COJ Catholic Progressive School

Teaching persistence in the classroom is an important part of setting up learners to succeed. Students who have mastered persistence are able to work through challenges, deal constructively with failures and adversity, and achieve the goals they have set for themselves. It’s a lot like running a marathon. The runners who make it to the finish line are the ones who persist in showing up for practices and trainings, learn to anticipate slumps and pace themselves, engage in positive self-talk during tough times, take steps to effectively prevent and treat injuries, and adjust expectations to fit reality – even if “finishing” means having to crawl the last mile. Like a runner who has not trained to run longer distances, learners can’t persist in their learning if they haven’t developed the stamina they need to keep going when things get tough. Teaching persistence depends on first developing student stamina as a way of conditioning learners to handle sustained effort. To help learn...

Do you teach perseverance in your classroom? It’s not something you’ll find listed in the Common Core standards…. the student will persevere through difficult tasks. However, as we all know, children aren’t likely to get far in school (or life) without it. I was thinking about that the other day as I prepared a presentation about arts integration. Perseverance is one of the important traits developed by arts experiences. Playing in a marching band, acting in a play, dancing with a company, sitting at a piano day after day to master a piece of music. It all develops perseverance. When you hear the life stories of famous scientists, inventors, artists, and visionaries, they always have one trait in common: amazing perseverance. Most of them failed repeatedly before they experienced success. However, an internal drive for success and a “never give up” attitude defined their life and their work. You’ve heard many of these before. Oprah Winfrey was fired from her first television ...

Singapore (CNN) -It's a world-class teacher's pet -- a straight-A student that's top of the class: Singapore is officially the country with the smartest high-school kids in the world. The country's academic success has helped it become a thriving economy, and the way it has built its education system could hold lessons for the rest of the world. "Singapore is a fascinating case," said Marc Tucker, the president of the U.S. National Center on Education and the Economy. "[It] was a major British port before the Second World War. When Britain got out and closed its base Singapore was in terrible shape. "Now today they are one of the best performing economies in the entire world. They did it largely with education and training." If Singapore's rags-to-riches transition was built on education, the secret of its education system is the quality of its teachers. "They source their teachers from among the best kids coming out of th...

Your task is to build a better world,’ God said. I answered, ‘How?… this world is such a large, vast place, and there’s nothing I can do.’ But God said, in all His wisdom, ‘just build a better you.’ – Author Unknown Every person I know seems to want a better world. Pretty much everybody you see on TV talk shows says they want a better world. All the politicians you hear and see are talking about how they have a plan to build a better world. All the plans seem to have one thing in common… Somebody else has to change or somebody else has to do better. It seems so daunting a task that few people actually attempt to make the world better. Pretty much everybody you see or hear talking about a better world forgets the easiest place to start… with themselves. It is just like the poem says, “build a better you.” Befriend people who aren’t like you. Don’t judge them, just try to understand them. Listen, really, really listen to someone who has a point of view very different than your ow...