How attracted are you to challenge? How many times do you take the more difficult path? If we want our children to appreciate and value the effort it takes to achieve great things, we need to show our children the benefits of being challenged. We need to be role-models for challenge.
We sometimes tell our children that they should learn from their mistakes, but have you shared with your child a mistake you made and what you learned from that mistake? Would you feel comfortable revealing that you don’t know everything?
These are some of the questions put forward by James Nottingham from “Challenging Learning”. His main focus is getting people comfortable with the feeling of being challenged.
He says that when students value feeling challenged and find being challenged interesting, they are more likely to persevere when things get tough. In fact, he also says when a task is easy and requires little effort students are less likely to remember the concept or skill they are working on.
We need to praise the strugglers who don’t easily give up. We need to push all students out of their comfort zones so they are no longer just cruising through the day.
I encourage you to look at James Nottingham’s website and watch some of his videos at:https://www.challenginglearning.com/learning-pit/
Christopher Biefeld
Assistant Principal