Weekly paid professional staff learn resilience through free, online opportunity
Offered through the Online Learning Initiative and the College of Liberal and Professional Studies, the course teaches participants resilience, gratitude, authenticity, and more.
Karen Reivich (seen here in March 2019) is director of resilience training at Penn’s Positive Psychology Center. She teaches an online Coursera course, Resilience Skills in a Time of Uncertainty, that’s now free and available to the public. (Image: Eric Sucar)
Wright is the undergraduate program and communications manager for the Sociology Department in the School of Arts and Sciences, but his background is in education. He began to wonder whether weekly paid staff might access some of the University’s strong online learning courses for free.
“I wanted to create a situation where support staff would be able to engage in these courses within their workflow,” says Wright, now a second-year doctoral student in Penn’s Graduate School of Education higher education division. “It would be an investment and interest in their professional development.”
With backing from Provost Wendell Pritchett and the WPPSA board, Wright met with Rebecca Stein, executive director of Penn’s Online Learning Initiative, and the pair chose as a pilot an online College of Liberal and Professional Studies (LPS) course on resilience taught by Karen Reivich of the Positive Psychology Center. Twenty-four people enrolled in the inaugural offering, which LPS ran from October of 2018 through February.
“It went very well,” Wright says. “The impact extended beyond the office, and that was something I did not anticipate. It goes to show how important these opportunities are for the ‘whole person,’ not just the ‘employee.’”
Thousands of people have taken part or all of Reivich’s online resilience course. Because of the format, the majority of interactions happen in cyberspace, with no face-to-face option. This time, however, Reivich got to meet her students in person, at a luncheon to discuss their experience.
That precise idea—enhancing the best of one’s self in the workplace and beyond—is one of the concepts Reivich teaches in the course, which is part of the Foundations of Positive Psychology specialization designed and produced by LPS and offered through the Coursera platform. “I take them through what we know are critical skills that contribute to our ability to deal with change and adversity but also tools to engage in ways that feel authentic,” she explains. “We talk about gratitude, about why it’s such a powerful emotion, and what it’s like to challenge your inner naysayer.”
Thousands of people have taken part or all of Reivich’s online resilience course. Because of the format, the majority of interactions happen in cyberspace with no face-to-face option. This time, however, Reivich got to meet her students in person, at a luncheon to discuss their experience.
One person, an administrative coordinator who has been at Penn for almost three decades, said she took the course on her own time and for personal betterment. Another talked about her desire to learn, and a third felt encouraged that her department gave her the time and space to pay attention to the ideas the process promoted. “This was the first online course I’ve created, and I was happy to see that people engaged with the content and with each other in ways similar to what I see in our face-to-face workshops,” Reivich says.
Given the success of the first course, Stein says her office is happy to support any such request and is open to doing another. For Wright, the positive reaction makes him want to build on the momentum.
“If you get the opportunity to take a course like this and it brings joy to your life, you’re getting skills that allow you to be a better person, family member, friend,” he says. “I found it so amazing that this course had that kind of impact. Now that we know that, what can we do moving forward?”
In Senegal, the ambitious Dakar Greenbelt project seeks to create an extensive network of ecological infrastructure in and around the city to sustainably address environmental concerns and enhance urban life. With support from David Gouverneur and Ellen Neises, Ph.D. candidate Rob Levinthal in the Weitzman School of Design led two courses that included a field trip to Dakar, that culminated in students presenting their visions for parts of the Greenbelt.
From a desert to an oasis: Penn engages in ambitious greening effort in the Sahel
Students from the Weitzman School of Design journeyed to Senegal to help with a massive ecological and infrastructural greening effort as part of their coursework. The Dakar Greenbelt aims to combat desertification and promote sustainable urban growth.
As part of an undergraduate course, Penn faculty and students curated an Arthur Ross Gallery exhibition of works from the Neumann family’s extensive collection of modern and contemporary art.
The University’s nexus for technology transfer supports researchers in their innovative efforts, from CAR T to mRNA advancements that have dramatically reshaped the world.
