Cultivating Resilience: A Plan to Build Resilience in a Low-Income, American Public School

This paper describes both the theoretical underpinnings and an action plan for building resilience as requested by teachers in a diverse, low-income public high school in Patterson, New Jersey, United States. The authors define and describe widely agreed upon protective factors of resilience, and further operationalize the components into a set of activities for both teachers and students to engage toward increasing resilience. A three-stage learning process is presented for teachers to learn and embed the constructs in their own lives, as well as share with the students. A detailed “learning journey” is appended to describe in detail the specific evidence-based activities intended to target a critical subset of three protective factors: connection, optimism, and self-efficacy. A measurement plan is also provided to assess growth in both students and faculty.