Children forever hear slogans and sayings about the virtue of hard work and perseverance. These are just three.
“It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.” Babe Ruth
“The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.” Thomas Edison
“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.” Beverly Sills
Most of these, once we get past who is being quoted, serve as an aspirin to relieve the real-world anxiety and frustration children, and adults, feel when faced continuously with tasks that are difficult to complete successfully. School children today face an increasing array of difficult-to-complete tasks as educators are mandated to ramp up the pace and level of difficulty of rigorous academic content and skill sets.
The pace and level of difficulty of tasks laid before teachers is just as daunting as the challenges their students face. Everything about education is becoming more difficult. The issue for student and teacher alike is this – how can difficult problems be solved when there are no short cuts and hard work, perseverance and applications of common sense run thin?
“When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” doesn’t help and may only increase the angst.
Although it may sound like denying water to a person dying of thirst, best instructional practice is denying a learning child access to easy answers. Best practice reads like this.
• Provide children with difficult academic problems.
• Teach children the skills needed to solve similar problems. This step takes the most time and the most instructional diligence. Perseverance here pays dividends later.
• Point children to the resources needed to solve this type of problem. Part of problem solving is their experimentation with various resources not all of which will prove successful.
• Let children struggle with the application of their skills, their understanding of the academic context of a problem, and the solution to the problem at hand. Stand back and let them experiment. Ask only, “And, how did that work out?”
• Allow children to struggle productively, providing questions only, no answers, to help them progress through the problem solution. Good questions are more important than easy cues and clues.
• Debrief children after they have solved a problem. Talk just as much about what did not work as what did work. Debrief children on the struggle and what they learned from their persistence.
Too often adults intervene, swooping in like rescuers, to relieve children of the hardship of struggle. We see parents putting themselves between their child and impending failure all the time. It seems easier to give a child the release from a problem than it is to explain to the child why you let them “suffer.” Weepy little eyes beg for intervention. Many adults and parents perceive the lack of immediate success as a failure and want to buffer a child from failure. This flies in the face of what we know about resilience training. Perseverance is not a trait that can be pulled out of a backpack on demand, used, and then returned to a backpack for another day. Perseverance is a consistent exercise of grittiness that a person applies to every aspect of life, not just school work. A child’s failure to build perseverance and grit may be more significant to adult success than their failure to develop good reading and comprehension or computation skills.
Additionally, “When something comes easy, you usually let it go the same way” – Nora Roberts. The speed of life is very fast for children and challenges that are solved easily are like commercials on TV, interruptions in the main story. Tough sledding is what they will think and talk about long after the lesson.
“Struggling productively” may well be how someone in a few years will label this era of complex and rigorous academic standards, performance-based assessments and educational accountability.