What do we mean when we talk about perseverance in math classrooms?
There are many conversations circulating about perseverance in the math education community: in the Common Core standards, at conferences, in email invitations for PDs, and in teacher meetings. Certainly, we all desire for our students to see mathematics as worthwhile and worth their time and effort to work through difficult and challenging problems. In our research with secondary math teachers, we saw teachers explicitly setting the goal of having their students persevere. This prompted us, and made us curious to think about perseverance more clearly and more critically. We started asking questions such as what exactly do we mean when we say perseverance? When can conversations around perseverance be harmful for some students? And what kind of resource, or framework, can we produce that will support teachers and teacher educators in thinking about perseverance in rich and productive ways?
We are conscious of the fact that terms like productive struggle, grit, and growth mind-set are typically used to frame what is lacking in Black and Brown communities. We caution against reinstating this framing here as well in which students of color are yet again depicted as deficient and low-performing. Instead, we believe that as teachers, we can create the conditions for more perseverance to occur in our classrooms as a result of facilitating their discovery of appropriate strategies at a more conscious and explicit level.
In this post, we offer the following sacrificial graphic to show how we came to understand the teacher’s role and agency in helping students work hard at making sense, not just working hard. While we often conflate persistence and perseverance, we came to understand that perseverance entails making sense of problems. In our experience, when students are confronted with a difficult mathematical challenge, those that are successful are able to rely on familiar strategies that help them (even if only temporarily) make sense of the problem at hand. As they chip away at understanding parts of the challenge, they are then motivated to continue working through or persist in solving the problem. This then becomes a fruitful cycle of making sense of mathematics through heuristics motivating one to persist. For this reason, we believe we should pay more attention to ways in which we help make explicit for students the kinds of strategies at their disposal so that they are more likely to handle challenging problems in the future and persevere through them. We offer the cycle below, as our current thinking around how these 3 dimensions of perseverance (persistence, heuristics, and sense-making) work together.
We are interested in math teachers’ experiences with perseverance in their classroom. Let us know what thoughts and reflections you have about our proposed definition of perseverance as consisting of the connections between persistence, problem-solving strategies, and sense-making.