Healthy Minds: Resilience Skills Foundation: Optimism & Evidence secondary
This lesson teaches students to challenge Gremlin Beliefs by seeking evidence and thinking flexibly. Using an optical illusion, opinion-line debates, and a story (Mia and Ava at the arcade), students discover the difference between optimistic and pessimistic thinking, and learn that our brains can tell inaccurate stories when they lack evidence.
Learning Outcomes
Outcome 1:
Understand the difference between optimistic and pessimistic thinking.
Outcome 2:
Know the importance of respect for different perspectives.
Outcome 3:
Discover how to use evidence to create more flexible and accurate thinking.
What's included
A quick look at the classroom-ready resources that come with this lesson.
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About the Organisation
Bounce Forward is the UK’s psychological-fitness charity.
We help children and young people — and the adults and environments around them — develop the understanding, skills and shared language to regulate, recover and adapt through challenge, change and everyday life.
Our work brings together mental resilience and emotional wellbeing, shifting the focus upstream: building capability before crisis, rather than waiting for something to go wrong. We translate evidence from psychology, resilience research, cognitive behavioural approaches and positive psychology into practical learning that can be taught, modelled and used in real life.
From evidence-informed curricula and staff development to family support and whole-community approaches, our work recognises that young people do not develop in isolation. What happens around a young person shapes what becomes possible within them.
Everything we create is practical, grounded in evidence and designed to build something that lasts — psychologically fit people and communities, better prepared to meet life.