Summary of Building Resilience for Teachers

Key Wellness Strategies and Self-Care Techniques:

Understanding Resilience: Resilience is defined as the ability to rebound after adversity. It's crucial for educators to build and strengthen their resilience, especially during prolonged challenges.
Emotional Awareness: Recognizing and understanding one’s emotions is vital. Key practices include:
- Pausing to identify feelings (e.g., fear, sadness) and exploring them rather than pushing them away.
- Developing a healthy relationship with emotions, acknowledging them as part of the human experience.
Practical Techniques:
- Emotion Recognition: Learn to identify physical sensations associated with emotions (e.g., shortness of breath with anger, lack of energy with sadness).
- Naming Emotions: Use language to articulate feelings (e.g., "This is sadness" or "This is anger"). Resources like emotion vocabulary lists can help improve emotional literacy.

Resources for Building Skills:

Books and Workbooks: Elena Aguilar’s book "Onward" and its accompanying workbook provide hundreds of strategies for cultivating emotional resilience.
Free Resources: The Bright Morning website offers tools like the Core Emotions resource to help individuals categorize and understand their emotions better.

Systemic Approach:

Highlighting the example of Portland Public Schools, the importance of a systemic approach to resilience-building is emphasized, focusing on community support and professional development.

Conclusion:

The conversation encourages educators to actively engage with their emotions and utilize available resources to foster resilience within themselves and their communities.

Presenters/Sources:

Adam Geller (Founder and CEO of Edthena)
Elena Aguilar (Author and Founder of Bright Morning)

Notable Quotes

— 03:07 — « Resilience is our ability to rebound after adversity. It's how we weather the storms in our lives. »

— 05:38 — « Right now, we are all doing the equivalent of running a marathon. This is gonna be a long stretch of challenge. »

— 07:20 — « One of the most powerful things that anybody can do right now is to actually stop and literally, perhaps, sit down and say, 'What am I feeling?' »

— 09:26 — « The first thing is just being able to recognize when you're having an emotion. »

— 10:38 — « Developing the literacy and the ability to use language to describe how you're feeling is really key. »