Reslience 101

By Gayle Golden

As we enter midterm time, stresses begin bearing down on students and instructors alike. 

Maybe you've noticed within the past couple of weeks that your students are buckling under a bit. Some may be struggling with mental health issues. Others come into office hours to express anxiety about your course. It may be time to ask yourself if you're doing all you can to address their underlying stress.

Sure that means thinking about whether you are being reasonable about expectations. We can always do more to be sensitive to undue stress. But are you also thinking about ways to help students build resilience?

If not, maybe you should. Colleges across the country have crafted entire projects to help students achieve a key skill they often lack most: the ability to "fail" without falling apart.

Resilience movement  

In 2014, 10 Ivy League universities formed the Resilience Consortium to collaborate on research, education and counseling around understanding and promoting student resilience.

Stanford University has its own Resilience Project that combines personal storytelling, events and academic coaching to remind students that setbacks are a part of academic life. Other colleges are trying to help students who traditionally struggle, such as first-generation students or those from under-represented groups, by tackling the way they view the idea of failure.

As it turns out, HSJMC faculty are right on track with this trend. Just ask a few of our faculty and you'll find "resiliency training" woven into a range of our courses. Here is some of what they have to say:

Focus less on the mistake, more on the lesson
"Everybody makes mistakes," Hubbard Senior Fellow Scott Libin routinely tells his broadcast news students. "That's why everybody needs an editor. The key is learning from mistakes so you don't make the same ones over and over again."

Libin asks student to focus less on the mistakes and more on the response to the mistake: "Will you let it frustrate and fluster you? If so, one error will cause a cascade of others. Or will you recognize what failure has to teach you, of which resilience is the most valuable lesson."

Libin reinforces this by talking about his own mistakes and encouraging guest speakers to share theirs as well. He also encourages students to take the job seriously, yes, but not so much themselves. "The ability to laugh is a survival skill," he says.

Remember the Beatles
Chris Ison, associate professor, also doesn't hesitate to get personal about failure in his professional news reporting classes.  "It's easy to talk about because I've failed so often, and I think if there's one time to talk about yourself in a class, it's if you're talking about your failures. They assume you overcame them, so they can too," he says.

While it may be hard to believe, Ison says his first news stories "really were terrible" and that he was even intimidated while speaking to sources. But, he says, he overcame those fears. He also brings the discussion up the present, saying that his writing can still sometimes be wordy and plodding until he edits himself.

His first rule for his class, he says, is "Remember the Beatles," a reference to the rule of 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell discusses in his book "Outliers." In other words, one has to practice, practice, practice to get good at something.

"The Beatles weren't great until they played eight-hour sets, seven days a week, month after month in Hamburg strip clubs," Ison says. "So students shouldn't worry if they aren't great or make mistakes. Who doesn't? It's temporary, natural, and overcome with practice, which is totally within their control."

And what's Ison's biggest disclosure about himself? He tells students he got a C in the very course he teaches: Jour 3121. Bold stuff to admit, but he contends the candor is helpful to students. "I think they can relate and see hope," he says.

You can't always get what you want

War stories can make good motivators for students learning to cope with failure. Teaching assistant Len Mitsch likes to how his advertising portfolio students a 1975 letter from the Minneapolis Star rejecting him for a cartoonist job. It was blow that freed him from a job chained to a drawing board for decades, he tells them -- a gift, in other words.

Instead, he says, his career in advertising led him to adventures standing atop oil derricks, supervising ad shoots from a helicopter hovering over shark-infested waters and collaborating with Steven Spielberg's cinematographer. 

Mitsch's real kicker, though, is what he tells them about the boxer Floyd Patterson, who apparently had the dubious honor of being knocked down the most times in the ring than anyone in history. As Mitsch tells: "Yes," Patterson once said, "but I also got up more times than anyone in history."

Grit translates into insight
Aside from offering motivational speeches on resilience, instructors can help students learn to grapple with failure by structuring those lessons into their grading system.

In Jour 3004, Susan LoRusso, assistant professor, teaches the concept of "grit," which she calls the "combination of passion and perseverance," early in the semester. The lesson opens up a conversation about failure and growth, she says.


"I use examples of failure from my own life and reflect on how I found opportunity for growth in those moments," she says. "I then have students write down characteristics that they would like to improve upon and ask them not to view these characteristics as fixed but instead commit to measurable goals to grow in these areas." She returns to these themes several times during the semester.

She also designs her course to allow for failure. "No one assignment, project or exam will drastically impact a student's grade," she says. That doesn't mean students don't get upset when they fail a quiz or get a C on a project, but it allows her to discuss the grade in a perspective separate from the students "self-worth."

"I ask students to reflect on what they could have done to be more successful," LoRusso says. "Usually students say they could have spent more time on the assignment or asked more questions. We then work on a plan to do just that in the future. This approach seems to encourage some embrace of failure, and definitely resilience. I almost always see growth in future work."

Are you proud of your work?
Stacey Kanihan, associate professor of strategic communication, doesn't mince words with her students.  "I tell them, 'You didn't come into this class expected to know everything, so let's make it worthwhile.'" 

Making it worthwhile means getting feedback on assignments that is meaningful enough to drive improvement on the next. Kanihan also makes sure that the assignments early in the semester count less than the later ones, which rewards an improvement trajectory. Students will respond to courses that acknowledge a built-in "failure-is-OK" point system. 

The other step is to help students see the improvement they make as they are making it or, certainly, when they have made it. Kanihan will outright ask them if they're proud of what they've done. "The resilience comes from seeing their improvement," she says. "They're proud of their work."

Don't wait until the end of the term
You also don't have to wait until the end of the course to get them to see this process. Sometimes it's pretty fun to point it out to them in the middle of all the stress.

In my own Jour 3101 News Reporting and Writing class, I give students a diagnostic lab the first day that reliably shows me one thing about those newbies: Virtually none knows how to write a news story. Their "stories," so to speak, about a police crime alert are just transcriptions of it, complete with police jargon and no concept of news structure.

But after a month of weekly labs on deadline, and detailed feedback on their many mistakes -- feedback that arguably stresses many of them -- I assign them a breaking news in which they must write three updates of a story over 90 minutes. It's fast-paced and demanding. When they file the last story, I always ask each student to think back to that first lab. They're always struck by the growth.

"See?" I tell them." You've come a long way. Take some time to celebrate. You didn't know how to do that then. All that work. All those mistakes. Now look at you."

If you have a question or a comment for ProActive Teaching, please post one below or email me at ggolden@umn.edu. I'll be back at you soon.