If you are a teacher, you have probably heard the word ‘resilience’ bandied about at staff meetings and INSET. Questions might have been posed such as ‘how do our pupils become more resilient?’ or ‘how can failing safely build resilience in learners’. Do you know what… It is a load of nonsense to use ‘resilience’ to describe the vast majority of pupils in the UK school system. Resilience is not achieving a D when the target was a C grade. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in a school context are rarely so all-encompassing to require the use of the term ‘resilience’. It is purely natural to have peaks and troughs in academic and co-curricular performance. Indeed, the trials and tribulations of social interactions will also cause embarrassment, regret and anxiety as well as elation and joy all in the same day (insert ‘and that’s just in the staff room’ joke here). This oscillation of good and bad is perfectly natural, something that is part of life as a human being. It is not normal to be permanently happy as much as it is not normal to always be top of the class. Bobbing up and down between extremes is normal. Recovering from the lows is a hugely important life lesson, so too is coping with success. There is nothing new under the sun, certainly this is not a new concept in education.

Here is a better way of looking at the idea of bouncebackability*, this time with a slightly different buzzword: academic buoyancy. It is defined as “students’ capacity to successfully overcome setbacks and challenges that are typical of the ordinary course of everyday academic life” (p129, Martin et al, 2013). It is the word “typically” that is so important. Children at any stage in their learning will be disappointed by events in and out of the classroom at school. But it is all relative, a ‘first world problem’ as the meme goes. Learning how to interdependently deal with the disappointment is key. The capacity to overcome everyday academic adversity, or in other words academic buoyancy, is a much better way to look at this than resilience. So the next time that someone uses the word ‘resilience’ in the staff roo, think to yourself ‘do they really mean it?’ More likely what they are eluding to is academic buoyancy. And we should welcome this bobbing up and down with open arms as part of the learning process.

* The word “bouncebackability” is attributed to former Crystal Palace FC manager Iain Dowie following a 3-1 win against Wimbledon AFC on 31st January 2004.

Want to find out more about academic buoyancy?

Martin, A. J., Ginns, P. and Brackett, M. (2013) Academic buoyancy and psychological risk: Exploring reciprocal relationships, Learning and Individual Differences 27 (2013) 128–133.