A Leader’s Guide to the Struggle to Be Strong: How to Foster Resilience in Teens

Activities, exercises, and questions invite teens to go deeper into the stories and issues of the updated edition of The Struggle to Be Strong.

Designed for use with the anthology The Struggle to Be Strong, this leader’s guide explains how to use the stories in the student book to build teens’ resiliency. Activities, exercises, role plays, and questions about the issues in The Struggle to Be Strong help students go deeper into the stories, reflect on them, relate them to their lives, recognize their own potential for resilience, and start building resilience skills.
 
Introductory materials offer guidelines for group leadership and provide leaders with more information about the seven resiliencies:

• insight
• independence
• relationships
• initiative
• creativity
• humor
• morality

Sybil Wolin, Ph.D., is a developmental psychologist and was codirector of Project Resilience from 1987 to 2000. She lives on the Chesapeake Bay with her husband.

Al Desetta, M.A., was an editor at Youth Communication, a New York based nonprofit organization that teaches writing, journalism, and leadership skills to inner-city teens, from 1985 until 2002.

He is currently a freelance editor.

Keith Hefner is Executive Director of Youth Communication, a New York-based nonprofit organization that teaches writing, journalism, and leadership skills to inner-city teens. He is also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for his work in youth development.