Rhea Heggaton,
Bilingual Teacher

If my students leave my classroom only learning one thing I hope it is persistence.  I was deeply impacted by a story from NPR about how Americans attribute children’s success to intelligence but other cultures attribute success to a child’s persistence and struggle to succeed. Teaching bilingual 5th grade this year brought this home. Even with scaffolded instruction, differentiated instruction, multi-modal learning strategies, all of the things we are taught to incorporate into our teaching, my students still started at me and asked what they should write on their paper. If they were given anything to read they just stared at it.

 

I had a serious life skill to impart to them.

 

Now I invoke the strategy Sal Kahn uses with his son. I never praise my students by telling them they are smart or praising them for doing something well that they already know how to do. When you enter my classroom you will hear me say “Wow, you are still working on the problem!” “There is some great persistence happening right now!” or “I need you to keep working and show some persistnace.” And my favorite “Anything that is easy is not worth doing”

 

A fun way to encourage persistence is The Marshmallow Challenge. We did this as a classroom reward and I decided to reward the students each trimester, with the same teams. The students see this 18 minute challenge as a pure fun. What they don’t realize is that they are using STEM skills and persistence; both are invaluable in the real world.