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.
I think you make a great point. I went PBL this year in my calculus and pre calculus classes. On the first day I spoke about mindsets and how our classroom would be structured. I asked that they spend at most 90 minutes on their set of 7-10 problems (we meet every other day). I told them it was OK to come to class with problems unfinished (but not unattempted). Despite my intro, I had many students panicking they either couldn’t finish each problem or that they were spending multiple hours attempting to finish. In my case, I see this as less “being persistent” and more “chasing the myth of perfection” but I agree there is a fine line in demanding too much “persistence”.
Wow, I love that – “chasing the myth of perfection” – such a great way to look at it. This is an ideal that my students seem to believe is required of them no matter how much I give them the speech that it doesn’t matter if it’s right. The key question for us as the teacher is how to balance the Persistence skill with the Problem Solving Skills, right? Growth needs to happen in both areas. Thanks so much for your comment and for reading! Keep doing what you’re doing!
I think this would be a great starting point for a discussion with students. As with all things, there needs to be a balance between challenge, enjoyment, fulfillment of curriculum, resourcefulness, and persistence. Different kids are going to be at different points at different times with this. It’s very hard (impossible?) to craft assignments that hit the sweet spot for every student in a given class. The tension between persistence and resourcefulness is a very real one and as with many other class norms that are counter to students’ previous experiences, it’s a lesson that needs to be revisited and reemphasized. This would be a great conversation to have within a department or even school wide to set norms that extend beyond a single class.
I also think that in some places, persistence is emphasized as a way to push kids through unengaging curriculum. Something that I saw a colleague doing recently that I loved is a sentence that he puts in his course description in the section on homework to the effect that if the student finds the assignment uninspiring, they are always free to design a different one that relates to this topic. Having students approach their work actively with the idea that it’s for their learning and not to please the teacher may also help push students away from mindlessly and unproductively working in a blind alley.
Thanks for bringing this up! Very interesting to think about.
Great suggestions! I think I will have that conversation with my kids next week. I wonder what they see as the purpose of the time they spend on their homework – maybe, as you say, it is different for all of them and just “pushing through” and even reading the problems is “persistence” to some of them, but to others it’s finding that breakthrough.
I do agree with you that some teachers (and maybe especially math teachers) think that persistence is just making it through curriculum that they “must cover” – so getting the kids to do it is half the battle. But I agree with you that my goal is to have it be more than that. The question of having students who might not particularly make those connections themselves grow to the next level is one that I am pretty interested in.
You mentioned the “sweet spot” for a student and I remember reading a paper about “finding the flow” of difficulty vs. challenge. I think I wrote a post on it a while ago – I’ll try to find it and send it to you. Thanks for reading and responding, Anna!