Our Strategic Plan process identified resilience and perseve
rance as important Habits of Mind that our students need to thrive in the 21st century. During a parent education seminar last week, parents and I explored 1) the behavioral contexts in which perseverance emerges and 2) the mindsets necessary to actually persevere when the task is difficult. The following recaps the first half of our discussion, and next month’s blog will focus on creating and defining the mindset needed in order to persevere in the face of an especially daunting or challenging task.
I asked each parent to think back to their own experience and identify times when they were able to persevere and times when they were not. Not surprisingly everyone was able to recall incidents in their lives where they were and were not able to persevere through difficult learning tasks. Strikingly, calculus and learning a musical instrument were examples used to demonstrate both types of incidences; occasions where people were and were not able to persevere.
The major insight was that the capacity to be resilient, to persevere through failure and overcome failure is NOT a character trait that some of us have and some of us do not have. It is not a behavior that some of us exhibit all the time. Therefore, developing the capacity is something that we can learn.
Further discussion revealed that the most common and most essential element necessary for perseverance is personal engagement. When someone is very interested in a task and perceives it to be meaningful and valuable, then perseverance emerges. There is a deep connection between interest and sustained effort!
We then talked about how to ignite interest when the student is not immediately engaged in a learning task. We developed some language that parents and teachers can use together. I offered several questions to use as discussion points with your children.
- Why is your teacher interested in you learning this? Why does your teacher believe that this is important for you to learn?
- Why is learning this topic/skill in your “best interest?”
- What about this exercise is interesting to you? Is it the mental tricks you are learning? Is it the content and the ideas?
I suggested that parents frequently ask their children what they are doing in school that is interesting, and why. Refrain from only asking them if their homework is done or what grade did they get. Try and shape conversations about what is interesting and why. Show interest in what they are learning, not just how they are learning.
Children do expect their parents to be monitoring their school work to see if it is well done, and that is appropriate, of course. However, when a parent focuses on what is “of interest” that concern communicates two very important overarching values: 1) being engaged in a task because of its meaning and substance is essential, and 2) it is the student’s responsibility to find interest in the activity when it might not be there in the beginning. An active mind can always find something intriguing in almost any task.
As we work together to develop our children’s capacity for interest and engagement, we create the conditions that foster resiliency and perseverance. Stay tuned for Part II: Defining the mindset necessary to persevere, in next month’s eNews!
