As students grow as goal-directed and resilient individuals, they have skills to successfully address challenges that they will encounter throughout their lifetime.

Goal-Directed and Resilient Individuals:

• Engage in healthy choices to help their physical and emotional well-being
• Problem-solve difficult tasks
• Manage time and resources to accomplish goals
• Recognize their own strengths and growth
• Advocate for themselves

Ideas for Discussing Goal-Directedness and Resiliency at Home

Pay attention to when you utilize goal-directed and resilient skills in different situations throughout your day. Try to regularly share these examples with your student and explain how you used specific goal-directed and resilient skills to help navigate scenarios. Over time, you might share examples of how you used skills well and opportunities for you to grow, too. Sharing your stories will help model the skills, demonstrate the importance of reflection, and build understanding of how skills can be used in and beyond school.

You might ask your student questions such as:

• Why is it important to identify challenges and work to overcome them?
• If you want to ___, what’s a goal you might make? What could be your plan to meet the goal?
• How might you take responsibility for your actions, completing work, mistakes, etc?
• How might you take responsibility for
  • your actions?
  • completing work?
  • mistakes?
• From the mistake ____, what did you learn?
• How can you be a good goal-directed and resilient individual when you are ____ (ex: trying something new; making choices about how to spend your time; in need of help)?
• What do you want to remember to be a goal-directed and resilient individual tomorrow?

Portrait of a Graduate in Action