What Resilience Really Means

Good afternoon. I am Nonie Lesaux, and I have the great privilege of serving as dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

To our graduates and all of you joining them on this momentous day: welcome. It's wonderful to celebrate just steps from our small but mighty — and deeply beloved — Appian Way campus. Having been a faculty member here for more than 20 years, I've been to a lot of Commencement ceremonies, and this is one tradition that never gets old.

I'll also say that based on my observational analysis at the Yard this morning, I am certain we were the loudest and most exuberant of all the schools. HGSE for the win.

During your studies, you have pursued questions and ideas that deepen our understanding of the efficacy, purpose, and process of education. By our estimate, our master's students have completed roughly 939,000 hours of coursework, and we are celebrating 17 Doctor of Education Leadership capstones and 19 Ph.D. theses — over 4,700 written pages devoted to doctoral projects. You all deserve a round of applause. 

I'd also like to recognize the countless colleagues whose dedication brought you to this point, and the many more who planned today's celebration. This event is a schoolwide effort: Every unit has a role to play, and staff from across the school are giving their time today. Please join me in thanking them. 

We also have one beloved faculty member retiring this year. Please join me in congratulating the one and only Mary Grassa O'Neill.

Finally, I know no one completes their graduate studies alone. Graduates, please join me in standing, as you're able, to thank those whose support has been instrumental in your journey. 

This is fabulous. And it's cozy under this tent. Welcome.

Today, we are celebrating your work and accomplishments — and, as is customary, also handing out advice. Personally, I'm somewhat allergic to unsolicited advice, for reasons both obvious and subtle, including probably that I grew up the youngest of three. So I'll keep the advice to a minimum and focus instead on a concept that takes me back to my graduate studies — and one that set me on my professional path.

It's a concept that undergirds our belief that change is always possible, one I’m certain that is central to the shared interests and values that bring us together today. It is also a concept that you will wrestle with throughout your personal and professional lives, I’m certain. That is, resilience.

"Resilience" is a word gets thrown around a lot, but it's actually a very precise concept. So today I want to ground us in what resilience really means, why getting it right matters to our shared work, and how we might think about it more imaginatively.

A study that changed everything

I’m a researcher at heart, so let me bring you into when and where I first really discovered that research is a powerful tool for understanding the human experience and advancing social progress. The year is 2000. The setting is the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. 

We were on the 6th floor of the Scarfe building for a doctoral seminar on human development. And one reading was a Scientific American piece from 1989. I can still picture my copy — slightly fuzzy, clearly a photocopy, the typeset hard to read in places. And now I'm very aware of how old I sound. 

It had such an intriguing title: "Children of the Garden Island,” by Emmy Werner and colleagues. 

Emmy Werner grew up in Europe during World War II, which played a role in her own view on the world and her life’s work. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska, and then as a faculty member at UC Davis became a leading child development researcher. In 1955, Werner and her team launched a study of children born on Kauai — the Garden Island, about 100 miles from Honolulu. This culturally diverse island of 30,000 at the time, many descended from immigrants who came to work on the sugar plantations, made an ideal setting for a longitudinal study because residents tended to stay put — a unique chance to examine how a child's environment of home, school, and community shapes their future. The team began by building trust with residents, enlisting Kauai nurses and social workers to take a census of every household and gather detailed personal histories of health, family life, and other key domains. Public health nurses interviewed pregnant women at home about their pregnancies, including any physical or emotional traumas, then followed up postpartum, and again when the children were one and ten. Special attention was paid to the home environment — traumatic life events, but also the simple daily interactions between parents and children. Teachers evaluated the children's academic progress and classroom behavior, while the research team itself captured achievement and personality data throughout elementary and high school. The team interviewed the children in depth at age 18 and again in their early 30s. All told, they followed nearly 700 children from childhood into adulthood — even by today's standards, an extraordinary piece of research.

Many of these children grew up in circumstances that could challenge their healthy development. One in five significant faced physical or developmental challenges before the age of 10. And by age 18, 15% of the participants had been involved with the juvenile justice system.

Werner and her team identified a significant percentage of the children — about 200 of the 700 followed by the study — as those whose futures might have been predicted very, very difficult. But that’s not how things turned out.

What they found was that at least a third of the children who faced the greatest adversity grew into competent, caring, successful adults — building meaningful relationships, succeeding in school and work, and contributing to their communities.

In vivid detail and living color, Werner and her team were among the first to document and formally introduce us to the idea that developmental outcomes depend on the features of a child’s environment — and they found that certain factors turned out to be protective against poor outcomes. 

So what were these protective factors, and how did they propel children forward in their lives? 

What you will next hear connects in some way, whether major or minor, to the future of education you came here to build. 

First, having at least one close, supportive relationship with a caring adult was a major protective factor. For those at highest risk, that person frequently wasn't a parent: it could be a grandparent, an older sibling, an aunt or uncle, even a regular babysitter. As these children grew older, they developed the ability to form close bonds, usually had one or several close friends, and drew key support from neighbors, peers, and community elders. Interviews at age 18 revealed that the most resilient children often had a favorite teacher who offered support during difficult times. Through these relationships, children developed a sense of belonging and of meaning in their lives. What mattered was the steady presence of *someone* who cared.

A second protective factor was children having — and taking — the opportunity to be responsible for meaningful chores or jobs and to feel competent doing them. When children are given real responsibilities that matter to others, not pretend tasks, they start to build their future selves: successfully carrying out a task helps them feel capable and useful. This was certainly the case in Kauai, especially when adults noticed and affirmed their competence. These tasks included caring for younger siblings, helping with family farming, or doing regular housework. Many of the youth later said that being needed gave them a sense of worth and agency — what we now call an "identity of competence."

A third protective factor was involvement in community institutions — churches, schools, the YMCA, or extracurriculars like 4-H, band, or sports. These places offered clear rules and routines, held children to certain expectations, and provided a sense of belonging. They also offered something else to belong to if home life wasn't a place of stability or safety.

Werner's research showed that resilience was not a mysterious individual trait that some people had and others didn't. It was, and is, the product of interactions between individuals and their environments. 

• One caring adult.
• Real responsibility.
• A setting that asks something of you and means it.

So to sum up, resilience is positive adaptation in the face of significant adversity. Notice that this definition has two parts, and both must be true at the same time. 

What made me fall in love with this study was not just the brilliant methodology, but that its findings are, at heart, optimistic about human thriving. Underneath the details was a deeper claim: resilience is the product of the social world we build for our next generations. It depends on what the environment offers, not on a temperament we hope they happen to have.

If protective factors produce thriving, then we can and should design for them. The risks young people face are not private misfortunes to be patched up; adversity is a shared, public condition we have the means to reduce. When we build different communities and settings, we enable a different future.

People, purpose, places. We will come back to each of them.

I left that seminar with the article folded into my bag and the sense — though I couldn't have explained it then — that this was the question I'd be grappling with for the rest of my career.

So let’s fast forward from the 1950s in Kauai and then the 6th floor doctoral seminar with Kim Schonert-Reichl in 2000 to here on Appian Way in 2026. 

Many of you, many of us, came to HGSE because you've seen up close what it looks like when systems fall short — when people of any age aren't learning to their full potential. A child who doesn't get the academic support they need. A talented student sidelined by financial barriers. A school or community strained by underinvestment or rapid change. Or maybe what you've seen isn't inside a school: the teenager whose real classroom is an after-school program or an internship site; the community college student struggling to finish coursework while juggling two jobs and caregiving. Or maybe you're under this tent because what you've seen isn't a visible, structural failure at all — it's the absence of innovation or tools that could fuel thriving. Responding to those insights is the very work of resilience, which is not fixed nor reserved for a heroic few. 

I think that your advantage as HGSE graduates is that, through your work big and small, direct and indirect, and in formal settings and informal ones, you can build the systems, organizations, and communities where resilience is not the exception, but the norm. That is both the opportunity and the responsibility you carry with you, starting today.

So let’s revisit people, purpose and place with that in mind.

On people, one of the most powerful ideas to emerge from decades of resilience research is that no one develops resilience in isolation. All of you are about to go out into the world and become those people who see and believe in others. Ask yourself regularly: “In this classroom, this office, this Zoom room, in this lab, in this design workshop, or wherever you might be — ask yourself: am I making it more likely that someone can bounce back from a setback and grow?”

On purpose: what the research keeps showing is that resilience is fostered in the doing. People — children and adults alike — grow stronger by being trusted with real work, where the effort shows and someone actually needs it done. 

I hope you feel your purpose fueling your work each day. But just as important, many of you are about to walk into roles where you will decide or influence what others are asked to do. You might be the teacher who replaces a worksheet with a project that matters to a community, or the member of an app development team who makes space for a colleague to steer the project. As you leave HGSE, I hope you ask yourself daily: "Am I setting the stage for others to find their purpose?"

Finally, on places, you are about to leave Appian Way, and as you do so, I hope you will think of yourselves as placemakers in your own right. Whatever your role or passion in education, you are building places that are strong, places that are someone else’s venue for discovering what they are capable of. Resilience grows in the places we make for one another.

To close, I want to put this into very concrete terms: 

As dean of this school of education, it seems to me that wherever I go these days — into a school or a district office, a community event, a business roundtable, or into a state house — I hear people, in all roles, making the same plea, in slightly different words each time. What people are asking for, in 2026, turns out to be the precisely what Werner found in her groundbreaking study in 1955. They are asking for more of the humanity that the Garden Island children had been given. In plain language, they are saying: More human skills and connections, please. 

They want our young people, and all of us, to have empathy and curiosity. They want them to have sound judgment, and the ability to work collaboratively with others. They want critical thinking and effective communication skills. So much of what lies before you, and before all of us, might in fact be called resilience work. But so much more than that, it is the work of human flourishing. That was true 70 years ago. It is true today. And it will be true another 70 years from now. There is an old French saying for this: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose — the more things change, the more they stay the same. 

That enduring work now belongs to you. 

And it belongs to you whether you are heading to a state house to draft policy, or to a classroom to teach fifth-grade math in a school that needs you…

whether you are designing the next generation of ed tech tools, including ones that use AI in the service of learning and growth, or you are developing solutions for first-generation college students to navigate an unfamiliar system that was not built with them in mind…

whether you are in clinical practice with preschoolers and their families, designing assessments that help teachers see what their students understand… 

whether you are launching a new micro-school built around what we now know about how children learn, or launching an afterschool program to better serve students…

whether you are engaged in philanthropy or social impact investing to spark progress in the broader ecosystem…

whether you are coaching a principal through their first years, helping young people speak through art-making to the society around them, or researching the questions our field has not yet answered.  

Whatever it is that you do, it will always be human flourishing work. It is what an HGSE graduate can and should do best.

And, in the spirit of unsolicited advice: The world you are stepping back into will come with its share of adversity alongside your successes. When those tough moments arrive — and they will — I hope you remember the three findings.

Remember the people who showed up for you. 

Remember the sense of purpose that shaped who you are. 

Remember the places that held you.

Remember these, and then go and make these things possible for someone else — and aspire to that work each and every day. 

Congratulations to the Class of 2026.