persistence

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Actions Speak

This is Kevin. Kevin is our Groundsman. Kevin arrives at school very early each morning and works through until the afternoon. He is multi skilled. He is an artist. You can see his creativity around the school in rock sculptures, garden designs and plantings. He is a problem solver, constantly working out strategies to fix or make things for our school. He is a mathematician measuring, calculating, weighing, budgeting, working to time limits and meeting deadlines. He is a tradesman involved in plumbing, painting, building and constructing.

 

The school looks so good and is so well maintained because of his work and creativity. Kevin takes pride in all that he does. And it shows. Kevin is a vital member of our school community.

Our school, our students, our school community. We are all vital members of our school community. Our school exists for our students. Our teachers and SSOs do not talk about “My Class” or “My Students” but rather “Our School” and “Our Students”. We are all responsible for the success of our students and our school, and this includes “Our Parents and Caregivers”.

Like teachers and SSOs, parents and caregivers are essential members of our school community and like staff, your words, actions and behaviours model expectations to our students. When parents and caregivers solve problems calmly through dialogue and conversation with each other or with staff they show that they too follow our School Values of Good Manners and Friendliness. Conversely, if they swear at each other from their cars outside the school, it undermines our values.

When parents and caregivers allow children to learn by their mistakes and the consequences of their actions they show that they too follow our School Values of Resilience and Persistence. Conversely, if they rescue their children they undermine and stop their learning.

When parents and caregivers get their children to school on time they demonstrate that they value learning and also model organization and time management skills. What does constantly being late teach children?

Kevin works so hard to have our school look the best it can be. Hopefully we are all proud of our school. I am not proud of the litter around the yard and I always try to model picking up litter despite never dropping it. How powerful it would be for all members of our school community to pick up papers as they walk through the school? It would show their pride in our school. It would model to the students that they should keep the yard clean and show care for our school by keeping it clean. It would encourage students to do the same. It would show that we all appreciate the great work being done by Kevin and it would show that we all have pride in Our School.

Our actions speak louder than words. Kevin doesn’t talk about painting a wall. He just gets about doing it and doing it well. Thanks Kevin for being such a good role model for Our School, Our Students and Our School Community.

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Persistence and Resilience

Skateboard I was recently at a BBQ and tried out a friend’s new skateboard. Being an aging “kid” and keen surfer I “surfed” this skateboard around the garden with modest flair, weaving through garden furniture and verandah poles. A young boy was upset because he could not turn the skateboard that he was on. He asked me to show him how to turn. He showed me what he was doing. He was standing incorrectly with both feet together. I showed him and put him in the correct position and suggested that he practise. One try, did not work for him so he gave up immediately, sat down and cried. I tried to encourage him back but he seemed to be more intent on seeking sympathy than mastering skateboarding. His father said that he always “spits the dummy” when he cannot do something immediately.

Our school virtues include PERSISTENCE and RESILIENCE and are crucial habits for children to develop to become successful learners and successful adults. They are defined as:
• The habit of trying again and again without complaint or the need for a reward.
• The habit of accepting failure as the stepping stone to success and bouncing back.
• The habit of seeing problems and difficulties as things you can do something about to make better.

Think of anything that you have learned or mastered. Riding a bike, learning to walk, talk, write, surf, skateboard, fix a car, cook, land a BMX jump… all are learnt through having a go, making mistakes, falling over and getting back up and having another go.

Billie Jean King, a tennis legend, described every lost point as a learning opportunity rather than a loss. All successful learners bounce back and keep trying.

What can we do as parents and educators to help our children learn persistence and resilience? We can redescribe problems as challenges. Give encouragement to try again rather than offer sympathy when a child “trips up” and falls. Help them to see that we learn more from our mistakes than our successes and that failure is a stepping stone to success.

Try asking your child questions such as:

What did you do today that really challenged you?

What mistakes did you make and what did you learn from them?

What did you do that really made you work hard to achieve?

Everyone who is successful has had to practise for thousands of hours. One doesn’t practice what one has already mastered. We practice what we can’t do over and over until we can. Mastery is only achieved through taking one step at a time, picking oneself up after every fall, learning from mistakes and having another go. Developing persistence and resilience will lead to success.

Let’s get our kids back on life’s skateboard every time they fall to help them become persistent and resilient learners.

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Cocooning Children

Once a boy  found a caterpillar. He carefully picked it up and took it home to show his mother. He asked his mother if he could keep it, and she said he could if he would take good care of it. The little boy got a large jar from his mother and put plants to eat, and a stick to climb on, in the jar. Every day he watched the caterpillar and brought it new plants to eat.

 One day the caterpillar climbed up the stick and started acting strangely. The boy’s mother explained that the caterpillar was creating a cocoon and was going to go through a metamorphosis and become a butterfly.

The boy watched every day, waiting for the butterfly to emerge. One day it happened, a small hole appeared in the cocoon and the butterfly started to struggle to come out.

At first the boy was excited, but soon he became concerned. The butterfly was struggling so hard to get out! It looked like it couldn’t break free! It looked desperate! It looked like it was making no progress!

The boy was so concerned he decided to help. He got a pair of scissors, and snipped the cocoon to make the hole bigger and the butterfly quickly emerged!

As the butterfly came out the boy was surprised. It had a swollen body and small, shrivelled wings. He continued to watch the butterfly expecting that, at any moment, the wings would dry out, enlarge and expand to support the swollen body. He thought that in time the body would shrink and the butterfly’s wings would expand.

But neither happened!

The butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shrivelled wings.

It never was able to fly…

The boy tried to figure out what had gone wrong and learned that the butterfly was SUPPOSED to struggle. In fact, the butterfly’s struggle to push its way through the tiny opening of the cocoon pushes the fluid out of its body and into its wings. Without the struggle, the butterfly would never, ever fly. The boy’s good intentions hurt the butterfly.

Struggling is an important part of any growth experience. Muscles don’t grow without be stretched. Our school values include resilience and persistence. TfEL (Teaching for Effective Learning) 2.4 is about Challenge and (appropriate) support. How difficult this becomes when (some/many) parents continually “rescue” their children. As the boy in the story, the parents might be well meaning but the result is children who cannot “fly”.

As part of the school’s Virtues program, we work with parents to enable children to develop resilience and persistence through struggling and embracing challenge. The following message to parents that I observed at Tapping Primary School WA (A Play Is The Way Lighthouse School) will soon be on posters around our school:

No False Rescues

Falsely rescuing children from emotional discomfort and difficulty weakens their resiliency and lessens their ability to persevere.

 We rescue when a someone is struggling to breathe, not when one is struggling to swim in a swimming lesson.Cocooning children will never allow them to fly.