Moral Focus Spotlight

The Moral Focus virtue for February is courage and the 3-5 wing focuses on resilience. Resilience is defined as utilizing personal strength to face difficult situations, trusting in the ability to overcome them. NHA provides two descriptors: viewing problems as opportunities to learn and grow and choosing to be positive in spite of challenges or disappointment. I found an article titled, 28 Ways to Build Persistent and Confident Students that provides a list of strategies that teachers can use to help students develop into resilience learners. The ones that resonated with me were:

1.    Start a unit of study by activating prior knowledge. Students who can connect new learning with previous knowledge will be far more likely to persist in facing learning challenges than those students for whom each concept in the material is unfamiliar.

2.    Offer plenty of rubrics, models, samples, and demonstrations so that students know when they are on the right track.

3.    Have students set reasonable goals and work to achieve them. When students work to achieve a personal goal, they have a vested interest in working.

4.    When you see students struggling with an assignment, use one of the most powerful questions in your teacher’s toolbox: ask, “How can I help you?”

5.    Teach your students that their work does not always have to be perfect to be acceptable. Sometimes “good enough” is really good enough.

6.    Offer a variety of different activities to review material. At the end of each class, when you provide a quick review of the day’s lesson, use a variety of different activities that appeal to the various learning styles among your students.

7.    Work with your students to focus on their strengths. Once they know what they are doing right, what individual study techniques work well for them, then students will be able to use those techniques and strengths to work quickly and efficiently.

Please click on http://teaching.monster.com/benefits/articles/10348-28-ways-to-build-persistent-confident-students to read the other 21 strategies that might fit your teaching style. Remember it’s important to model our Moral Focus virtues and provide students with opportunities to explore them.