Year 11 Pastoral Guardian

Resilience is a term we often hear in education contexts and life coaching contexts.  What does it mean? Resilience can be described as your ability to deal with challenges or setbacks, to do the best you can in your circumstances, and to find internal fortitude when times are tough.  As adults we face many situations when life doesn’t go the way we had planned and we have to bounce back and have strategies to cope.  The same applies to adolescents who have to manoeuvre through the challenges of growing up, managing relationships at home and school, and the additional demands of their completing assignments and exams and receiving feedback and results about their academic success. 

We all need strategies to manage life’s challenges and to recognise what we can and cannot control.  I would like to share the following website link that sets out useful strategies in an easily worded and visual format that might be helpful for you to work through with your daughter when you realise that she needs to have some help in developing her resilience.  Some useful advice was communicating, finding a supportive network, finding ways to feel good about yourself, setting achievable goals, and looking after yourself. 

https://kidshelpline.com.au/teens/issues/building-resilience

I asked Year 11s what resilience meant to them and what resilience strategies they have employed this year:

Resilience means developing strategies to face challenges, never give up, and to improve.  Teanna Carius

When we got our marks back coming back this term we decided to try to do better.   Rebecca Ives

Some of the resilience strategies that you can read in the Kids Helpline link above tie in with our PD program this term that is focusing on body image and feeling happy with who you are.  The girls have been viewing the video Embrace, about one woman’s incredible journey for herself to battle challenges and her own perceptions of her image.  In the series, she interviews women who have faced astronomical challenges and changes and have had to bounce back and never give up.  To complement the information in this program, a nutritionist, Megan Bray, addressed all Year 11 students this week about body acceptance, balanced eating, and healthy lifestyle and its effects on how you can take control of managing your life positively.  All of these strategies can help you to be more resilient at difficult times.

The message the Year 11 students took away from this presentation were that:

Rave diets don’t work; healthy eating does.  Teanna Carius

It was interesting to find out how much and how often you have to eat every day to fuel your body and brain.  Monica Ciobo

Healthy body, healthy mind, healthy outlook improve academic work and control mood swings.  Emily Smith

I hope the students take up the challenge of using some of these life strategies that they have been learning to assist them this year and in the future.

As a cohort, the Year 11s have been complimented this week for the positive way that they have approached senior schooling - by Ms Butterworth in her address to Year 11s about leadership, by Mrs Goldie in her presentation about academic strategies, and by me as Pastoral Guardian.

Karen Farrow