Mental Resilience

In recent years, mental resilience has become an inseparable component of various excellence tracks, such as in the fields of sports, music, and the military. Similarly, students with the potential for academic excellence need mental tools and skills that enable them to cope with effort, difficulty, and failure. This need will be growing in Israel’s post-war reality and on the threshold of an accelerated technological revolution, particularly among vulnerable populations.

In the field of education today, conventional thinking suggests that the role of schools is to also provide students with emotional and social skills. Alongside the focus on building knowledge and cognitive skills, schools must inspire in their teachers and students a belief in their abilities to succeed and a willingness to invest and make the effort. Professional bodies in Israel and around the world have developed expertise in this field but not yet such that focuses on excellence students.

The foundation is currently examining the option of harnessing professional services from the field of psychology and other fields to help educators adapt these services to the unique needs of excellence students. Over the past year, the foundation has commissioned research, held consultations, and initiated several pilot programs so as to learn about practices in this field in Israel and around the world.