Why does everyone want to build persistence and resilience in their students?

The graduate students I work with are obsessed with persistence and resilience. We all should be, but we need to think about them differently.

The other night, I logged onto a Zoom call with a group of second year teachers and graduate students to talk about the research they’re doing in their classrooms. Formally, I’m what’s called their “mentor,” which means that I host virtual sessions during which we discuss their learning (from readings and lectures within their graduate program) and the way that it shapes (or doesn’t, or vice versa) their work in their respective classrooms. There’s also a fair amount of venting about life as a young teacher. Their graduate program at Penn is the one I graduated from in 2016. It was impactful for my own development as a teacher, and I’ve worked for Penn, in this capacity, since I finished my degree.

This week, we talked a lot about resilience and persistence. Research on both is everywhere in the education world these days; it often doesn’t distinguish between them very well, and many of us in society treat the words as parallel-enough, almost interchangeable. Most older people seem most often to use either word to explain how no one is as resilient or persistent as they were when they were young, when really I’d say that’s not a comparison that can be made, given how many variables in teenage life that have shifted in the last decade or two. This post is not about whether students are or are not resilient or persistent. Instead, it’s inspired by the fact that so many of these graduate students are interested in the ways that they can develop resilience or persistence, especially around problem-solving, in their classrooms. Teachers care about both ideas because they matter. I assert that they matter broadly, too, because working to understand how we can build our own persistence and resilience, harness them to do good, and acknowledge their drawbacks, is an empowering exercise for people at any stage of life. 

I’m looking to build persistence in myself right now. The job of a teacher means something quite different this year compared to years past: learning loss has impacted teachers this year directly, where last year it was more of a nebulous idea, something we’d “face next year.” Students are struggling en masse to catch up to where they need to be, and though attention on early childhood learning loss is critical, attending also to the impact of learning loss on adolescent experience is equally vital. Many students feel like there’s too much to catch up on, and too little time to do it before it’s time to to apply to college. I would predict a spike in dropout rates in the coming years as this backlog builds up for Covid teenagers. Teachers are scrambling to prevent this from happening, both spending far more time out of class working with students to build fundamental skills and expending their emotional energy to meet the emotional needs of a much broader set of students than usual who need emotional support. I am one of these teachers. I would like to leave this problem, please, and return to it when I’m ready, but that’s not an option when you’re a grownup with a job. 

It’s not that I haven’t felt the need for persistence -- or my own lack of it -- before. I’ve always struggled with persistence. The youngest of four children, I learned pretty early on that if four people are all trying to get the same thing, and someone else has the jump on you, it’s usually easier to give up than to try; since then, I’ve struggled to banish that tantalizing fact from my mind to open up new opportunities. On my call, I was surrounded by a Zoom-cloud of almost-all math teachers, a proportion I often look to avoid because it invariably pulls me back to multiple years of not-very-persistent attitudes toward math (I like to think that this makes me a good mentor, because I can empathize with their students better than I can with them).

One teacher asked the group: what really is the difference between resilience and persistence? He was measuring interventions to help students develop persistence in problem-solving, which is an aim that many teachers across disciplines have, though it can often use different language or take on different forms, like “how can I make sure that students revise based on their own thoughts?” or “how do I help students to treat challenge as normal, not problematic?”

Another teacher replied to his question: “resilience is coming back, where persistence is moving forward.” It stuck with me. She (a math teacher!) was so much more aware of the precise definitions of these terms than I (an English teacher!) was. But she knew this difference to her core, and she was right. 

Many peers of mine -- people who call themselves “writers” in any sense -- often talk about the moment that they learned how to revise. It was graduate school (the second round of graduate school, to be precise) for me -- which I entered having finally pieced together that my own lack of perfectionism had, in fact, prevented me from turning my ideas into the excellent-adjacent work they could I actually produce. Other writers say, maybe, college; a senior thesis. But people who don’t become writers, people who struggle and work their tails off for an A: they learn this much earlier. That’s because they have to do this thing where they try again until they can pass. That habit is called persistence. Or resilience. Depending on the approach that you take. What the words have in common is the sense of iteration, the idea that in life, the first try won’t always be good enough. Persistence and resilience, together, are two critical and transferable literacies that students have to learn in school, but teaching them effectively can be difficult, especially if and when they aren’t developing naturally. 

I’ve had much more success with resilience than I have with persistence. For example, a rejection from graduate school will rock me (I’ve taken too many things too personally to even try counting), but two years later I’ll come back swinging, get that scholarship money, and make sure no one can say that I gave up. When I needed to hang the (very simple to hang but somehow horribly deceptive) shades I ordered for the big windows in my apartment, I tried to hang them for about ten minutes. Then, I put the drill down, dusted the paint flakes off of me, said “I hate this” several times, and then walked away. I tried again the next day. I love to walk away and circle back. 

My sister, by contrast, is persistent, annoyingly and excruciatingly and gloriously persistent. She will not stop until those blinds are hung. She will not stop looking for the ring that someone dropped on the ground. She will jam a square peg into a round hole if it is the last thing she does. But she’s not as resilient as I am. Once she’s decided something isn’t worth her time, it’s pretty much dead to her. 

They’re different skills, different gifts, and they’re deeply connected, because they have to do with how we approach problems. Everyone certainly needs one of these to get through life. But do we really need both persistence and resilience to thrive? Are they equally valuable? How does the development of persistence over resilience or resilience over persistence shape a person’s life? Do we learn these things in the classroom, really ever, or are they facts of life, already determined by the time that we arrive in a classroom?

Of course, as a teacher of these graduate student-teachers, it’s my job to tell them that a teacher can make them happen. But lately I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s not that simple, that some of this might be baked into our being. In short, I don’t think that teachers, in trying to build these mindsets, are focusing their energy in the wrong place. I also think, though, that it won’t necessarily hurt a student to not be persistent or not be resilient, as long as, if they don’t have one, they do have the other. Valuing both equally, rather than requiring one, could be a secret to engaging students in class who approach life differently; similarly, building teams of thinkers constituted of some persistent types and some resilient types would likely benefit all kinds of workplaces, teams, and volunteer organizations. 

Really, resilience and persistence are problem-solving habits. They work in concert, and only a really amazing person has them both in equal measure. I actually like that I’m more resilient than persistent, because I don’t find comfort in chaos, and prioritizing coming back to problems helps me to balance my approach, reflect, and build strategy before I try something again. Persistence is something that I develop and implement when I have to, but it doesn’t feel natural to me. I do, however, like to be around more persistent people, because they can inspire me to recognize that I have the capacities now to accomplish a task that I’m more timid about. They’re bold. They also annoy me sometimes, because I want to shake them and tell them that there’s a much better way to solve the problem, if only they’ll give me the time to figure out what that way is. We need balance. There’s no need to expect every student, or every peer, to demonstrate resilience and persistence in equal measure: it’s not only a losing battle, but it also devalues the power of community over individualism in solving problems.

I’d propose a shift, not only in education but also more broadly -- on sports teams, in workplaces, in families, and even in businesses -- away from conflating resilience and persistence and toward valuing them as complimentary entities crucial to the problem solving process. If we can reframe conversations about parenting, community-building, and success to center resilience and/or persistence, but reframe them as community competencies instead of individual competencies, then we can empower students to see themselves and ourselves to see ourselves less as flawed problem-solvers and more as valuable to a problem-solving team.