Resilience

Resilience

Intent

At The Rodillian Academy, we are rightly proud of our resilience curriculum and the associated learning and skills that students are taught from the beginning of year 7. The Resilience Curriculum’s objective is to challenge the fixed mind sets of students and provide them with the knowledge and strategies to change their mind set and behaviours.

The seven different types of resilience are addressed throughout the course – Physical, Behavioural, Endurance, Academic, Emotional, Cultural, Spiritual and Cognitive. Students are expected to identify their strengths in different areas and take on challenges to improve others.

Resilience lessons aim to develop self-confidence through presentation skills, teamwork, identifying mistakes and learning from them. Developing good learning habits through learning about the memory, revision techniques and self-belief through their understanding of the brain.

Resilience lessons also offer students the opportunity to directly think about, work with and develop life skills and knowledge that are integral to becoming a lifelong learner. The lessons have been developed with the ideas of Carol Dweck, Matthew Syed and Angela Duckworth at the core of their messages, and no lesson goes by without considering how to apply the key concepts of grit, growth mindset, and perseverance to what they are learning.

All Year 7 students have one Resilient Reading lesson per week. The sessions are created to encourage a love of reading as well as boost their skills in decoding, fluency, vocabulary and reasoning.

Students are grouped into appropriate groups which are supportive and challenging. Our more confident readers will be taking part in activities based on texts which cover many key issues relevant to young teenagers. Students explore these texts through a wide range of activities: debates, journal writing as response, and reciprocal reading.

Our less confident readers will be in small, supportive groups designed to make accelerated progress and allow them to meet the increasing literacy demands of secondary school education whilst ensuring that that they see themselves as ‘real readers’.