Teaching Tenacity, Resilience, and a Drive for Excellence: Lessons for Social-Emotional Learning for Grades 4-8

How can we help students develop resilience to persevere in the face of setbacks? How can we ignite a drive that will inspire them to sustain effort even through difficulty? This book equips teachers to deliberately cultivate psychosocial skills, including self-awareness, problem solving to deal with setbacks, assertive interpersonal skills, and intellectual risk-taking. By teaching students to be aware of how their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors affect their pursuit of excellence, students can learn to tackle challenges and setbacks that they might experience as they reach to achieve. Lessons include engaging activities and curriculum connections, covering topics related to perfectionism, mindset, grit, stress, procrastination, social-emotional intelligence, and more.

Grades 4-

Emily Mofield, Ed.D., is an assistant professor in the College of Education at Lipscomb University. Her background includes 15 years experience teaching gifted students and leading gifted services.

Megan Parker Peters, Ph.D., is an assistant professor and the Director of Teacher Education and Assessment at Lipscomb University. She is also a psychologist, specializing in the needs of gifted and twice-exceptional learners. She is also the recipient of the National Association for Gifed Children's Hollingworth Award for research on achievement motivation (with Emily Mofield).