Tips for Teaching Kids the Value of Persistence

Teachers know how significant a role they play in helping younger learners develop essential values that they need to navigate the real world later on. They could be a handful even for veteran educators, but kids learn the tenets of patience and the importance of perseverance better when given correct guidance. For kindergarten and grade school teachers, it’s all a matter of using the right strategies and approaches to help learners realize the importance of being committed to and accomplishing a task. 

Persistence is one of the most important values that learners will need to hone. It prepares them intellectually and emotionally for the more demanding challenges that await them as they enter high school and college. The younger they get started, the more effective and resilient they become in facing increasingly complex problems on their own. Here’s how you can help them nurture their persistence:

1. Provide a different view of problems

Young as they are, kids are receptive to situations they feel endanger their sense of comfort and safety. While it’s natural for them to feel unease and discomfort when they’re made to face an unfamiliar scenario, kids won’t develop the confidence needed to explore and investigate when they try to justify staying in their comfort zone. 

The best approach for this is to help children understand that difficult tasks and problems are not there to threaten or punish them. Instead, it helps if you allow them to view these problems as opportunities to learn new skills. It’s only a matter of focusing more on helping kids develop these skills regardless of how long it would take for them to solve a problem.

2. Offer an appropriate level of challenge

When it comes down to designing your teaching strategies and lesson plans, the activities you include must provide kids with a certain degree of difficulty. Getting them to work on a task that’s too easy and familiar won’t result in active learning. 

On the other hand, activities that are too difficult often lead to a decrease in morale and a loss of desire to learn. For this, you will have to make sure the activities you make them do are appropriate for their age. Activities such as color by number for kids are particularly useful in helping preschool kids recognize colors and numbers and develop goal-oriented traits.

3. Create opportunities for working in groups

Persistence is best developed when children are allowed to work with others in pursuit of a common goal. Group activities not only nurture a child’s agency for socialization, but they can also help them see the value of leadership and teamwork in knowing that each member has to put in their fair share of effort. 

Kids can also learn how to manage and support each other, especially when a collective task produces a corresponding reward in the form of high grades or material prizes like candies or toys. 

4. Encourage independence

There’s no questioning the importance of scaffolding a child’s learning by providing them with appropriate challenges. As they progress and the challenges become even more complicated, children should be given enough space to put whatever skills they learned from the previous activities to accomplish new ones. 

It’s never always good to micromanage learners and get them to produce the results you expect. Another way they can develop persistence is to give them tasks that engage independent thinking. There’s fear at first, but children who have already gone so far will eventually feel more confident in completing a task using prior knowledge.

Endnote

It’s not enough that teachers help students learn how to count and spell basic words. They should also be given challenges that equip them with a sense of accomplishment and strength as they continue to progress.