Persisting
"When I first started doing math, I would just give up at any time. But now that I'm understanding it, I'm striving to know more and understand more ways to do thing and not just give up."
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7th Grade Scholar
At my school, we begin teaching students about the importance of persisting from the moment they set foot in the building. Persevering through challenges is one of the major themes of every back-to-school community meeting during the first week, and I have taught an explicit lesson about fixed and growth mindsets for all of the middle schoolers for the past two years. This year, that occurred on the third day of classes. I have found it very effective to incorporate some basic neuroscience into this lesson. Students, like adults, are sometimes much more receptive to an idea if they understand that it is grounded in careful research.
My slideshow for the beginning-of-year lesson on maintaining a growth mindset and persisting through challenges (left) and the video that I show along with slide 8 (above). Slides 2 and 4 contain the neuroscience connections. Note also that slide 11 introduces the idea of conscientiously building positive habits. This always generates interesting discussions among students, and we think through the items on the following slide in terms of habits that we want to build and grow during the year. Thus, my students first start thinking about habits of mind in terms of persisting.
Persisting was also a significant point of emphasis during our community meetings in the first semester. Each week, scholars were asked to complete a different prompt about what they could do to grow their intelligence, improve their learning, and accomplish their goals. Talking explicitly about the rewards of persistence on a weekly basis helped keep the concept fresh in our scholars' minds. At this point in the year, they are all very familiar with the idea, and most have internalized it to a large extent.
Examples of scholar-facing growth mindset and persistence checkpoints used during community circles this fall. Unfortunately, I no longer have the original student work, but it is worth showing at least a sample of the range of persistence-related activities to which my scholars have been exposed over the course of the year. Pages 13, 15, 20-21, 22-23, and 31 were especially popular with my students.
Of course, persisting is also a focal point within classrooms; I work very hard to model and support growth mindsets on a daily basis. Many students believe that they are not “math people,” and it is essential to remind them that they are capable of mastering math (or anything else) even if they have not done so “yet." I do not permit my students to tell me that they are not math people, and I resolutely follow any “I can’t” statement in my classroom with an enthusiastic “yet!” I am so careful to do this every time a student says that he or she cannot do something that it has become a running joke within my classes. Indeed, students frequently supply a “yet” for themselves or their classmates before I have time to do so. I am delighted by this, of course; not only is it an example of finding humor with my classes, but it also demonstrates that my students are developing the ability to persist even without my help.
Growth mindset posters in my room. These are among my most prominently-displayed decorations, and I point to them every time I reference them.
The habit of persisting can also be reinforced through reflective activities that align with other classroom tasks. One of my favorite ways to do this is to prompt students to think about what they have learned recently and what they want to learn next. I like to include these questions on an exit ticket when we are about two weeks into a new unit. That gives students time both to have mastered some concepts and to have encountered some meaningful challenges. For example, my sixth graders began the second semester with their first formal algebra unit. Many of them were a little intimidated—after all, algebra is high school math—but they dove in with the sort of growth mindsets that we have been practicing all year. After a couple of weeks, I included the reflective prompts below on the back of a daily exit ticket. Students were justifiably proud about their areas of confidence but also impressively self-aware in recognizing where they had room to improve. Their responses were a valuable source of data for me and led to several very productive re-teaching activities. Of course, such activities would have been much less effective if my scholars had not approached them determined to persist until they succeeded.
Samples of student "glow" and "grow" reflections on the back of exit tickets. Note that some scholars, like the first one whose responses appear above, chose to identify general growth areas rather than ones specific to algebra. This helped me to locate a group of students whose impressive conceptual mastery was masking some very basic deficits, especially with respect to long division. Knowing that the entire group had self-identified that growth area made re-teaching about long division a much more enjoyable and productive experience for everyone involved.
I have even framed our preparation for PARCC testing around persistence this year. Many students experience a great deal of testing anxiety, and I find that discussing tests as an opportunity to demonstrate all of the impressive growth they have made over the course of the year mitigates their stress. Scholars also tend to feel more comfortable identifying their own areas of weakness when they are doing so as part of a plan to persist; it is easier for most to talk about ways they want to improve rather than topics that they still find challenging. Of course, great teachers must also ensure that their students understand what testing does not measure. With that in mind, I frequently ask scholars to celebrate their own persistence and growth in ways that may not appear directly on the tests. I would be doing my students a grave disservice if they left my classroom believing that test scores can tell their entire academic story.
Examples of test preparation aligned with persistence. To the left is a Venn diagram created by my sixth graders. Note that their understanding of success in class and on tests is deeply rooted in the mental habit of persisting when confronted with challenges. To the right are samples of a student-facing test preparation document. Students identified many math and ELA concepts of which they want to show mastery on the PARCC tests, but I also included a final question about points of pride that will not be obvious to test graders. I was particularly impressed with the scholars who talked about becoming better people (page 1), improving their attitudes (page 2), and enjoying what they had learned (page 3).