Teaching Sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

10 minutes	Part A: What is resilience?
25 minutes	Part B: Our character strengths
25 minutes	Part C: Personal resilience helping the community
05 minutes	Reflection

Part A: What is resilience?

Step 1.

Discuss: What is resilience?

One definition might be “An ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.”

Another could be “Advancing despite adversity.”

As a class, come up with your own definition of resilience.

Step 2.

Discuss: What might a resilient person look like or be like?

For example, do they have a good sense of humour, or are they quite serious?

See if you can create a picture of a ‘resilient’ person (both inside and out).

It might help to talk about whether students know anyone who they think is particularly resilient. This could be someone like:

A parent
A sportsperson (for example, an AFL player or Ash Barty)
An actor
An author

Talk about what traits they notice in this person.

Part B: Our character strengths

Step 1.

Give students a copy of the Student Worksheet.

Step 2.

Ask students to reflect on themselves.

Do they think they embody some or all of these traits on this list? To what extent.

You might need to spend some time defining unfamiliar words.

Step 3.

Briefly discuss how not everyone can be amazing at everything, and nor should they be expected to be. Diversity should be celebrated. It would be boring if we were all exactly the same. (Plus, it’s helpful when communities are diverse. But we’ll get to that in a moment.)

Step 4.

Independently, students fill in the character traits sheet.

Using a highlighter or texta, they fill each bar with colour. The further they fill the bar towards the right, the stronger they think that trait is within themselves. Think of this bar as a value out of 100.

Some bars might be empty, and that’s fine!

Part C: Personal resilience helping the community

Step 1.

This is a creative writing task.

Firstly, students will need a number of characters. The story will feature a team - not of superheroes exactly, but this is probably a relevant example to use.

Students could use their friends and their character traits sheets, or they could invent some characters by filling out some extra character sheets. It’s important that each of the characters in the team have different strengths.

Students will then consider a stressful setting, such as a bushfire, flood, or pandemic.

They will describe what the characters experience, as well as how each of the members of the team used their strengths to keep the team resilient in the face of stress.

Reflection

Allow some students to share their stories.

Differentiated learning

Extension

Encourage students to extend their planning of a story into an actually big writing piece, where their character traits are challenged and they face plenty of adversity.

Provisions for learning support

Students could write a story about a time they were resilient and what helped them to be resilient in that moment.

Teacher reflection

Take this opportunity to reflect on your own teaching:

What did you learn about your teaching practice today?
What worked well?
What didn't work so well?
What would you share?
Where to next?
How are you going to get there?

Resilient Australia - Personal Resilience Helping the Community

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Summary

Learning intentions:

Students will...

Success criteria:

Students can...

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