Human Development & Family Studies (HDFS) faculty at Altoona, Mont Alto, and York have been working with their students in various courses this semester to develop an understanding of the value of resilience for themselves as students and future professionals in the HDFS field (and for their future clients) where burnout can be an issue.

Drs. Lauren Jacobson-McConnell, Sonia Molloy, Jackie Schwab, and Robin Yaure have been using the CFRA resilience survey  with students in their HDFS classes. Students are completing activities and reflections meant to bolster resilience levels. Thanks to a grant from the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence, faculty at Mont Alto and Altoona are also using the ELLI lifelong learning survey along with critical reflection assignments to help triangulate the resilience scores.

Here are a few more details on what’s happening in those classes

HDFS 420 (Schwab) – The first exercise was to promote mindfulness and support asking students to reflect on a practice shared by Brene Brown (June, 2017) called “She is doing the best she can.” While the goal of this exercise is part of our communication and conflict resolution material, it fits in well with the building resilience efforts.  This simple practice fits in both with positive psychology and mindfulness pillars of resilience and ‘self-control’ and ‘cultivating support’ factors that define resilience (Flanagan, 2017). 

HDFS 311 (Schwab) – ‘Balanced goal setting’ class activity.  I asked the class to reflect on their goal setting habits.  Then they wrote answers to the “Four Questions” (Flanagan, 2017) and kept this for future reflection.  I also had them complete the Professional Development Self-assessment I (which I use every year) and asked them to select three skills to improve.  We added those to the back of the four questions handout (from J. Kasar, N. Clark, D. Watson, & S. Pfister, 1994).

HDFS 129 (Yaure) –  I gave students a handout with the ten factors of resilience from the CFRA.  I then asked them to identify the top three elements that are most meaningful to “you in terms of how you think you would be most successful”, identify which they felt BEST at, and which they felt they needed to work on most. I did not specify how many of the elements should be identified for the last two questions, and would change that next time. I am going to follow up with a discussion/activity on grit and then focus since those came up most often for the top 3 and would therefore be good to work on, respectively.

Drs. Amber Seidel (HDFS York) and Joseph Seidel (Engineering Harrisburg) have been working on a joint project looking at study approaches and levels of resilience.

Stay tuned for more details on their projects and what they are learning!