Reply to Teaching persistence and hard work

Forum Index » Elementary School-Aged Kids

Reply to "Teaching persistence and hard work"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Op, they are born with it. Or not.[/quote]

This is absolutely FALSE.

Tons and tons of resarch -- including Carol Dweck's research at Stanford -- shows that persistence is a SKILL that can be learned, just like all sorts of other skills.

In fact, Dweck's reserach shows again and again that it's your type of "fixed" mindset that prevents kids from developing persistence!

Here's what the research shows:

When children (or adults) believe they are either "born with" a capacity for hard work or not, they have absolutely no incentive to try harder when things are difficult.  This is in part becasue they are quicker to believe that it is out of their control.  Basically, the mindset is, "This is hard for me, so I guess I'm not good at it.  Some people are born with it and some are not.  I wasn't, so why bother trying?"

Basically, the "fixed" mindset you describe encourages passivity and resignation -- even in areas where kids (or adults) could improve their performance with more effort.  This includes the very idea of hard work and persistence (practicing and building up the habit of sticking with something that's hard) as well as other skills like math, writing, reading, memorizing spelling words etc.

Sure, some of this stuff comes easier to some people than others.  But that does NOT mean that the others can not learn it.  They may have to work harder, but anyone can learn to do that.  ANYONE.

This [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics