead to a behavioural reaction which the teacher might later regret.

To enhance resilience in this situation, it is important to first view it as a collection of neutral facts and then challenge our perception of the student’s behaviour, e.g. he might be experiencing mental health issues or he might find the material irrelevant or difficult. Then we can capture and modify our automatic affective responses and control negative behavioural reactions, e.g. it is better to discuss a situation assertively instead of reprimanding the student or harbouring a grudge against him. This usually leads to an enhanced knowledge, or understanding of the situation and our own role in it.

One of the ways to navigate this common challenge with the disengaged student could be assertivity which allows us to express our beliefs, feelings, opinions and thoughts in an open and respectful manner that doesn’t violate the rights of others. Assertive communicators use actions and words to express their boundaries in a calm manner with an air of confidence.

The language of assertiveness comes from the research and practice of Nonviolent Communication (Rosenberg & Chopra, 2015) and includes two parts: honestly expressing ourselves to others, and empathically hearing others. Both are expressed through four components – observations, feelings, needs, and requests.

Observe without judging. Notice and express information without evaluating it in terms

of right or wrong. Notice that there is no evaluation, just factual observation.

Express feelings. Hidden emotions are usually at the heart of failed communication. They often disturb and sabotage communication from within and cannot be addressed and solved because they are not known to your communication partner. Express your emotions in a considerate way, without judgment. To develop your emotional awareness and language, you can use Robert Plutchik’s wheel of emotions (2001). Taking a look at the wheel regularly and asking yourself ‘what emotion am I experiencing right now?’ contributes a lot to building resilience.

Express and clarify your needs. For example, you can say ‘It is important for me to have your attention and to be treated with care’.

Express specific requests based on your feelings and needs. After clarifying your

emotions and needs, finish by making a clear request, expressing what exactly the other

person should do so that you can feel your needs are met. For instance, ‘That’s why I am

asking you to…’

Thus, resilience isn’t about toughing it out or hardening up. Actually, resilience is about listening to our emotions. In Susan David’s words, ‘emotions are like the guiding beam from a lighthouse’ (David, 2016), so if you need to hunker down and shut out the world and have a mental health day, that’s part of being resilient too. However, if you are faced with a challenge and feel you have to act on it immediately, the SPARK model and assertivity could be your guiding beams.

References

Beltman, S., Mansfield, C., & Price, A. (2011). Thriving not just surviving: A review of research on teacher resilience. Educational research review, 6(3), 185-207.

Boniwell, I., Osin, E., Kalisch, L., Chabanne, J., & Abou Zaki, L. (2023). SPARK Resilience in the workplace: Effectiveness of a brief online resilience intervention during the COVID-19 lockdown. Plos one, 18(3), e0271753.

David, S. (2016). Emotional agility: Get unstuck, embrace change, and thrive in work and life. Penguin.

Plutchik, R. (2001). The nature of emotions: Human emotions have deep evolutionary roots, a fact that may explain their complexity and provide tools for clinical practice. American scientist, 89(4), 344-350.

• Mediating a text.

• Mediating concepts, or ‘languaging’.

• Mediating communication.

1. Critical incident (a story showing some clashes or misunderstanding – discussion – tips – role-play)
2. Real-life, meaningful simulation with an information gap combining development of communication and mediation skills
3. Add cards with adverbs of manner
4. In role plays, have representatives of different cultures / ages

1. Questionnaires: To introduce the reading program, create a questionnaire for your students to discuss and reflect on their past and present reading habits and preferences. This is a positive and personalised way to begin which gives a teacher insights into their students' attitudes towards reading.
2. Arranging materials: A great way to arrange reading materials is by using differently coloured stickers that can indicate levels and/or genres. Sort, label, and arrange the books from the simplest to the most difficult. It will definitely make your and your students' lives easier.
3. Choosing a book: Make sure your students know how to choose a book on their own. Pick up the first pages of books of different levels that start in an interesting fashion, and place them on a poster or online board. Clearly mark the levels and ask learners to read and highlight any difficulties. Explain that to read comfortably, there shouldn't be more than three challenging places on a page. This activity will also give learners the first taste of several interesting books.
4. Simple reports: To monitor the reading process, ask your students to write a simple report, answer a questionnaire, or draw an illustration based on the book. The latter gives students a creative way to report on the books they've read. They can talk or write about what the picture shows, what happens before and after.
5. What's next?: As their homework, students write 5 main events on strips of paper or stick-it notes, on the sixth they write the title in capital letters. In class, they shuffle the strips for their partners to put the events in order. Make sure students don't include any spoilers. This way students can motivate each other by sharing their reading experience and opinions about the books they've read.
6. Gifts: Ask students to list the names of the main characters of a book they've read. Then they choose a gift for each character and justify their choice orally or in writing. This activity encourages students to interpret the plot in a fun way.
7. Letter to a Character is an integrated skills activity that will make students think outside the box. Students work in pairs. They tell the plot of a book as if they were a character. Their partners note down some details but can't ask any questions. Then students swap roles. Partners write each other letters asking or commenting on what they've heard and then respond to each other's letters.
8. Guess who: Given your students have read quite a lot of books and some of them are in common, run a Guess Who game at the end of a term or academic year. Students guess the names of characters from books by asking yes/no questions.
9. Book Flood: The Fiji Book Flood experiment by Ellyt and Mangubhai (1981) describes the application of this activity where you allocate some time during the lesson for silent reading. It is best done at the end of lessons (online is even better) as students might want to continue reading. Don't forget to pick up a book yourself!

1. One picture aka lazy material preparation for pre-primary is a simple picture with all the words we are studying such as this one here. Cute wild animals set including lion, tiger, hippo, bear, zebra, giraffe, and elephant. Safari jungle animals vector. Woodland animal illustration 6973880 Vector Art at Vecteezy It can be used in a game of riddles (‘It is big. It is green. What’s this?’ ‘It’s a crocodile!’) or in a game that we just call ‘Pairs’ with kids looking (and the teacher circling) any two of the animals based on a feature that they share, starting with some very simple language (‘The crocodile and the frog. It is green and it is green’) and moving on to more complex structures, depending on the level, age etc (‘The tiger and the zebra. The tiger has stripes and the zebra has stripes’).
2. Maximising out the coursebook. It is quite common for the coursebooks, for VYL and YL to introduce a set of vocabulary with a one-page spread of all the key words in context, like for example has been done with the zoo animals in Superminds 1 by CUP (unit 2, page 22). Apart from playing with flashcards and from the ‘listen and look’ and ‘listen and repeat’ there are quite a few things that can be done with the material on this page in a way that will help the kids learn and produce the new words more effectively, for example: Making riddles about the animals in the zoom, even in the simples of ways (‘It is big, it is brown, it has got 4 legs’) or with the prepositions (‘It is next to the crocodile’). Ranking the animals from 1 (my favourite one) to 8 (my least favourite one) and comparing the list with a friend. Labelling the animals according to whether we like them (draw a heart) or not (draw a crossed heart) and talking about, either by producing sentences (‘I like crocodiles. And you?’) or questions (‘Do you like crocodiles?’) this way bringing back the structure that the children already know and are familiar with. Colour-coding the words starting with the same letter, especially beneficial for the early readers. Memory games in which students play in pairs and test each other, with one of the student looking into the coursebook, the other guessing, simply recalling the numbers (‘What’s number 5?’) or miming or mouthing the words (‘Look at me. What am I?’)
3. Maxing out the vocabulary list for the older YL, based on a vocabulary list, like the one that can be found in Prepare 3, 2nd edition, CUP, p. 68). The students can also make more complex and higher level vocabulary games. Riddles in which the students give a definition of one of the words. Asking questions in which the students make up their own questions with the words in the book, although here the students might need the question starters such as ‘Do you like…?’, ‘Do you think that…?’ or ‘Did you…last week?’ etc. Find a pair in which the students choose two of the words and explain their choice (‘Action film and adventure film because I like them’, ‘Comedy and animated film because kids often like these kind of films’) etc. Similar or different in which students choose a pair of words for their partner who needs to decide if they are similar or different and justify their decision (‘Thriller and horror film’ ‘They are similar because they are both scary’)
4. Exam tasks also based on the same list. The students can choose five of the words and talk together, in a debate, answering the question suggested by the teacher, for example ‘Which films could you watch with your friends?’ (film genres, A2 KET), ‘Which is the most difficult job? (jobs, B2 FCE) or ‘Which characteristics are most necessary for a teacher to have?’ (personal features, C1 CAE).
5. The same set of materials recycled, for example a set of wordwall cards with the places in the city (https://wordwall.net/resource/34597977) which we used with my teens in the following topics: vocabulary lesson on the places in the city, grammar lesson and modal verbs (Tell me about the rules in this place), adverbs of frequency (Tell me how often you go there), there is and there are (Is there a bridge in your town?) and used to (Your city today and in the past).
6. Maxing out the dialogues, such as the one in Superminds 5 by CUP (page 72). With younger learners, we cover all the points in the coursebook first, then we mark all the key words together, guided by the teacher. We call them the banana words and this way we create a template for the students to create their own version of the dialogue, first by just reading and replacing the highlighted words with their ideas, later on repeating the same, with the books closed. For the higher level, this same dialogue can be used as the basis for the paraphrasing activity in which the students have to re-enact the same dialogue replacing the original sentences with their synonyms.
7. Liar Liar based on spoken, recorded or written discourse, for example such as the text in Gateway to English, Macmillan (2nd ed, page 7). First and foremost it is a reading skills development activity but it can be further extended into a speaking task. The students work in pairs here, with one of the students trying to retell what they remember from the text, with the other student checking the accuracy of these statements in the book. If an inaccuracy is found, the student with the book says ‘Liar, liar’ and correct the sentence. With the listening task, the same can be done with a transcript of the listening.

• Self-reflection

• Reading

• Sharing with colleagues

• Online activity

• Do you have to design materials, courses and make lesson plans? Do you want to make revision and recycling more efficient and learn more about students’ perception, attention, memory and learning styles? 

• Do you work with different age groups, including YL and VYL? If you want to know more about the development of Higher Mental Functions, about the stages of development from birth to adulthood, the peculiarities of child play and its transformations,

• Do you want to create a friendly and motivating learning environment? Be more confident when it comes to boosting your students’ motivation? Would you like to cope with your own emotional stress at work more efficiently?

• Do you teach students 1-to-1? Or would you like to make your approach to teaching groups more tailored to your students’ needs and personality types? Have you ever reflected on how your own personality affects your teaching style?

• Do you teach groups? Would you like to learn more about the stages that each group goes through before becoming a good team? Find out how social roles shape our behaviour and reflect on what type of leader you’re likely to be?

• Do you teach in-company classes? Or, perhaps, have to assess and recruit other teachers? Or you might even dream of setting up your own business! Learning about different types of organisational culture, work-life balance and recruitment/assessment techniques, as well as making a plan of your own CPD might be a good idea.

• Do you sometimes lack the knowledge of the underlying processes in our brain that are the basis for literacy, cognitive functions and self-control? Do you feel uncomfortable teaching hyperactive children or finding an approach to their parents? Would you like to learn more about the interdisciplinary branches on the brink of Neuroscience and ELT Methodology?

• Do you teach multinational groups or, perhaps, teach English abroad? Even within a multinational company you might have to teach people from different countries and pay special attention to culture differences. Social norms and taboos, the expectations about the teacher and learning process, perception of hierarchy and even the way people think is shaped to a great extent by the culture your students belong to. 

• Have you ever wanted to get some tips on how to make a good and valid questionnaire or how to give feedback in a friendly and positive way? We can borrow quite a lot of tools from Psychology, e.g. facilitation techniques, active listening, case study method, observation techniques, etc. 

• Are you interested in ELT methodology? To get a deeper understanding of its development, you might need to look into Psychology and the theories that had a great impact on the ELT community.  You’ll be surprised to see how the changes in Psychology resulted in the appearance of new teaching techniques and methods!

• Set up the context and generate interest in the topic of the lesson by using a quote or visual aid.
• Explain the meaning of all hats and say that you’ll be wearing the blue hat today.
• Demonstrate the activity by giving a simple statement like ‘cats are better than dogs’ and eliciting opinions from each perspective, e.g. you can say “Let’s put our yellow cats on! Give me some responses.”
• Present the real issue and let students pick up hats. You may let them choose hats according to their preference first.
• Mix the hats up and distribute them randomly or you can allocate roles. Repeat the activity. You may wish to change the issue slightly to keep your students motivated.
• Ask students to reflect on both experiences and give them a chance to discuss their own point of views.
• At the end of the lesson you can ask students to write a paragraph or two based on the ideas generated during the discussion (see CPE writing task 1). By this time they may well be ready to produce a discursive essay evaluating at least one opinion giving clear reasons and supporting their point of view.

• I this what I really want?
• Why do I need this?
• Does it go along with my values?

• Why do I want to have a professional blog?
• Why do I want to work on freelance?
• Why do I want to have many certificates?

• consider your own and your learners’, needs, goals, likes and dislikes
• critically evaluate available coursebook materials
• use authentic sources by creating manageable tasks
• think of a hook or a kind of sparkle that will help you motivate our students
• have a story in mind or something that makes the lessons and the whole course coherent

• Use pictures or drawings

• Useful language

• Answers

• Student-generated prompts

• Feedback