Title: 8 Ways To Build Student Stamina: How to teach persistence
Source/Author/Date:Scientific Learning/Norene Wiesen/January 14, 2014
URL Link [http://www.scilearn.com/blog/teaching-persistence-how-to-build-student-stamina]
Key Points: This fairly short, but very readable article give some great tips on teaching students perseverance through change of mindset, positive self-talk, modeling by teachers and other adults, and a host of other ideas.
Relevance: I believe that it is important to teach children to stick with things, especially when things are not going as well as could be expected. Students need to understand that mistakes are not failures; they are opportunities to learn.
Too often, I see students give up when they feel somethings has become too difficult. There are a couple points made in this article that I find extremely accurate. The first I agree with fully is modeling persistence. Students are always watching adults, especially teachers. We as educators must express to our students that not everything comes easy to us. One way I like to model this is by thinking aloud while teaching. For instance, if I am not exactly sure how to spell a word correctly, I verbalize my thought process in figuring it out. This demonstrates I am not perfect and am willing to work on figuring out the correct answer rather than giving up and choosing a different word. Expecting more out of our students is imperative. I believe this to be especially true when working with our population of students. Our students will run in to many people throughout their lives that will doubt them, it is part of our duties to prepare them for these situations and help make them believe in themselves. I have seen situations where even parents have protected their children too much holding them back from growing as individuals. As educators we need to expose them to as much information and as many tools as possible encouraging them and showing them all they can do individually to the best of their ability.
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