An important part of helping students to embrace iteration and persistence is to help them notice when and how they are persisting as well as how they feel about it and how they are benefitting from it. Having students visibly document their persistence is a great way to do this in a classroom setting - the students benefit from both creating their own documentation and reading and engaging with that of others.
If I was using VEX IQ in my classroom, I’d do this with a bulletin board where I would create a section for each Unit as we worked through them, and give students a simple format for sharing how they persisted during the competition sections of the units. For example, you could make printouts of something like this:
First (second, third, etc.) we tried _____________. The data we collected showed ____________________ so we refined our approach by ___________________________. The results were _______________________________.
I would print them on different colors of paper and assign a color to each iteration (first try yellow, second try blue, etc.) so when the board gets going, students can see all the different colors representing the number of iterations their classmates tried. Then I’d have them place star stickers on the iteration that gave them the best results.
I really like having visual reminders of persisting front and center in classrooms, but there are so many other ways to document persistence. Students can make a vlog or a blog, or you can have them photocopy pages in their Engineering Notebook to display. Really, anything that gets students articulating how they are persisting in their own words and discussing them with others is very valuable.
How would you document and display students’ persistence in your classroom?
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@Aimee_DeFoe @Jason_McKenna, I second that -what a great idea!
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While we are on the subject of persistence, I would like to share a practice I use during my teaching career. This has to do with the teacher’s iconic red pen. Now even though my favorite color is red, whenever I would get a paper back corrected in red pen it screamed at me: red flag, WRONG, failure. I figured that if I felt this way, perhaps there were other students who felt the same way, so I always did my corrections and mark-ups with a green pen. I would tell my students, something written in green means, here is something you can improve.
Now this might be just a simple little thing, but anything we can do to encourage our students to be persistent I think is a good thing.
If you have not watched the Habits of Mind - Persistence video in the Professional Development Library, it is an excellent watch and well worth the time!
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@David_Kelly Agree completely. We have to do more to make students a partner in the assessment process. Assessment should be something that is done with students, no to them. Instituting steps like this helps greatly.
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@David_Kelly I’m right on board with all of this! I also avoided the red pen when I was teaching. And, anytime we can talk with a student about their work in addition to providing written feedback it adds so much to the process, as it becomes a conversation rather than a one-sided edict from on high, if you know what I mean!
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Absolutely @Aimee_DeFoe and @David_Kelly! I found that in recent years in my Kindergarten class, I was also spending time with my students helping them to learn the meaning of ‘help’. Often times, I would be asked “Can you help me?” by a student, when they really meant, “Can you do this for me?” Part of building persistence was working through challenges, no matter how small, so I tried to be really mindful of not ‘swooping in’ to solve a problem, but instead giving children supports to solve the problem together.
Especially with young children, much of the day is spent in lessons of persistence - from learning how to tie shoes, or spell a word, to bigger things like learning how to listen in a conversation, or take turns. So much of what we do in early elementary school is persistence-oriented, but it’s not always highlighted. I love @Aimee_DeFoe’s idea of a persistence bulletin board! For pre-literate children, or young writers, I used to write down their words, and hang those up; or have students illustrate their words, to have a hand in the documentation.
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I started doing check ins during hybrid, to see how the kids were doing as they worked on their projects. I still do this on Thursdays and Fridays. It gives the kids a chance to share and for me to encourage. Since I have high school, it has also allowed me to identify students who want to seriously pursue STEM and assist them with their post-graduation plans.
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