Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Educators

Emotional resilience is an important skill to master for educators who face emotionally charged challenges every day. The Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Educators professional development course builds this skill using strategies Elena Aguilar outlined in her book, Onward: Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Educators. Participants learn how to better understand and manage stress by developing practical skills that help prevent burnout. Strategies taught in this course benefit new and veteran educators, teaching them to better understand and manage emotions for both themselves and their students.

What Is Emotional Resilience?

Emotional resilience is a component of emotional intelligence that encompasses the ability to know when you are having emotions, understand what you are feeling and use strategies to engage those emotions. Emotional resilience, which requires strong emotional intelligence, involves the capacity to not just survive but thrive in the midst of challenges. Everyone can benefit from emotional resilience to better navigate the inevitable stressful situations that occur in life. However, it’s essential for educators who face complex, often unanticipated situations as part of their daily job.

Strategies for Emotional Resilience

Educators can increase their emotional resilience through better understanding how emotions work, and the strategies needed to manage them. By using the following strategies consistently, educators increase emotional resilience:

• Pausing between an event and your response to it
• Identifying and naming the emotions that arise to better understand how you feel
• Pausing and identifying the story that you’re telling yourself
• Maintaining a hopeful outlook and accepting that changes are part of life
• Practicing self-care, including regular exercise and healthy diet
• Focusing on building good relationships with co-workers and members of the community
• Maintaining a sense of humor
• Using emotions as a source of energy and inspiration

What You Will Learn in This Course

This online professional development course about building emotional resilience in educators uses a variety of techniques to learn the material, including reading, journaling and taking a self-care assessment. Student outcomes from the course include:

• Learning to guide themselves and students to build emotional intelligence and resilience
• Using tools to acquire a resilient disposition in order to better face changes and challenges in the workplace
• Applying learned concepts and strategies regarding emotional resilience to make positive transformations in the classroom and at the school
• Recognizing commonly used strategies to manage daily stressors and rebound from inevitable setbacks
• Evaluating the impact of emotional resilience on teaching practices
• Successfully approaching difficult conversations with students and their families by implementing active listening strategies

The Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Educators course is designed to empower educators. The course will help participants acquire resilience dispositions that allow them to successfully manage the changes and challenges that occur throughout the school year.

NOTE: The required book must be acquired separately.