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. In 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.  Of 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).

But at the same time, imagine that you actually have kids who are well-intentioned, pretty smart and actually interested in learning.  Let’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.  I would ask the question, “How persistent do we want them to be?” (and so would they).

Many kids in the PBL classroom wonder this in the beginning of the year and I am asking myself now too.  This student of Schoenfeld’s that persisted for 22 minutes –  is that a good thing?  How long is too long?  When would we want a kid to know to look for resources?  To question their prior knowledge in a different way?  To know to stop and wait to discuss with others the next day?  To try using technology?

So my question would be how do we know when we are teaching persistence as a good  and 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?).  My 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.