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Building Resilience as an Educator


Educators are very good at meeting the needs of their students, their families and anyone else who may need their help. We go into education because we care for others and want to make the world a better place. What we are not always great at is taking care of our own needs. In theory we know that we can’t really take care of others until we have taken care of ourselves but in practice that is often the very thing we try to do. When we do not take this time we run the risk of burnout and worse. There has been a lot of research lately about teachers and resilience. There are two resources in particular that teachers can turn to in order to work on building their own resilience: Elena Aguilar’s Onward and Angela Watson’s website.
Elena Aguilar has done extensive research in the area of teacher resilience. In her book Onward she identifies the twelve key habits of resilient educators. She has thoughtfully paired each habit to correspond with a month of the school year. She has also created a workbook with daily activities that teachers can engage in to begin implementing the ideas from the book. She has a website http://www.onwardthebook.com/author/elena-aguilar/ with additional resources to support the content in her book. She has designed the book and workbook to be used by individuals or teams of teachers working together. One idea is to find a teacher buddy or even a group of teachers who are also wanting to build their resilience and do a year-long book study. The community you create doing a book study will in itself help support your resilience.
Angela Watson’s website https://thecornerstoneforteachers.com/ is another great source of resilience-building tips for teachers. She has lots of resources on her website as well as weekly emails that you can subscribe to. She has a weekly podcast called “Truth for Teachers” if you prefer content delivered that way. Using the website, subscribing to the emails and listening to the podcast are all free. She also runs a “40 Hour Workweek” club that you can join for a fee. Her emails and podcast can be a good weekly reminder of the importance of taking care of yourself and offer tips for building your resilience.

Elena Aguilar and Angela Watson are both experts and great resources for ideas. However, just reading Aguilar’s book or listening to Watson’s podcast isn’t really enough. The key is to commit to taking time for yourself in order to implement their ideas. Or, you may already have some ideas of what may work for you but you may not have given yourself the time to do those things. Your needs as a teacher are extremely important and the more you are able to take care of yourself and build your resilience, the more you will  ultimately be able to offer others.

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