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The Resilience Scale: Shifting the Fulcrum
IMPROVE SKILLS AND ABILITIES
Notice that when the fulcrum shifts left (i.e., the child has increased his or her capacity for resilience), this helps offset the weight of the negative experiences.
The metaphor of the Resilience Scale illustrates how resilience works: External, environmental, and individual factors come together to offer the best chance to tip a child’s scale toward positive lifelong outcomes. It is important to understand that an individual’s scale is not static. The red and green boxes change, and the fulcrum shifts over time and with educational and life experiences. Communicating About Resilience We find the Resilience Scale to be a powerful advocacy tool you can use to communicate with any stakeholder: a fellow educator, an administrator, a policymaker, a family member, or a student. The scale metaphor helps us frame resilience as being influenced by outside factors and fostered by internal capacities. This understanding shifts the burden of weathering adversity from the child to the community. It helps us avoid the damaging implication that some students can just bounce back naturally while others cannot. Framing resilience in this way can help stakeholders understand that they can contribute to a solution that supports the child.
Chapter 1 • What Is Resilience? 21
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