I want to be really clear here. Grit, resiliency training and mindsets have value. They help children and adults with high ACEs. Make no mistake about it, some help is vastly better than none. This is true even if we cannot prove it except by anecdotal and qualitative data at this point.
Here is the point I am trying to make -- and this is where the new word "lasticity" comes in (developed and explained and examined in Breakaway Learners). Some of the concerns expressed here may have less to do with substance and more to do with terminology. Resilience is, if one looks at its meaning, about bouncing back -- not forwards. It is also focused on the person with the high ACEs.
So, if you look at the amazing program cited in one of the programs in Walla Walla, the attention is largely on interventions geared toward the students. That is not unimportant. But, in the cited article on this initiative (https://acestoohigh.com/2015/0...school-say-the-data/), here is the sentence that captured my attention although it is offered as a secondary not primary point:
"The Children’s Resilience Initiative and its many partners made a concerted effort to educate the community of Walla Walla about the new knowledge about human development, how punishment really doesn’t help children learn, and how building resilience can give children hope and opportunity."
This is where lasticity shows its mettle. Lasticity is about cultural change -- change in the institutions (and those within them) who serve the students who have high ACEs. This is because of the centrality of reciprocity (and trust and transparency) to success. Now, if one parses what happened in Walla Walla, there was a cultural shift: there was teacher education, there was community engagement and learning. But, it appears not as a central feature of the effort and the success.
I would argue that cultural change is the essence of support and success for students who are at risk, particularly those with high ACEs.
Lasticity is, in a sense, a new word but not a totally new concept. It is the name for a construct that gathers together what we do and what we need to do and creates an overarching approach for replicable and scalable student success. It is focused on five elements -- elasticity, plasticity, pivoting right (choice architecture like red, yellow, green in Walla Walla), reciprocity and belief in self. These five foundational elements are then animated and sustained by the 6 T's --- trust (epistemic), transparency (and absence of bs), teaching (everyone is an educator not just those with degrees although the latter matter of course), tolerance (as in rethinking punishment), temperance (as in decrease stimuli and choices) and tranquility (as in consistency).
Here is another way of thinking about this. We tend to focus on strategy. We need to deploy these X number of strategies to garner success with kids with high ACEs. We need to develop strategic plans and details for implementation. I would say that as important as strategy is, culture eats strategy for lunch. The key is cultural change. Absent that, all the strategic plans created will not have stickiness or sustainability. Lasticity is about lasting change in the institutions and people serving students with high ACEs. These students did not ask for their situations; they did not do anything to score high. Things were done to and around them. That's why they need the rest of us to step up --- by changing how we respond to them.
That's the key: Our institutions and our culture need to change if we are to have widespread success in helping those who have experienced trauma, toxic stress and abuse. The goal is both to understand lasticity and get it into our lexicon.
That's a question: how do we make a word come alive?
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