The MU Counseling Center is always looking for ways to empower students to handle the challenges they face at a large university, both academically and socially.
For fall semester, the center is making available to faculty, advisers, administrators, Residential Life staff and others in the campus community who interact with students an online toolkit for helping students. It is called Realize Your Resilience.
The goal is to give students the tools to overcome some of the issues they face in their campus lives, thereby helping them develop inner strength and mental resilience. Developing these qualities can help students be academically successful, said Christy Hutton, the Counseling Center’s programming and communications coordinator.
The curriculum is made to be flexible; it can be used as part of a course, in a workshop or in a small-group setting. “What is cool about this is that you can teach it as a whole or pull one unit out and drop it into a curriculum as it fits into what you are doing,” Hutton said.
Access to the program is through the Counseling Center’s administrators, who provide the login and password to access the online program.
Practical Applications
Introduced in 2014, the Realize Your Resilience program is administered by Screening for Mental Health Inc., which markets educational mental health programs targeted toward various demographics, including college students.
The program introduces the Seven Building Blocks of Resilience: Success Orientation, Goals and Purpose, Thought Patterns, Mentorship, Nurturing Relationships, High Achievement Expectations, and Involvement and Engagement. Each category offers a teaching guide, which can include multimedia.
An adviser might use the program to instruct several students concerned that their grades aren’t measuring up to their and their family’s expectations. Choosing the category High Achievement Expectations, the adviser could click on three subcategories: Setting Up Positive Expectations for Success, Using High Expectations for Your Success and the Nature of Intelligence.
The category Goals and Purpose might be used by an English professor instructing students to write about purpose in life. The three subcategories are Finding My Purpose, My Purpose Wheel and Be Good, Do Good.
Realize Your Resilience also offers tip sheets with titles like Be Optimistic, Beat Your Negative Self-Talk and Tips for Managing Stress.
There is a lot more to the program. For more information, contact the Counseling Center.
