New View EDU Episode 63: Building Academic Resilience

Available October 1, 2024

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Resilience is a hot topic in education. We wonder if our students display enough of it, how we can help them build it, and whether resilience alone is enough to help kids thrive in an increasingly demanding and uncertain world. But what if we need to expand our thinking beyond building resilience in individuals and start considering a systems-based approach? That’s what Megan Kennedy is exploring with her team at the University of Washington Resilience Lab.

Megan joins host Morva McDonald to share what the Resilience Lab does, how their efforts are shaping campus culture, and what their research shows about the efficacy of a systems-based approach to fostering resilience. She says that as the demand for mental-health care among college students remains high, the Resilience Lab seeks to offset the need for those services by better equipping students with personal skills and support. However, she’s clear that it’s not about downplaying the importance of mental-health services, nor is it about focusing on personal responsibility. Rather, she says, they’re trying to remove the onus of responsibility for mental health from students’ shoulders by taking a campus-wide, deeply embedded approach to helping everyone, from faculty and staff to the community at large, learn and practice resilience-building skills.

Megan says that research shows much of students’ mental well-being on campus is related to the social environments and contexts in which they find themselves. She points out that it makes sense to then dig into healing those well-being issues through working on the environments, not the individual students. She offers examples of some of the simple but potentially effective interventions her lab has designed to embed resilience-building practices into campus life. Among them are working with professors to add core messaging around academic resilience to their syllabi, testing, and feedback mechanisms; adding mindful prompts during classes for students to check in with themselves and neighbors; advertising community events and mental-health resources during classes; and training faculty and staff to deliver stress-coping material to undergraduate students in various settings.

The efforts are not limited to students. To take a systems-based approach to building resilience and well-being on campus, Megan argues, it’s vital to change the culture. Faculty and staff are trained in stress coping and mindfulness so they can practice the skills and mindsets they hope to impart to students. They are then able to shift their own culture, spreading it throughout the community and offering the knowledge and habits to students through various means. The Resilience Lab seeks to make these skills and resources accessible to students through offerings within the communities and settings they’re already comfortable in. Providing culturally relevant and easily available support throughout a student’s day makes for a fully systemic approach to resilience-building that’s not burdensome, disruptive, or inaccessible.

The Resilience Lab’s work has begun to spread, with programs being added on more than 30 other campuses so far. The next frontier, Megan says, is building a continuum of care from the university level down through the K-12 system. Understanding that the level of resilience skills students bring to university with them is determined by what they’ve learned and practiced throughout their lives, she hopes to continue the culture shift downward to ever younger ages and stages, and promote greater understanding and collective work between K-12 schools and the university system.


Key Questions

Some of the key questions Megan and Morva explore in this episode include:

  • What is the role of mental-health services vs. the role of the Resilience Lab and its work? How do these two important supports work in tandem with each other?
  • How can resilience work cross the boundaries between frontline teaching and learning, and back-end systemic and structural programming?
  • How does this work factor in the experiences of students with marginalized identities? What needs to be taken into account to build a system within which they are able to access resilience-building opportunities?
  • What are the ways in which this work can be integrated across the experiences of faculty and staff to create real culture change?

Episode Highlights

  • “These skills and mindsets have a primary kind of effect on their own ability to cope with stress and … have some resilience, both individual resilience and to build team or organizational resilience in the work. Because oftentimes I'll teach these groups to organizations as a whole. For example, an entire school or college, or to a full team, so that they're learning these skills and mindsets in community. And then that gets reinforced in their team meetings and in their relationships. And if you can imagine that to scale, all of a sudden, you have all these schools and colleges … that have learned these skills and mindsets in community, and then that grows.” (16:54)
  • “We could still explore this concept of, ‘How do we not just spiral up the social and emotional learning from kindergarten to 12th grade, but how do we actually extend that into the university?’ So what's happening in the K -12 system helps support students as they transition into college. And what we are teaching in college is really building off the skills and mindsets that the students have been learning all the way up. So I've spent some time in my career really interested in a collective impact approach. How do we work together around common issues and be working in a really aligned and coordinated way? So this idea of having the K-12 system and the university system more seamless around social-emotional learning is, I think, a really interesting and cool opportunity.” (24:29)
  • “I don't suggest that that's an easy thing. Collective impact never is. But I think that on the table would be a lot of conversations about the competitive nature of things. And it's interesting that we're in a time where the need to be collaborative and work across differences and come to the table and be able to manage our emotions when we have different perspectives and different ideas, because the issues are really challenging, is more important than ever.” (30:57)

Resource List

Full Transcript

  • Read the full transcript here.

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About Our Guest

Megan Kennedy is the director of the University of Washington Resilience Lab. As a leader and facilitator, Kennedy aims to build healthy and compassionate learning communities. From engaging stakeholders in vision-setting to partnering with students, staff, and instructors, her approach to leadership centers on collaborative relationships. She believes that building high-quality wellness and educational programs requires teamwork at every level. Currently, Kennedy is developing and evaluating systems-based approaches to well-being that combine applied research, education, and collaborative programming across three University of Washington campuses. This includes partnering with academic departments, student wellness groups, and community-based organizations seeking to deepen their capacity for mindfulness and resilience. Kennedy earned her master’s degree in applied behavioral science from Bastyr University and is a licensed therapist with more than a decade of experience in public and private practice.