Pick up just about any school district’s plans for the year, and you will find student resilience everywhere.
It is a pillar in the portrait of a graduate, a line in the social-emotional learning budget, and the reason there’s an advisory block on the master schedule. We have decided, correctly, that we want kids who can meet something hard and not fold.
District leaders are watching students bring more stress through the door than ever, and they want to send them out steadier than they arrived. It follows that building resilient, confident kids has become an explicit, funded goal in thousands of districts.
What’s missing in too many of these portraits, budget lines, and advisory blocks is one of the strongest levers for building resilience: teaching kids how to read on time.
Building resilience in students: the roots of a movement
Building resilience feels a bit like it’s the topic du jour in the education space, but its roots can be traced back more than half a century.
Dr. Emmy Werner spent some 40 years tracking the development of nearly 700 children born on the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 1955 to measure how stressors in the womb, during childbirth and beyond impact a child’s trajectory. Over the course of four decades, Werner found that children who grew up with poverty, family instability, or trauma but still thrived shared certain protective factors, including a sense of competence, at least one stable relationship with a caring adult, and early, repeated experiences of mastering something difficult.
Her findings were published in the form of the seminal Kauai Longitudinal Study in the early 1990s, and they formed a cornerstone of the modern concept of child resilience.
A second piece of that cornerstone comes from the work of Stanford professor and psychologist Albert Bandura, who spent a career studying where confidence comes from. Bandura surmised that confidence isn’t a personality trait. Instead, he said it’s built through what he called “mastery experiences,” meaning direct, repeated success at a task.
The link between self-efficacy and early reading mastery
Bandura’s 1977 self-efficacy theory provides a similar conclusion to Werner in regards to early mastery, namely that the most convincing evidence a child has of their own competence often comes from succeeding at an early, public, difficult task.
For most children, learning to read fits that bill to a T.
It’s a challenge they face in 1st grade, surrounded by their peers, and it’s unquestionably a difficult one. Thanks to Science of Reading scientists, we now know just 5 to 10 percent of children learn to read easily, while the majority of kids need varying degrees of explicit instruction to master foundational reading skills.
We also know that a student’s early reading success or failure compounds over time.
According to the Matthew Effect in Reading, Canadian psychologist Dr. Keith Stanovich’s landmark 1986 work, when kids succeed in early reading skills development, reading feels rewarding. This leads to more reading, unlocking enhanced vocabulary and greater skill development. The positive effects snowball from there.
For kids who struggle early, the opposite is often true. The struggles lead to frustration, and reading feels like the thing that’s too hard instead of the thing that feels good. Those feelings lead to avoidance, and gaps widen as these students fall further and further behind their peers.
When kids aren’t reading on benchmark, there’s an extra social and emotional component that comes with supporting their literacy needs, says Cristina Segura, a SEAL coach in the English Language Learner and Multilingual Achievement (ELLMA) Office of the Oakland Unified School District in California.
“Students know they’re struggling,” Segura says. This shows up in the data too.
Data from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) Students Confident in Reading scale released in 2021 shows a clear relationship between how confident 4th graders feel about their reading and how well they actually read. As students’ self-reported confidence drops, their measured achievement drops too.
Kids who reported being “very confident” in their reading skills had an average achievement score of 541 on a scale centered at 500. Kids who reported being “not confident,” on the other hand, had an average score of 449.
To put the impact of that score gap in perspective, researchers estimate that roughly 40 points on the PIRLS scale is equivalent to one year of learning. A 92-point gap works out to roughly 2.3 years of learning between the most confident and least confident readers.
Once they’ve passed the critical 1st grade year, a child who cannot read isn’t just a student who has yet to achieve mastery of a skill. They’re a child who spends each day, in front of their classmates, collecting evidence that they cannot do what everyone around them can, at the very age when children decide whether they are capable people.
The compounding impact of these struggles on achievement is half the cost of a child’s reading skills gap. The other, equally dangerous, half is the whittling away at a student’s belief in themselves.
Connection before content
Sometimes the first step isn’t an academic one but a personal connection forged with a student. When a 5th grader arrived in Louisiana’s DeSoto Parish Schools, it was her first experience in a school building. She had never attended school in her home country, and she had no experience with the letters of the English alphabet or the Spanish one.
During a routine walkthrough, DeSoto’s Supervisor of Student Learning Willa Smith sat down and started speaking Spanish with her. The shift was immediate. Once the relationship was there, “What we discovered is she hadn’t been to school, so she was struggling with words make sentences, sentences make paragraphs, paragraphs make passages,” Smith says.
Getting to the heart of the child’s needs “allowed me to support them in that opportunity for learning,” she adds. “Building those personal relationships first allows us to build those academic relationships next.”
The inverse relationship between reading and resilience
Does confidence in reading shape achievement, or does achievement just shape how confident kids feel? Research tells us it’s not a matter of either/or but both.
An international team of researchers tracked 13,825 twins as part of the Twins Early Development Study, testing their reading skills and their self-perceived reading ability at age 9 or 10, then again at age 12. Because the study followed twins, researchers could separate how much of the confidence-skill connection came from shared genetics versus lived experience, giving them an unusually clean view of the relationship.
They found what you’d expect: kids with stronger reading skills tended to see themselves as capable readers. But they also found something less obvious: the relationship ran in both directions.
A student’s belief about their own reading ability at age 9 predicted their reading growth by age 12, independent of where their skills actually stood at the start. In other words, once a child decides they’re not a reader, that belief doesn’t just sit quietly next to the skill gap. It goes to work on it, tearing away at the fabric of a student’s confidence little by little.
Bandura’s mechanism for building a strong foundation for student resilience is the mastery experience: direct, repeated proof that you can do the hard thing in front of you. Werner’s protective factor is a sense of competence.
Districts that want resilient students have an important role to play in building these interwoven skills: intervene early to build a solid reading foundation, before the doubt calcifies.
When kids start believing in themselves as readers
Ledyard Public Schools Superintendent Jay Hartling described how this plays out in the classroom during a recent district leader panel on building student identity. Hartling shared the story of a young student in his district’s special education services (SES) program, a child who the Ledyard team knew was capable of closing his reading skills gaps but hadn’t been able to show it.
“We know he has the ability and has struggled to demonstrate it because of a variety of challenges,” Hartling says.
That changed when the child was enrolled in the district’s one-to-one early literacy intervention. The foundational skills he’d been stuck on for months started clicking as he worked one-to-one with an Ignite Reading certified literacy tutor. The student’s skills growth was so rapid that the conversation quickly shifted from how to support his intervention needs to how to transition him out of the district’s intervention program.
“When I say he lit up … I haven’t seen him so engaged,” Hartling says.
What changed wasn’t just the child’s reading level. “He’s continued to spring forward, because he found the confidence there, and his identity began shifting to a student who could be successful,” Hartling says.
The 1st grade window
The window to build students’ confidence in their reading skills doesn’t stay open long. Johns Hopkins researchers tracked early literacy intervention outcomes across 13 school districts over two years. When kids finished 1st grade reading on grade level, researchers found 17 out of 20 were still on grade level a year later. Among kids who finished 1st grade behind, just 1 in 8 caught up the following year.
Building confident students one reading skill at a time
Hartling’s student built his confidence in daily, one-to-one early literacy intervention by doing the hardest thing on his schedule and watching himself get better at it. That’s what Werner and Bandura were describing decades before resilience had its own line item in a strategic plan: competence begets confidence.
Once kids have learned to read, they have what they need to read to learn across every academic subject. Layer in a resilient mindset, and their self-efficacy lets them see a hard passage or a new subject as a challenge to work through.
The research backs this up in older kids specifically. A study of 8 to 11-year-olds found that reading self-efficacy predicted word reading skill even after accounting for working memory, phonological awareness, and vocabulary, meaning the belief mattered on top of the underlying cognitive skills, not just alongside them.
Most districts already know they want to raise kids who can meet something hard and not fold. What the research says, and what Hartling watched happen with one student, is that the highest-leverage place to build that quality isn’t a new initiative competing for space on the schedule. It’s making sure the block of time already reserved for reading intervention reaches every kid who needs it, before a foundational skills gap has time to convince them they can’t.
Districts that get kids reading on time aren’t running two separate initiatives, one for literacy and one for resilience. They’re running one system that happens to build both.
