Do your students know how to persevere? Maybe you can you relate to this: You’ve planned a gorgeous, brain-busting STEM Challenge for your kids. Ten minutes in, you’ve got a couple who are nearing total shutdown. You’re desperate for them not to give up, and maybe even a little disappointed in their lack of persistence.

How do you teach students to persevere when they seem to lack the gene for it?

I’ve spent a LOT of time thinking about this problem! STEM Challenges provide us an amazing opportunity to work on growth mindset and other character education, because if we’re truly challenging our students, they’re going to get frustrated. They’re going to fail sometimes. When we’re ready to seize that opportunity, we get some of the most impactful lessons of the year from them!

Something big I’ve realized over time: Perseverance and determination are skills to be taught and practiced just the same as dividing decimals.

When you introduce division with decimals, you don’t just tell your students to divide. And when they struggle or fail, you don’t keep telling them, “Just keep dividing!”

You show them how, right? You go through multiple methods to getting the job done. You find ways for them to practice and turn the abstract into something more concrete.

Yet, we often use the ineffective “tell them” approach with softer skills like perseverance. We say:

This is about as effective as, “Just do your best to divide, pal. Keep at it! Go for it! You’ll figure it out eventually.”

And the biggest problems with the “tell them” approach are:

• Students have probably hit peak-frustration when we’re offering these platitudes.
• They don’t know how to keep going when they’re stuck.

We have to do more than talking the talk of growth mindset. We have to show kids how to walk the walk.

So how do we do that? What’s the solution?

3 Tips to get things moving in the right direction!

1. Get Excited About the Opportunity of Teachable Moments

I have been guilty in the past of getting frustrated with my students for shutting down. Knowing how many standards need to get “covered” left me feeling like I didn’t have time for character education. I’ve barked all those unhelpful phrases shared earlier in this post.

What I’ve learned is treating life skills, like perseverance, with the same respect I give content standards often pays off big-time. If we can teach our students to keep working when things get hard, it helps us when the going gets tough in all subjects, all year long (and beyond).

It feels a little scary when our instructional minutes are precious & few, but I’ve found it’s worth it!

2. Hold a Class Discussion About What Causes People to Want to Give Up

When students are ready to give up on a challenge, there’s often a lot of negative emotion happening for them. This is one reason our encouraging words often fall flat.

Take time to explore what is happening and what causes people to want to give up. If you want to solve a problem, you have to get to the heart of the problem, right?

Your kids often don’t understand what’s happening in their brains and why that’s causing them to take negative action (or inaction). Helping them process & examine what’s happening is the first step to getting “un-stuck” during tough challenges.

Your goal is to be a model for how to handle tough situations and feelings, not a mirror to their frustration.

Keep the tone curious and nonjudgmental throughout the discussion. Help students make sense of what’s going on in their minds when they want to give up.

3. Create a Procedure with Action Steps

What does perseverance look like? What are we really asking students to do to make the switch from emotional shutdown to positive action?

During your class discussion, brainstorm with your students. Create a simple, doable procedure with your students to help them understand what positive action steps they can take the next time they’d rather just give up.

Make sure you take into account what is actually doable in moments of extreme frustration & involve your students in creating the plan so they have more buy-in to use the procedure.

Understanding what actions would be helpful, and then actually taking those actions is the piece we often leave for our students to figure out on their own. We wouldn’t leave them in the dark with decimals; we shouldn’t do it with perseverance either.

If you feel like you need some more direction for leading a productive discussion on perseverance and want to know exactly what questions & follow-ups work well, check out the mini-training below.

It comes with the discussion fully laid out and an editable copy of the “Getting Un-Stuck” procedure poster I use. You’ll find all the details when you click through on the image.

This training is also included in the Teaching Growth Mindset & Perseverance During STEM Challenges Bundle.

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