Heather Lageman & Bill Sommers

What’s the Matter? is a feature exploring quotes and ideas that help us focus on what truly matters – each one of us and our collective learning and growth. Each week, we’ll examine perspectives that challenge conventional thinking and invite deeper engagement with the transformative power of education and the mattering movement.

Beyond Resilience: Building Shatterproof Schools in Challenging Times

“When the winds of change rage, some build shelters while others build windmills.”

Chinese Proverb

Tasha Eurich, Insight: Why We Are Less Self-Aware Than We Think—and What to Do About It

As educational leaders, we’ve long celebrated resilience as the ultimate coping strategy. We’ve encouraged our teams to “bounce back,” “power through,” and “keep calm and carry on.” But what if resilience alone isn’t enough for the complex challenges facing today’s schools?

Drawing from Tasha Eurich’s groundbreaking work in the book “Shatterproof,” it’s time to move beyond simply surviving the chaos of modern education to actually harnessing it for growth. As Eurich puts it, becoming shatterproof doesn’t mean never breaking—it means continually choosing to build back better than ever.

Today’s school leaders face what Eurich calls the “Chaos Era”—a time when stressors are chronic, cumulative, and extend across multiple domains. Sound familiar? Between post-pandemic recovery, staffing shortages, student mental health crises, budget constraints, and evolving academic standards, we’re operating in a perfect storm of challenges.

The problem isn’t that we lack resilience—it’s that resilience has limits. Like a rubber band stretched too often, our coping capacity can reach a breaking point. Recognizing this isn’t weakness; it’s wisdom.  Eurich shares this quote from Hemingway to open her book: “The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” Our schools, our teams, and our students can emerge not just intact, but genuinely stronger from the challenges we face together. The question isn’t whether chaos will come to our schools—the question is whether we’ll build shelters or windmills.

Scaffolding Ideas for Matter-Focused Learning

• The Windmill Mindset Shift Based on the Chinese proverb “When the winds of change rage, some build shelters while others build windmills,” help your school community reframe challenges as energy sources.

Implementation:

• Identify one major ongoing challenge facing your school
• Host community discussions about how this challenge might contain hidden opportunities
• Develop action plans that harness rather than simply endure the disruption

The Chaos Audit Take inventory of your current stressors across all life domains. Create a comprehensive list including work challenges, family pressures, health concerns, and community issues. This isn’t about solving everything—it’s about honest recognition of what you’re carrying.

Quick Start Implementation (45 minutes initial, 15 minutes weekly):

1. Map Seven Domains: Work/Career, Family, Health, Financial, Social/Community, Personal Growth, World/Environment
2. Brain Dump (20 minutes): Write everything that creates stress in each domain—no editing, no judgment
3. Color Code:

• Red: Chronic
• Orange: Acute
• Yellow: Cyclical
• Green: Controllable
• Blue: Uncontrollable

4. Connect the Dots: Draw lines between stressors that affect each other
5. Weekly Updates: Add new stressors, remove resolved ones, notice patterns and cascade effects

Key Insight: Track your “resilience rating” (1-10) each week and notice how interconnected stressors compound your overall capacity.

Resilience Ceiling Conversations Create safe spaces for leadership teams to discuss their limits without judgment. Eurich emphasizes that “some people have more resilience than others, but we all have our limits.”

Framework:

○      Share signs that traditional coping strategies aren’t working

○      Discuss the difference between individual resilience and team resilience

○      Identify early warning signs of hitting resilience ceilings

○      Develop protocols for when team members need additional support

• Beyond Bounce-Back Culture Many schools celebrate resilience stories where people “bounce back” to their previous state. Start celebrating “grow forward” stories instead.

Activities:

• Collect stories from staff, students, and families about how challenges led to genuine growth
• Create displays showcasing how difficulties became catalysts for positive change
• Revise recognition programs to honor transformation, not just recovery

• The Stream Strategy Eurich shares the metaphor of a stream always winning against a rock—not through power but persistence. Help your school community adopt this mindset.

Application:

• Identify areas where your school has been trying to “power through” challenges
• Explore how consistent, patient pressure might be more effective than intense bursts of effort
• Develop long-term strategies that emphasize sustainability over speed

Source:

• Eurich, Tasha. (2025). Shatterproof. New York: Little, Brown Spark