Resilient Schools: Models and Functioning

Abstract

The problem of school resilience as its ability to ensure a high level of performance while working in unfavorable social conditions is attractive at the same time for several reasons. The solution to this problem allows the student, overcoming his socio-cultural limitations, to receive a high-quality education, and the state to improve the quality of human resources. Thus, the problem of ensuring social equality and justice as a condition of national security is organically intertwined with the problem of school resistance. The remaining uncertainty regarding the issue of the existence of resilience schools is resolved by including non-social objects as actors of educational interaction in the sphere of pedagogical analysis. It is shown that unfavorable social conditions (from the standpoint of school and universal values) in reality seem to be the most likely life prospect for students. To change the perspective, it is necessary either to change the conditions of interaction, or to change the attitude towards them. Depending on the chosen option, the school's strategies are determined, which determine qualitatively different models of resilient educational organizations. The study proposes five such models based, respectively, on the principles of: resonant interaction, focusing on supporting positive and blocking negative educational fluctuations of schoolchildren; compensatory interaction, calling for the creation of specific conditions in school that replace the effect of an unfavorable environment; the development of personal resilience of students as a meta-competence; integration of all previous models into a single educational system. The latter, the integrative model, can be considered as the highest level of school resilience achieved by successive changes of the previous ones. The fifth model is represented by the negative resilience of the school, which shows persistently low educational results and accepts its condition as inevitable. The necessity of considering negative resilience as a specific condition of an educational organization requiring special treatment and approaches to its development, as well as representing an independent research interest, is substantiated.