Lindsey Hancock Warden
Persisting
While developing my students in each of the habits of mind is very important to me, I typically focus on persistence as the first habit that we tackle at the beginning of the school year. In my class, persisting is a behavior that my students must exhibit everyday in order to be successful. I like to introduce this Habit by showing my class examples of persistence, and discussing what this behavior looks like in the classroom. Persistence looks like meeting challenges and difficulties, and finding workable solutions to overcome them, whether students are dealing with personal problems or a complex assignment. As the school year continues, I frequently discuss persistence as we engage in learning activities and ask my students to reflect on how they have grown in their ability to persist. My students' employ persistence regularly in my classroom, including in large projects and academic tasks. In the materials below, you can review an example of my initial lesson on persistence, see how my students have engaged in and reflected on persistence throughout the year, and view a culminating project in which my students had to activate deep levels of persistence to complete.
Table of Contents
Introductory Lesson & Activities
I explicitly taught persistence by using the lesson plan to the bottom. This lesson is designed to first get students to think about the ways in which they have already used persistence. Then, they define it in their own words and view examples of other people demonstrating persistence. Finally, they relate persistence to the text that we are reading in class. By approaching persistence in multiple ways, my students are able to gain understanding of this habit and apply it to real scenarios in which they may have to activate it.
In the accompanying PowerPoint, I share photos from a time that I was around my students' age. When I share this slide, I tell them the story of the photographs, which involve a time I attended a state debate tournament and made it all the way into the top sixteen teams in the tournament. In our quarterfinal round, my partner and I lost on 2-1 decision. Later we read the feedback ballots, and realized that one of the judges who marked against us checked the wrong box. He meant for us to win the round on a 2-1 decision, and we could have moved on in the tournament. Instead of getting discouraged and giving up, we came back the next year and placed even higher. I find that this story is important to share with my students, because it shows them how persistence can be really effective. For many of my students who participate in speech and debate activities, this story is very relatable and they can easily see the lesson. It provides another way for my students to think about and remember persistence as they are seeking to activate persistence in their lives.
*This Powerpoint does not contain images of my students. It contains personal photos, and stock photos sourced from the public domain.
These two bellwork examples included below were some of the ones we discussed in class. They provided great opportunities to reinforce the idea of persistence by allowing me to facilitate reflection on the first student hiking twenty miles back to see a site with his group, and the second student researching and writing a letter to show her parents she was responsible enough for a pet after they said no the first time. I really liked the examples that my students came up with because most of the other students could think of similar situations they had to overcome. Including these student examples in the lesson definitely helped make the idea of persistence less abstract for my class, and they began to notice through the bellwork how persistence could apply to their lives.
I included these four videos in my introductory lesson on persistence. My students and I viewed these videos together, and the students took notes on how each of them demonstrate persistence. My intention behind each video is for students to identify specific forms of persistence.
The first video applies specifically to education, and helps my students understand how many students in the world find workarounds to actual geographic and physical challenges just to attend a school. The lesson we draw from this is that is that sometimes we have to undergo physical and mental challenges as we are fervently pursuing learning. The second video depicts child participants in the 1963 Children's March on Birmingham, and illustrates how working together and being brave are facets of overcoming challenges and solving problems that we might have to apply to our lives or classroom work as well. The third video highlights the life of Malala Yousafzai, who championed girls' educations in Afghanistan and still refused to be silent even after she was attacked by the Taliban; her persistence ultimately paid off in the form of a Nobel Peace Prize! The final video describes the work of my good friend from college, an undocumented immigrant who overcame living in the shadows and suicidal thoughts to become a successful paralegal. From these videos, my students learn that even the most insurmountable challenges can be tackled with persistence. On the left, see an example of student notes from the video portion of this lesson.
Persistence Lesson Videos
In the final portion of this lesson, students work together to review chapters from our ELA text and find examples of the characters persisting. They drew cartoons and wrote summaries to explain how the text's characters activate persistence.
In this student sample, the students depict the book's narrator losing a basketball game against a school from his hometown, but training harder, and in different ways, in order to come back later and beating the same team. When the peer pair presented their work during our class closing, we could work as a whole class to highlight the narrator taking his feelings of anger and disappointment and applying himself for a better outcome. In this manner, the students came to a full understanding of persisting, and how they can persist in multiple different facets of their lives.
Reinforcement & Reflection
Reinforcement Lesson Powerpoint & Texts
I created this Powerpoint to explicitly review and reteach persistence over the course of two days. I decided to create this Powerpoint and review persistence because I found my classes to be at a particularly low place at this point in the semester, both academically and behaviorally speaking. Students were not demonstrating growth on their summative assessments. There had been multiple office referrals that were troubling to me. It seemed like students were giving up very quickly on challenging assignments rather than pushing through them.
I think that a great way to model persistence is to start by discussing goals. An important skill when it comes to persisting is being able to identify our challenges, and think through new, innovative, and improved ways to approach them. I walk my students through that process in the early slides here by discussing some problems and potential, new solutions. Starting with the seventh slide in this presentation, I review persistence by summarizing the definition and actions we identified at the beginning of the semester, and with a humorous YouTube video that illustrates persisting in the form of a bird trying to sit on a high wire and trying multiple times to make it happen. The funny video drew my students in, and invested them in thinking again about persistence. The students wrap up the first day's discussion by reflecting on persistence in writing.
On the second day, the ninth slide of the presentation asks my students to recall on their own what persistence means to them. Then in following slides, I begin teaching the week's ELA standard through texts, but two of the texts themselves are based on persisting. I found this to be a simple way to incorporate the habits, including persisting, into our class. This also worked well in practice assignments, such as the text-based questions and short story reading below. The theme of this story is persistence, so even as students are working on their academic standards, the idea of persisting is being reinforced.
*This Powerpoint does not contain images of my students. It contains personal photos, and stock photos sourced from the public domain.
Additional Reinforcement: Student Writing Samples
These two student samples are from an informal writing assignment in which the prompt was, "think of a book you have read during independent reading this year where the character persists. Describe at least three ways that the character is persistent, and apply them to your life in the conclusion." This was a really good reflection opportunity for my students to identify persistent behaviors in their self-selected books, and then reflect on how they might emulate those behaviors in their everyday lives. This type of work also trains my students to identify persistence in texts, which acts as further reinforcement of this habit.
In the first reflection, my student discusses how a book character chooses to take risks, work hard, and think outside of the box. All of these skills are skills that a student may need to employ when they activate persisting in a given situation. In the second reflection, the student speaks to persisting as a means of coping with struggle and finding new and joyful ways to do things no matter your situation. While this sample speaks to broader challenges that communities face as well, the student successfully demonstrates his understanding of persisting through challenging work.
I collected these informal writing samples at the end of the year after asking my students to reflect on how they activated persistence at school. Some of the content of my students' essays was surprising because they thought about persistence in many ways other than just working harder to manage behavior and make better grades. Instead, they addressed facets of persistence like working to overcome biases, approaching assignments in new ways, and overcoming challenges outside of school. By reflecting on persistence at the end of the school year, my students were able to consider how they will continue activating this habit in the future.
Persisting Through Paper Writing
One process that my students engaged in this past year was learning to write major research papers. Students had to undertake a long process of self-selecting a research topic, writing a topic proposal, researching and drafting an annotated bibliography, writing an abstract, drafting their paper, conferencing with me, and ultimately writing and submitting a final draft of a term research paper for a major grade. You can read more about this assignment and my students' final products in the Qualitative Growth section of this portfolio.
Through this process, my students learned a great deal about working through the challenges of extremely long and complex tasks. Some students had to submit multiple topic proposals before we could agree on topics that were rigorous and interesting. Other students had never learned to create internal or bibliographic citations, and so they really struggled with paying attention to those minor details. The length requirement of the term paper posed a major challenge to some, who had to push themselves to add additional information to their papers. While my students struggled mightily to work through this challenging project, they learned a great deal about approaching challenges with innovative thinking, embracing the struggle, and persisting onwards to their goals through difficulty.
Page 1 - Topic Proposal: This student came up with topic ideas for his term research paper. The first topic, which was about the history of our town, seemed too narrow for the student to find plentiful sources. Based on my feedback, he changed directions and chose to research how language is developed. This topic, of course, is very broad. This presented the opposite problem in some respects, and he had to activate his persistence during the process to find solutions.
Pages 2-5 - Annotated Bibliography: None of my students, including the student whose work I pulled for this sample, had ever written an annotated bibliography for a paper before. Learning to create the citations, and then actually sitting down to read each article with required depth to write the paragraph summary took a lot of time for each student. There was some complaining in my class during the weeks we devoted to annotated bibliographies, but ultimately each student engaged in their research and found tools (with my assistance) to help them. Some students learned to plug their websites and journals into tools like Easy Bib, and then type their annotations directly into the document. Other students, like the author of these sample documents, used reference materials like Purdue OWL. My students engaged this process not just for a grade or because I asked them to, but because they could see the value in learning to write at a more academic level and they wanted to persist through the task for their own benefit.
Page 6 - Abstract: In addition to a topic proposal and annotated bibliography, I required my students to submit an abstract that summarized some of their research and informed the reader regarding the direction their paper would take. At first, my students did not really see why they needed to produce so much writing. They were used to getting a short writing prompt and writing one, or maybe two, drafts of an essay, so they really felt that a topic proposal, annotated bibliography, abstract and two drafts of the paper were completely excessive. However, my students continued to work and meet their deadlines, ultimately allowing them to activate this habit and perform at a more academic level of writing than they had previously.
Page 7 - Conference Notes: An important aspect of persisting is stopping to take measure of the successes and any areas that still need to be addressed. My students and I completed this process with writing conferences to review all of their work throughout this process, plus their rough drafts. We were really pressed for time by the end of the semester, so my students had only two days to implement the type of feedback that you see on page 7 of this sample. Some of the feedback is extensive, such as changing the order of paper sections and making additions. By this time, my students had plenty of practice with persisting and most accepted the feedback enthusiastically and set to work writing really excellent final drafts.
Though this was an extensive process, it did reinforce to my students the importance of engaging persistence in their academics and in their daily lives. They learned that by taking on a difficult task, and approaching it from many different directions and following through, they could achieve something they really did not imagine themselves capable of before.
Conclusion
In conclusion, teaching persistence is something I do year-round to ensure that my students are growing in this habit, and able to activate it in situations that may range from a personal struggle to an academic challenge. By teaching persistence explicitly, showing examples of other children who faced, and found solutions, to challenge, and talking through situations in which my students might need to persist, I ensure that my students have the foundations they need in order to recognize and build this habit. By focusing my students' attentions on persistence through discussions about goals, in our literary texts, and through written reflection, I reinforce this skill and ensure that they continually hear of its importance to our lives. Finally, through an extensive project that forced my students to activate high levels of persistence, my students demonstrate that they can effectively engage in persisting in order to produce gains in their academic and personal growth.
References:
TheRichest. (2016, April 19). Kids Who Risk Their Lives Going To School [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0zwFPR5OVY
Biography. (2014, January 10). Children's Crusade of 1963 | American Freedom Stories | Biography [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV0k-3Hkjsw
Draw The Life TikTak. (2019, January 8). MALALA YOUSAFZAI | Draw My Life [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNAmM-llm4c
Bailtang America TFC. (2019, March 13). Filipino Grammy-winning singer, Dreamer and paralegal is achieving big dreams [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ybuw2zCmIso
*All Powerpoint images are either personal images, or available in the public domain. No students are depicted in my Powerpoint slides.
**Other images are personal images unless otherwise referenced.