SUKOL urges teachers to help students tolerate disappointment and bounce back

According to ePressi, at a recent SUKOL training event, language teachers were urged to make resilience a deliberate part of classroom practice: pupils should learn to tolerate disappointment, set achievable goals and recover from setbacks. The call came as educators and the media have flagged growing parental pressure to shield children from discomfort. The announcement followed earlier calls from the Language Education Policy Network and teacher unions urging stronger support for language education and equal access to mother‑tongue lessons.

Docent Peppi Taalas of the University of Jyväskylä told members that today’s student population is highly diverse and that classrooms must give pupils structured opportunities to practise goal-setting and build mastery. He used the concepts of self-efficacy and agency to explain why: self-efficacy is a learner’s belief in handling specific tasks, while agency covers planning, initiative and the capacity to fail and recover. Repeated small successes, he said, strengthen meaning and motivation and help pupils move past disappointments.

"At the centre of everything is the teacher’s own agency and sense of meaningfulness. That must be cared for," Taalas said. In the discussion that followed, teachers reflected on moments when they themselves feel capable and effective. "Satisfaction and self-efficacy are at their strongest when teacher and pupils share a flow state. You do not notice the lesson ending or that it is time for recess," a Tampere primary school language teacher commented.

Participants stressed that most classroom encounters are positive, despite frequent negative headlines about schools. One noted that even secondary pupils respond visibly to individual, affirmative feedback: "A one-on-one positive comment can make a middle-schooler’s eyes light up." SUKOL’s training underlined that boosting pupils’ resilience requires classroom practices that allow small failures as well as institutional support for teachers’ professional agency.