The Fourth R: Resiliency

Everyone wishes to keep his or her children safe from even the little traumas of life, but we all know this isn’t possible.  What we hope for in place of the impossible is that our children will be resilient in face of whatever happens.  I don’t recall reading or being told anything when my own children were small about how I could be effective in helping them develop resiliency, and it’s interesting that the subject now seems to be growing in importance as a result of the stresses military children now face with repeated deployment and returns of their parents to and from a war zone. 

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Johns Hopkins Center on School, Family and Community Partnership has put together a web course for teachers of military children. “Building Resilient Kids” is for school administrators, support staff and teachers to help students meet life’s challenges. Though the focus is military children, the approach is meant to benefit all children.

According to the website linked above, the objectives of the course are to increase understanding of the following: 

• Military community, lifestyle and culture
• Issues surrounding mobility and deployment
• Special challenges to families during wartime including separation, reunion, death and disability
• Strategies to improve educational, behavioral and health outcomes for all students, 
• Strategies to increase students’ connectedness to school
• Schoolwide and classroom strategies to build social, emotional and academic problem solving skills at each age level
• Best and promising practices to create a safe and supportive climate for students
• Strategies to build school, parent and community partnerships

Some of the activities in the course include learning games, puzzles and case studies; videos of students, parents, school staff, researchers and military personnel telling their stories; description of best  and promising practices; and a step-wise procedure to create a teacher's own intervention program to use on a school-wide, classroom, or individual basis.   For further information, contact michael-blum@msn.com.