A reasonable expectation of teachers?
It is not unusual or unreasonable for teachers to "resist" taking on more and more.
One recent example, "It's not a school's job to teach your children resilience. Teachers are busy enough already" (more...).
About resilience
Resilience is fundamental to everyone's success and well-being now and in the future.
In particular resilience is fundamental to learning. Learning involves attempting thoughts and actions that one does not yet know how to do. All learning includes the risk of failure hence the need for resilience.
Learning, success and well-being all involve social and emotional aspects. We continually construct and reconstruct our knowledge, actions, arrangements and relationships, mostly in everyday interactions with others. This means that improving resilience involves social and emotional learning in the context of the activities and cultures of the school, its families and community.
The idea that resilience is something that can and should be taught by the student's teachers is true but the notion can be counter-productive, especially when teachers have to demonstrate that they have "taught resilience" as part of an industrial production model of education. The ridiculous demands on teachers to demonstrate that they have "taught X" is the major cause of "teacher resistance", narrowing of the curriculum and plateauing of student outcomes.
Teaching resilience
In fact all successful teachers, families, schools and communities naturally "teach" resilience as a matter of course. Teaching and learning resilience are best integrated into the whole life and work of the school, its families and community. It includes planning, modelling, coaching, support and celebration. Think of how toddlers learn and extrapolate that to make it developmentally appropriate for the learner.
Real-time integration of the teaching of resilience into the life and work of the school maximises the effectiveness of the "teaching' while minimising the extra demands on teachers. They are indeed "busy enough already".
A foundation of social and emotional learning
My final school had Program Achieve as its core education program. And there are numerous other social and emotional programs that provide a useful and comprehensive pedagogical framework for schools (and their teachers to adopt and live). Ideally the concepts and practices can also be shared with families and the community.
What to do...
An example from my last school involved assisting a small number of students who, when faced with a new learning task, would almost immediately recognise that they did not know what to do. They would then give up and/or seek help from the teacher.
By working with these students to better understand their needs we devised a strategy for
