Resilient Learner
Resilient Learners — Because How You Learn Matters as Much as What You Learn Exams are coming. Pressure is building. This curriculum gives young people the mindset and tools to meet it. Resilient Learners is a seven-lesson Year 10 curriculum that turns the resilience skills pupils have developed throughout Healthy Minds directly onto their experience as learners. At a pivotal academic moment, it helps young people understand what gets in the way of their best, and what unlocks it. Pupils explore barriers to success, learning priorities and strategies, growth versus fixed mindsets, and how to manage anxiety when the stakes feel high. They build personal action plans, learn to harness emotions for performance rather than be derailed by them, and finish by identifying the personal strengths that will carry them forward — not just through exams, but through life. The curriculum culminates with a strengths lesson grounded in evidence that starting from what we're good at makes us more likely to respond effectively to setbacks, seize opportunities and thrive. Pupils are even encouraged to become strengths champions — taking the learning to younger students, staff or their wider community. Academic pressure without psychological fitness is a recipe for anxiety and underperformance. This curriculum builds both together — because the most resilient learner isn't the one who works hardest, it's the one who knows themselves best. Part of the Bounce Forward Healthy Minds suite — evidence-based, developmental, and built for real life.
Lessons
7 lessons in this module.
Barriers to Success
The opening lesson of the Resilient Learner series applies the resilience skills to the experience of studying and exams. Students map their personal learning journey on a timeline, identifying highs and lows, what enables them to perform at their best, and the beliefs that helped or hindered them. The ABC model is briefly revisited through a relatable exam scenario to reconnect students with the link between thinking, feeling, and behaviour in an academic context.
Learning Priority and Strategies
This lesson helps students identify their personal strengths and weaknesses across four key learning capabilities, then learn from each other through a structured peer-teaching carousel. By self-assessing their confidence in Perseverance, Getting Going, Keeping It in Perspective, and Moving Forward, students group themselves by their strongest capability and take turns both teaching and learning from their peers, exploring the Beliefs that underpin each capability.
Learning Mindsets
This lesson introduces Carol Dweck's fixed versus growth mindset theory and frames it within the resilience skills language students already know (mindsets as clusters of Big Sticky Beliefs). Students explore their beliefs about intelligence through an Agree/Disagree scale, a mindset grid activity, paired role-playing of fixed and growth mindset responses, a short video about brain plasticity, and a group evidence-gathering exercise — building a compelling case for why a growth mindset is more helpful for learning.
Dealing with Anxiety
This lesson focuses specifically on how anxiety interferes with learning and exam performance, and reinforces two key tools for managing it: calming and focusing techniques (harnessing emotions) and WoBbLe (taming catastrophising Gremlin Beliefs). Through an ABC worked example where the Consequence is given first, students identify what Activating Events and Beliefs might be driving exam-related anxiety, then practise WoBbLe on three real exam-pressure scenarios.
Action Planning
This lesson brings together all four Learning Action Plans completed across the series and consolidates the skills into a personal forward-planning document. Students first practise using the skills "in the moment" through the Hot Seat activity with an exam-day social stressor scenario, then write a detailed personal plan covering Gremlin Beliefs, learning capabilities, strategies, support networks, and self-reward. The lesson closes with a Q&A opportunity and a summary of the five core benefits of resilience for learning.
Emotions, Energy and Performance
This lesson introduces the Emotions, Energy and Performance model from sports psychology — a four-quadrant grid (positive/negative emotion × high/low energy) that maps emotional states to performance zones: Thriving, Survival, Burnout, and Recovery. Students explore where their emotions currently sit, what beliefs keep them from prioritising recovery, and what practical actions they can take to achieve the right personal ratio of high performance and effective recovery — particularly in the lead-up to exams. The Five Ways to Wellbeing are revisited as a source of recovery ideas.
Strengths
The final lesson of the Resilient Learner series — and of the complete Healthy Minds curriculum — draws on the work of the VIA Institute on Character to help students identify and articulate their personal strengths. Through a focused listening exercise, a strengths card exploration, a small-group presentation, and a discussion connecting strengths to the Energy and Performance grid, students leave with a clearer sense of who they are at their best and how to use their strengths intentionally going forward. The lesson closes by encouraging students to use their strengths to write a personal statement for life beyond Year 11.