Resilient pedagogy emerged as a way to teach during the pandemic requirements for remote and hybrid learning. But as we continue to see schoolwide attendance and other disruptions in 2025, how can we make our teaching more resilient in the current climate? I first heard about resilient pedagogy from Angela Watson in the summer of … Continued The post Resilient teaching, revisited: what it means post-COVID appeared first on Truth For Teachers.
Resilient pedagogy emerged as a way to teach during the pandemic requirements for remote and hybrid learning.
But as we continue to see schoolwide attendance and other disruptions in 2025, how can we make our teaching more resilient in the current climate?
I first heard about resilient pedagogy from Angela Watson in the summer of 2020. The idea immediately resonated with me, not just for what it could do in the current context for the 70 ELA teachers I led as their curriculum coordinator, but as something that I had been reaching for as a teacher all along.
Even now that I am back in the classroom full-time, I think of resilient pedagogy often and plan with it in mind. This is my updated thinking on that original article.
What is resilient teaching or resilient pedagogy?
Dr. Rebecca Quintana from the University of Michigan defines it this way:
Resilient teaching is the ability to facilitate learning experiences that are designed to be adaptable to fluctuating conditions and disruptions. This teaching ability can be seen as an outcome of a design approach that attends to the relationship between learning goals and activities and the environments they are situated in.
Resilient teaching approaches take into account how a dynamic learning context may require new forms of interaction between teachers and students, content and tools. Additionally, they necessitate the capacity to rethink the design of a learning experience based on a nuanced understanding of context.
I would argue that there have always been “fluctuating conditions and disruptions,” especially on a student-by-student level as they navigate their own crises and traumas. Since the pandemic, we continue to see this through significant K-12 attendance issues. With this comes fluctuating behavior and academic performances. Finally, depending on what state you’re in, you may be subject to ever-constricting legislation.
While we cannot control everything, resilient pedagogy offers us three principles to follow.
1. Extensibility
Plan for what’s known in the start-up world as the “minimum viable product.” In our context, that means:
Plan for the priority standards.
This is easy to forget in the rush “back to normal.” Instead of biting off more than you can chew, slow down. Take your time. Focus on the essentials. If your school or team has already selected priority standards, that’s great. Hold each other to them if you feel the need for speed.
If you don’t have these set, I suggest finding a highly reliable source to follow. You don’t need to select the priority standards from scratch. That is not a minimum-viable-product. You just need a short, thoughtful list. Check with your discipline’s professional organization to see their recommendations.
Choose a small set of instructional routines.
We can lose a lot of time planning up one-off lessons. Plug your content into a consistent set of approaches. This may seem boring, but things are often less consistent to students than they seem to us. They have multiple teachers, even in elementary school, and if they are frequently absent, then things may seem even more inconsistent to them (even if it happened every day they were gone). This is also supported by cognitive load theory, as it lessons students’ extraneous loads.
Make a minimum-viable list.
Start with your assessment and make a list of the absolute prerequisite tasks. When a student is gone a lot, only chase them through this small list–forget the rest. I post a list on my Canvas page at the beginning of each unit. It has helped me make peace with student absences that are beyond my control and help me focus on what really matters, which makes me a better teacher.
Wait for favorable conditions.
Add standards or change routines only when conditions are favorable. If you feel tempted to sit down and create a grandiose Kahoot or escape room, ask yourself if conditions are favorable. Do you have the time and emotional bandwidth to do that? Have your students demonstrated that they can accept a change in routine in stride?
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If you feel tempted to speed up to cover the curriculum or add one more focus to a unit, ask yourself if conditions are favorable. Do you have the time and resources to create more content? Have your students demonstrated a capacity that they are ready for more?
2. Flexibility
I have a rotating cast of students gone every day and multiple that I haven’t seen in weeks. It is really hard to keep straight who was here for what, and I don’t have the ability to sit with students gone for extended periods of time and catch them all the way up. If that’s you too, then flexibility will be important.
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Flexibility is the ability to make it so almost all students can access the content, regardless of time. Part of this is anticipating that not everyone will be there the day of the lesson. Here’s how to be flexible and extensible.
Post videos of lessons.
There are several ways to simplify this:
- Find good enough ones through a website like Khan Academy.
- If you teach with a team, you could divide up the videos to be made for lessons you teach every year.
- Make learning through video a key routine and teach all students to do it that way.
Read shorter texts.
In general, my classes read stories, poems, essays, and articles. When we read something longer, I have key scenes available so that students who have been gone can get caught up quickly. These also become the parts they can draw evidence from if they need to write about the text.
Break up paper writing.
In my last drama unit, students needed to write an analysis essay. They wrote a paragraph about each act after we read each act. At the end, they put these together with an introduction and conclusion to make a full paper. This strategy increased the likelihood that they missed less reading and less writing. For more tips on ending late papers for good, check out my article:
6 practices that ended late work in my ELA classroom and finally got students writing
3. Redundancy
Even with an extensible, flexible plan, the chosen methods will not work for every student. This principle ensures that there are multiple ways for students to access the curriculum. These multiple ways should be set, however, so that they are still extensible. They should be the simplest options for you to regularly provide.
Give students various ways to do the reading (e.g. online, print, audio, or translations).
Many online text sources, like CommonLit, provide these options for you.
Give students a few set ways to participate.
For example, they can write their answer, share it aloud, or express it nonverbally. Whatever ways you choose, include them in any lesson plan. If you teach the lesson live, also provide a video or notes resource for students to review. This is really covered by the flexibility principle.
Cover the same content over multiple days and watch for evidence of understanding.
Providing multiple opportunities for students to show what they know about the same thing deepens their understanding and helps include absent students.
Where to start?
You choose! Start with what you need right now to build your resilient teaching.
Maybe you know you’re “doing too much” as the kids say, and you need to scale back to essentials. Start with extensibility.
Maybe every absent student throws you off-course and you don’t have an elegant plan to get them (or yourself) back on track. Go for flexibility.
Maybe there’s a core group of students that isn’t getting it and you want to layer in another modality to deepen their understanding. Redundancy would be good to use for that.
No matter what, I wish you resilience all year long.
The post Resilient teaching, revisited: what it means post-COVID appeared first on Truth For Teachers.
