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Creativity, Enrichment, Learning, Personal Development, Taskmaster, Taskmaster in School, Teaching, Teaching and Learning, Teamwork

What’s So Good About Taskmaster Club? RESILIENCE

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Week 9 – Resilience

Resilience – the ability to cope with challenges, setbacks and uncertainty – is one of the most important skills young people can develop.

In school, resilience helps pupils tackle difficult work, persist when things don’t go to plan and recover from mistakes. Beyond school, it supports wellbeing, adaptability and confidence in the face of life’s inevitable ups and downs.

Taskmaster Club, perhaps unexpectedly, provides an excellent environment for developing resilience. The nature of the tasks – unpredictable, varied and often slightly chaotic – means things rarely go exactly to plan. Pupils must adapt, rethink and try again.

And crucially, they do this in a setting where failure is not something to fear, but simply part of the process.

What Do We Mean by Resilience?

In educational contexts, resilience generally refers to the capacity to recover from difficulties, adapt to change and keep going when faced with obstacles.

Professor Angie Hart from the University of Brighton, whose research focuses on resilience in young people, describes resilience as something that can be developed through supportive relationships and positive learning environments rather than something people either have or don’t have.

More about the Resilience Framework developed by Professor Hart and colleagues can be found here:
https://www.boingboing.org.uk/use-resilience-framework-academic-resilience/

This perspective is important for schools, because it suggests resilience is not just an individual trait, it is something that learning environments can actively nurture.

What the Research Says

Educational research increasingly highlights resilience as a key factor in successful learning.

Psychologist Professor Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset shows that when pupils believe abilities can develop through effort and practice, they are more likely to persist through challenges and learn from mistakes.

An overview of this research can be found here:
https://simplyputpsych.co.uk/psych-101-1/the-science-behind-carol-dwecks-growth-mindset-understanding-the-key-to-personal-and-professional-success

Similarly, research supported by the Education Endowment Foundation highlights the importance of metacognition and self-regulation – pupils’ ability to plan, monitor and evaluate their learning – which are closely linked to resilience when tackling difficult tasks.

More information from the EEF can be found here:
https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/teaching-learning-toolkit/metacognition-and-self-regulation

The evidence suggests that pupils benefit from learning environments where challenge is encouraged, mistakes are treated as learning opportunities, and reflection is built into the process.

How Taskmaster Club Builds Resilience

Taskmaster Club creates exactly this kind of environment.

1. Tasks That Don’t Always Go to Plan

Many tasks are deliberately open-ended and unpredictable. Teams may start with a confident strategy only to realise halfway through that it isn’t working.

This is where resilience comes into play. Pupils must adapt their thinking, modify their approach and keep going rather than giving up.

Learning to cope with that uncertainty is a powerful experience.

2. Failure Is Part of the Fun

One of the unique aspects of Taskmaster Club is that failure is often funny. Plans collapse. Towers fall over. Elaborate ideas turn out to be impossible.

Because the atmosphere is playful and supportive, pupils experience setbacks without embarrassment or judgement. Instead, those moments become opportunities to reflect, laugh and try something different next time.

This helps pupils learn that mistakes are not something to fear – they are part of learning.

3. Encouraging Persistence

Many tasks require sustained effort, problem-solving and cooperation. Teams must keep working together, even when progress is slow or ideas run out.

This encourages pupils to persist, test new strategies and support each other through difficulties.

That persistence is a key ingredient of resilience.

4. Learning to Reflect and Improve

After each task, pupils often discuss what worked, what didn’t and how they might approach the challenge differently next time.

This reflective process helps them develop the metacognitive skills that research links to successful learning – thinking about their own thinking and adjusting their strategies accordingly.

Over time, pupils begin to see setbacks not as failures but as valuable feedback.

5. Supportive Teams Make Challenges Easier

Resilience is rarely built alone. Supportive relationships play a major role in helping young people navigate challenges.

Because Taskmaster Club is team-based, pupils face difficulties together. They share ideas, encourage one another and celebrate successes collectively.

This collaborative environment helps pupils feel safe taking risks and trying new approaches.

Why Resilience Matters

Resilience helps pupils approach learning with confidence and determination.

When young people develop resilience, they are more likely to:

  • persevere through challenging work
  • cope with mistakes and setbacks
  • adapt when situations change
  • maintain motivation and engagement
  • approach problems creatively

These qualities are not only valuable in school but are also essential for navigating an increasingly complex and unpredictable world.

Final Thoughts

At first glance, Taskmaster Club might seem like a series of playful, slightly ridiculous tasks. But beneath the laughter and creativity lies something deeper.

Pupils are learning to try things that might not work.
They are discovering that mistakes are normal.
They are developing the confidence to adapt, rethink and try again.

In short, they are building resilience.

And when young people learn that setbacks are simply part of the journey – rather than the end of it – they gain a skill that will serve them far beyond the classroom.

Taskmaster Club materials:

Further posts in the ‘What’s So Good About Taskmaster Club series:

Games

Pass The Pigs

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The summer holiday is the perfect time to stop rushing around and start spending quality time with my own children. When we get bored after the first week and/or the weather takes a turn for the worse, we start playing games. Card games are simple and a deck of fits easily into luggage if you are travelling, but so does Pass the Pigs!

Pass the Pigs is a family favourite and has many develpmental benefits when playing the game with children. It helps with maths, but also with learning resilience and perseverance.

The aim of the game is to score the most points by rolling a pair of pigs. Your score is calculated depending on the position the pigs land in. The first educational benefit is simple addition. The children need to add up the score of the two pigs they have rolled, then they must add it to their total score. It’s a good bit of mental addition practice. But that’s not the best bit.

The best bit is the losing. As you play the game you accrue points, but you can also lose your points. All of them. If your two pigs are touching (making bacon) or you roll a double sider with one dot up and one dot down, your score goes back to zero. What I’ve found to be particularly valuable are the converstations I’ve been having with the children when they do lose their points.

To start with there were a few tantrums and then not wanting to play EVER AGAIN! Then they would play if the were in a team with an adult. This gave us the opportunity to model our reactions to losing points. It’s ok to be disappionted. But we’re trying to teach proportional responses. Eventually they were happy to play on their own, with/against the rest of the family. Great fun ensuses. WARNING – avoid playing the game if your small child is too tired, it’s easy to go back to square one!

There is immense pleasure to be found in rolling a leaning jowler or a double razorback. But that pleasure is heightened by the jeopardy involved. I like the fact that you can be winning the whole way through the game, only to lose all of your points at the last moment. Equally, you can be floundering in single figures and surprisingly be the last player with any points.

The, rarely seen, double leaning jowler. The top score in Pass the Pigs.