Thursday, October 1, 2026
Much has been written about how our students are entering a world that could best be characterized by the acronym used in the period of international destabilization immediately following the end of the Cold War: volatility, uncertainty, chaos and ambiguity, or VUCA.
The term is often evoked to express the sentiment of a dire future, but one could argue that having an honest appreciation of the many situations that have the qualities of VUCA is the best preparation for oneself and for society as a whole. Moreover, it is true that while our anxiety about instability in society typically tends to project into the future, there has been ample historical evidence of how exercising purposeful preparation for unpredictable situations has ultimately allowed people to prevail.
When educators speak of how best to prepare students for a less predictable, dynamic world, resilience is often the go-to skill identified. While the development of resilience can help students respond to and survive complex and novel problems in positive ways, however, the skill of prosilience offers so much more. Prosilience can best be defined as the collective mindsets and skills that help people intentionally prepare for and face challenges before they occur so they can create positive opportunity out of difficulty.
While it is true that we can’t fully describe many of the challenges in the world ahead, we certainly know enough to structure engaging and student-centered learning activities that help students develop a prosilient mindset. In fact, open and more conceptual statements of problems or challenges yield far more enjoyable, collaborative and thought-provoking learning opportunities.
Take, for example, a resilience-vs.-prosilience approach to the following problem: You graduate from college only to find that the job you thought you were going to interview for has been eliminated by artificial intelligence. What do you do?
A resilient approach would structure a learning experience about how students would respond to such a frightening situation. A prosilient approach would engage in the process of adaptation from what was expected to what actually occurred, and would move beyond reacting. In other words, instead of asking, “What do you do?” the prosilient approach would ask, “How would you go into college knowing that this problem is a possibility, and how does that impact your decision-making?”
In this sense, the more valuable skill of intentional preparation for response — as opposed to just the response — before the problem occurs comes with the expectation that something will undoubtedly go wrong in the real world. The Navy uses the term “chair flying” to describe the rehearsal of the response process if problems arise in flight, or any other situation.
Prosilience naturally lends itself to a real-world, authentic learning setting, and also builds confidence in students in the same way that complex problem-solving and productive-struggle learning activities do.
Chris Zublionis is the departing superintendent of the North Shore School District. On July 1 he will become superintendent of the Plainedge School District.
