Flexibility and Resilience in

Teaching
Educators must anticipate change and head the parade to avoid becoming victims
of change.
—Thomas R. Harvey
BE RESILIENT

Part of success is failure. You can’t know success unless you know failure.
Resilience is getting knocked down and getting back up. It is simple as that. Now, it
doesn’t feel good to experience failure. It can be depressing and demoralizing. But it
cannot lead to immobilization. Inaction is the enemy of resilience.

There are four qualities that make up resilience:

1. Problem-Solving Skills

This involves critical thinking and discernment. Do you have the ability to define
the problem? Can you come up with a workable solution? Will you implement the
chosen solution? If you can do all these things, you have problem-solving skills.

2. Sense of Personal Control

Do you have a feeling that your destiny is in your own hands? The psychologists
call it “internal focus of control,” which is a fancy way of saying what you do will affect
what happens to you. You have a sense of personal potency.

3. Support from Friends

Not only should your friends give personal support, but they should also give
critical but loving feedback on what you are doing. Both are important.

4. Action
Do something. Act. Serve others. The only way to get over your depression with
your personal failing is to set out a program of action and then do it. If you don’t know
what to do, then merely serve others until some problem-solving skills kick in. Inaction
is the enemy of psychological health (Neenan, 2009).
The last quality is most important—you have got to keep doing something to
create a high-achieving environment. Success is worth it.
And in being resilient, you model resiliency and flexibility for others. You must not hide
your feelings. This just makes you seem invulnerable. Air them. Share them. Seek input
on them. You’ll find sharing your failures with others will only lead to later success.

ADAPTATION AND PERSISTENCE

In biology the organism that survives is the one that adapts. In schools, if you
don’t adapt, if you rigidly stick to what you are doing, you will soon become outmoded
and passé.
In the 21st Century School movement, adaptability is one of the seven key skills
that all students and their leaders must have (Wagner, 2008; Harvey, 2011). In this
world of change, you must be prepared to alter what you are doing and seek out
something better.
You must be prepared to adapt the ideas and suggestions in this book, as well as
all ideas, to meet your circumstances. If not, you’ll not achieve a high success
environment.
But at the same time you are adapting, you must be persistent in what you do.
You must give the change a chance to work. If you abandon an idea the first time you
experience some resistance, you’ll never be successful. Change requires time and
persistence to implement it.

FROM ADVERSITY COMES STEEL

While in college, I worked at Bethlehem Steel. I saw raw iron ore put in a big
cauldron and then put under intense heat. The slag was thrown off and all that was left
was the molten steel.
So, too, is it with human lives. We apply intense heat and pressure to our raw
beings and some just give in to the pressure and give up. They become human slag.
But most are simply made stronger by the pressure and become better for it. Sure the
fire is no fun and we hate every minute of it. But it makes us stronger. From adversity
comes steel.
I remember seeing Joe Plom give a speech. He started by walking three paces to
the left. He then turned around and walked three paces to the right. He repeated this
motion several times. Then he spoke. He had been a Vietnam POW and that was all the
room he had in his “tiger cage.” He was there for two years. He could have gone mad.
But instead he did three things each day:
1. He played in his mind every shot of some golf course he played.
2. He talked to his God.
3. He thought of advice he’d give his children when he eventually returned.
He kept strong in the face of captivity by overcoming the pain of confinement
and torture and thinking instead about what he would do. From adversity comes steel.
I remember Anne Breitenberger. She was dying from cancer. The faculty all met
and expressed that while she was our best doctoral graduate that year, she couldn’t get
out of her bed and be the doctoral banner carrier. But we decided we’d ask her out of
courtesy to her record.
When we did, we were amazed. She said yes. When graduation came, she got
out of her bed and dressed in her regalia. She came to the stadium and carried the
doctoral banner. With someone on each side of her, she went step by step by step by
step down the center aisle. When later asked about her feat, she said, “I wouldn’t miss
this for the world. I earned it. I enjoyed it.” Three weeks later she died. But she was an
inspiration to us all. From adversity comes steel.
Finally, I remember vividly having a debilitating stroke. The doctors all said I
would never walk or talk again. They wanted to warehouse me in a nursing home. I
was feeling sorry for myself. But my wife came to the hospital. She looked me square in
the eye and said, “You always speak about from adversity comes steel. Now prove it.”
That challenge was all that I needed. It was hard, painful work to learn how to walk
again. It was frustrating to have to relearn speech. It was incredibly demoralizing
having to learn to smile again. It took me about a year in the hospital in-patient and
out-patient wards. But I did it. And I’m better off for it. From adversity comes steel.
Now, how does this relate to establishing a high-achieving environment? You’ll get
knocked down in your quest. You’ll fail. But you have got to get up and brush yourself
off and learn from your mistakes. If you say to yourself, “From adversity comes steel,”
then you’ll have the fortitude to achieve success.
Therefore, the following three principles lead to flexibility and resilience:
1. Be Resilient.
2. Adaptation and persistence.
3. From adversity comes steel.

Since COVID-19 still threatens our health and safety. Here is ideas How to Be a
Flexible and Resilient Teacher during COVID-19. Teaching through the uncertainty of
the COVID-19 pandemic, whether in-person or online, is sure to require some mindset
changes and adaptations. 
Teachers are one of the most notoriously Type-A personality types of any
profession. We are mentally preparing our classrooms for the fall as we close them
down each June, often squirreling items away that we can’t wait to showcase next year,
adding amazing new products to our wish lists, and making a mental plan of exactly
how we’re going to change things up. We actually look forward to going into our
building each August to prepare and create a magical new space for our kiddos, and
there is really nothing like that final moment of satisfaction when each desk looks
exactly the way we want for our kids to walk in on that first day. 
What is particularly difficult this back to school season is that our classrooms
cannot look the way we want them to, and realistically, neither can teaching. We
cannot let that deter us from continuing to show up for our students and for ourselves,
and to do so, we must embody two key characteristics: Flexibility and resilience.
Google offers three definitions of flexibility, all of which are essential for our
mental toolbox of strategies we need in order to prevail in teaching and in life given the
current climate. These definitions are: “the quality of bending easily without breaking,”
“the ability to be easily modified,” and willingness to change or compromise.”
Thankfully, as teachers, we pretty much do each of these definitions on a daily basis as
we modify curriculum, change our lessons at the drop of a hat when we realize that
the information is not coming across the way we intended, and we certainly know how
to bend without breaking! 
Thinking about resilience, the definition of resilience according to the American
Psychological Association is: “The process of adapting well in the face of adversity,
trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress—such as family and
relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors.”
Seems like we’re living right through multiple sources of stress right now, so continue
reading to check out some strategies to boost flexibility and resilience as we take on
our toughest challenge yet: teaching during a pandemic.
Tip 1: Slow Down
This tip may seem counterintuitive as we are constantly inundated with new
technology tools, new protocols, new professional development opportunities, and
more, but who can possibly learn hours and hours of new material and actually apply it
all effectively without losing their minds? Not me, that’s for sure. I find that when I try
to barrel on ahead and try to do everything, I get so overwhelmed that I end up doing
nothing! Consider which pieces of the new technology or the hundreds of professional
development options are truly going to make a difference in your practice, and work on
those. As teachers, we constantly feel like we are not doing enough and that we need
to show up in every possible way for our kids, and the reality of showing up for our kids
comes from showing up for ourselves! Take a moment to remind yourself that by NOT
attending every single opportunity, you will actually be doing yourself and your
students a service by being able to fully engage in the opportunities you seek out, and
you’ll have more mental capacity to undertake turning those professional development
meetings into real plans for your students.
Tip 2: Take Breaks
 Similar to the previous tip, set up some personal boundaries to differentiate
what is work and what is home, including your physical space as well as your mental
space. If your school’s work hours have you with kids from 8:00 AM to 3:00 PM, you
are not only allowed to take a break at 3, I would encourage you to take a break at 3. I
say this as someone who notoriously sits at the computer for at least an additional hour
after the work with students is over, so it is really a tip I’m working on myself.
Especially if you are working remotely in any capacity, it is so important to force a
separation of work and home in order for us to be the most productive and effective
teachers we can be! 
Tip 3: Utilize Already-made Resources - Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
I think that there is a combination of pride, grit, perseverance, and excellence
that teachers constantly strive to feel and a lot of those feelings come from creating
beautiful and innovative new things for our classrooms, such as the virtual Bitmoji
classrooms that are popping up, as well as amazing new technology tools to help create
interactive spaces with kids through the internet. Sometimes, though, we need to
remember that we can (and should) take a step back and utilize materials that
somebody else made! I have relied heavily on Teacher Vision’s Back to
School and At-Home Essentials resources which has saved a ton of time and
enabled me to focus on more pressing priorities - like learning how to navigate a
hybrid model. 
Tip 4: Call on Your Support System
Make sure that you are not locked away in your classroom or your home for
weeks on end! Call your coworkers and laugh about something your kids (personal
children or students!) did that day. Video chat with your family that lives in another
state and make a point to not discuss school at all. Set up some beach chairs six feet
apart in a park with your best friends and know that you’ve got each other’s’ backs
through anything, even if you feel like your head is spinning so fast you’ll never catch
up on your work. Your support system can help you handle anything, and you are not
alone.
And finally, Tip 5, the most important one of all: Remember that
academics come second, and our kids’ and our own mental and emotional health and
happiness come first, period.

Apply Your Knowledge

Direction. If you are a teacher this pandemic, how would you respond to the
challenge and how would you cope up with online teaching/
 Assess Your Knowledge
Direction: Based on the discussion, make a photo collage showing Flexibility and
Resilience in Teaching. You can use Photogrid, PicsArt, Pixlr or any online application
for making photocollage. You can see it via messenger.