How Creative Writing Can Boost Students’ Resilience
It is required of a teacher to help build a sense of community amongst students. A safe and healthy environment would benefit students, particularly the traumatized, to open up and develop self-confidence and resilience. Students get to sit together and offer themselves compassion through writing and sharing their struggles.
One of the best ways for teachers to establish connections with their students is to encourage them to use creative writing to nurture their reading and writing skills. This creativity can help them overcome their academic challenges.
Fostering a growth mindset
One of the ways that students can improve their academic performance and enhance their resilience is to build a growth mentality. According to “Carol Dweck,” professor of psychology at Stanford University and author of the book “Mindset,” explains that “individuals with a growth mindset focus on learning from mistakes and taking on challenges, instead of believing that they are doomed to being failures or untalented.”
A growth philosophy goes hand in hand with treating ourselves with kindness and compassion. Encouraging students to channel their inner creative spirit towards writing e.g. history essays and editing would them strengthen their resilience.
Asking questions and arousing curiosity
It is said that children as young as five years old ask about 120 questions a day, while six years old ask close 60 questions a day. However, adults of 40 years old ask only four questions a day. So encourage your students to be more curious about things and ask more questions like kids.
This way, they can easily structure their thoughts as well as generate creative ideas for writing. Also, their curiosity and wanting to know more would see them through whenever they have to work on difficult topics.
Embrace a positive outlook
Students always try to have a positive outlook in life as this can develop their sense of self-confidence. Another way to build resilience when faced with external challenges is to strengthen your inner reserves of hope and poetry can be a source of inspiration.
It should be noted poetry is packed with emotion. And students can write poems to cope with pressure from their personal lives. Writing poems would not only develop their creativity, but it will equally make them patient and calm.
Practicing kindness
A student should be encouraged to think about themselves in different ways. They should learn to practice self-love and, in turn, extend it to others. Furthermore, students can channel the inner creativity towards giving kindness, peace, love, and so many other things that can benefit society.
Experiment, fail and learn
As Thomas Edison said, “I make more mistakes than anyone else I know, and sooner or later, I’ll patent most of them.” Edison was a world-renowned inventor and innovator who was able to learn from failed experiments. When he died, he left 3,500 notebooks with details of his ideas and thoughts.
Encourage your students to follow their instincts, experiment with ideas, and learn from their mistakes. In this way, they understand that nobody is perfect, and everyone, including genius, can make mistakes. Besides, they come to perceive failure as temporary, and this can further strengthen their resilience.
Reaping the benefits
The goal of a teacher is to meet students wherever they are and to learn about their whole life. Through creative writing activities, educators create a community of compassionate and expressive learners who clearly understands the effects of trauma on each other’s experiences and build resilience together.
Finally, it is essential to help students to identify their common humanity. This would boost their creativity and resilience, which can help them to share their struggles and flaws through beautiful writing.
