As a parent, I want to step in and just do things myself to save time, but by not letting my children learn how to fail and retry, I am not helping them become persistent. Also, if I solve all their problems for them, they won't be resilient when they have to solve problems for themselves.
On November 11th, the last day of the iNACOL Online & Blended Learning Symposium of 2015, I tweeted: "Students are going to face a world we can't even imagine. They need to be resilient." What does it mean to be resilient? I went to my favorite search engine, and the first thing that popped up was a definition of resilient.
For a person or animal, it means one who is able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions.
So how are we preparing students to be resilient and persistent? This troubles me, because I don't have an answer to it. I see my children, 3 & 5, who are very persistent when it comes to something like wanting to have a piece of candy, but who walk away from something that might be a little tough for them.
For a Christmas present, my daughter was given a knitting set. She was persistent that we open it; however, I had no idea what I was doing, so I had to learn. During the time that I was trying to figure it out, she was persistent that she could do it (without any instructions). Once I figured it out and showed her how to do it, her persistence with it lasted about 3 stitches. She's five, so I don't expect her to have all the fine motor skills to do it, but this is typical of her. She doesn't have the persistence to stick with a project.
Right now, the Kirkwood HSDL program has a 95% success rate for the 15-16 academic year; however, I expect that number to go down. I don't see all of the students that have due dates of January 8th, 2016 finishing by that date. Some haven't started their classes that they signed up for in August and others may have worked for two weeks, taken two weeks off, and then never got back to their course. So, that brings me back to the question...how can we teach persistence and resilience to our children/students?
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