{"id":1016,"date":"2014-09-12T21:33:35","date_gmt":"2014-09-12T21:33:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/wp\/?p=1016"},"modified":"2014-09-12T21:41:50","modified_gmt":"2014-09-12T21:41:50","slug":"teaching-persistence-takes-time-but-how-much-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/2014\/09\/12\/teaching-persistence-takes-time-but-how-much-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching Persistence Takes Time….But How Much Time?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just read a great story posted on a blog about Malcolm Gladwell’s comments about Alan Schoenfeld’s research <\/a>on persistence in problem solving in Gladwell’s book Outliers.\u00a0In this story, a young woman persists for 22 minutes on a problem that had an average persistence time for most students of about two minutes. \u00a0Of course we would love to have students be persistent in the face of a problem they couldn’t solve and have some determination and creativity to bat to allow themselves to grapple with the problem (in other words, not just sit there and persist in the feeling of gosh-I-wonder-how-to-do-this).<\/p>\n

But at the same time, imagine that you actually have kids who are well-intentioned, pretty smart and actually interested in learning. \u00a0Let’s just give them the benefit of the down for a second here – and we’re in a classroom where we have interesting problems that might keep them engaged in the evening with an cool idea with which they must grapple for a while. \u00a0I would ask the question, “How persistent do we want them to be?” (and so would they).<\/p>\n

Many kids in the PBL classroom wonder this in the beginning of the year and I am asking myself now too. \u00a0This student of Schoenfeld’s that persisted for 22 minutes – \u00a0is that a good thing? \u00a0How long is too long? \u00a0When would we want a kid to know to look for resources? \u00a0To question their prior knowledge in a different way? \u00a0To know to stop and wait to discuss with others the next day? \u00a0To try using technology?<\/p>\n

So my question would be how do we know when we are teaching persistence as a good \u00a0and productive thing or when we are teaching students that their problem solving is just the definition of insanity (repeating the same thing over and over expecting different results?). \u00a0My thought is that persistence without a growth mindset (or the belief that you can change your way of thinking and knowing) can be just as dangerous as no persistence at all.<\/p>\n\n

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I just read a great story posted on a blog about Malcolm Gladwell’s comments about Alan Schoenfeld’s research on persistence in problem solving in Gladwell’s book Outliers.\u00a0In this story, a young woman persists for 22 minutes on a problem that had an average persistence time for most students of about two minutes. \u00a0Of course we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71,83],"tags":[114],"class_list":["post-1016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grit","category-persistence","tag-persistence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1016"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1018,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016\/revisions\/1018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}