Mental Resilience

In our 2024 roadmap, we started from the assumption that knowledge and high cognitive ability alone are not enough to succeed in excellence tracks. Students also need the mental strengths to cope with continuous effort, difficulty, and failure. The Advisory Council recommended that we identify the skills that are especially important for excellence-track students, and focus on those that can be taught in schools by teachers, without turning them into psychologists.

Acting on these recommendations, we enlisted centers of expertise in psychology and cognition, developed a shared conceptual framework, and built a portfolio of 12 pilot programs around it. The programs are at different stages of implementation, expected to reach thousands of teachers in the coming years.

A consultation with experts sharpened two insights. First, our conceptual framework is still too general and not focused enough on the skills unique to learning at the level of excellence. Second, focusing on the skills of the individual student is not enough. How teachers teach, the class as a group, and school-based routines also affect how students cope with challenge, their sense of self-efficacy, and their persistence.

These insights become more pressing against a worrying educational reality, as the results of achievement tests such as PISA show. After years of war, disrupted continuity of learning, and necessary accommodations for students and teachers, questions are being raised about whether knowledge and learning habits have eroded, and whether the bar of expectations has slipped. When the foundations of knowledge and learning habits weaken, the points at which students meet difficulty along the path to excellence may be multiplying. The question is how to combine teaching that strengthens the foundations with nurturing the ability to cope with challenge.

The International Advisory Council’s discussion will focus on whether and how to expand the pilot programs, and on exactly what is right and feasible to implement. Are the existing models ready for expansion, or is another stage of development and testing needed? And should we keep teaching individual skills, or broaden our view to take in teaching and the classroom environment?