Teaching Perseverence

My students struggle with perseverance. They struggle with being able to start a problem, continue working through it when the going gets tough, and seeing it through to an answer that makes sense.  I have long wondered how I can guide them in developing those skills.  

I think I've found something that will help. 

I recently stumbled upon Dan Meyer's 101 Questions (www.101qs.com). This website is a warehouse of images and videos that can help to inspire students to ask questions.  By displaying an image or video and asking students "What's the first question that comes to mind?" I can guide students in developing those questioning skills.  I think this is important in developing perseverance. I believe that students give up because they don't know what questions to ask themselves to get over the wall they've hit. I think that ability is one of the basic building blocks of critical thinking. 

After students have learned to generate their initial questions, I can then guide students in formulating a list of information they would need in order to answer some of those questions.  This would be great in helping students to discern which information is useful and which is extraneous. At this point we are not trying to necessarily answer the questions they initially developed. I believe this would take some of the pressure off students and allow them to be more creative in the questions they develop and the  plan of how to answer them they put together. 

Once we have spent some time in developing questions and defining the needed information we can delve into actually answering those questions.  This whole process needs to be done over time. Students need to get comfortable with each stage of the process before moving onto the next in order to build up their confidence.  Time also allows students the chance to develop their relationships with each other as mathematicians. After all, don't mathematicians spend time collaborating to explain the world through mathematics? Wouldn't it be amazing to have students begin to act, work, and think like mathematicians?

Now you might be asking where are the Common Core math standards in all of this.  And I'm sure I could find a standard to go with each image or video. I believe the process itself is worthwhile even without any standards. And in wanting to let go and work outside the box do I really need to spend the time linking standards to each image or is my time better spent planning how to guide my students through the process? I'm going with the latter.  

No fear, right?