Options for Sustaining Effort and Persistence

Educators can incorporate equity into curriculum design, materials and learning spaces to support learners in persisting through challenge in their learning process. Below are five “considerations” or strategies for the guideline of options for sustaining effort and persistence. If you click on each of these considerations, you will find examples of how these strategies can be implemented into practice.

Below are five “considerations” or strategies for the options for sustaining effort and persistence guideline. If you click on each of these considerations, you will find examples of how these strategies can be implemented into practice.

Clarify the meaning and purpose of goals

Help learners understand the goal and its significance. Sustained effort requires clarity and personal connection to the goal. Highlight how the goal is meaningful to learners' lives and communities while reinforcing its purpose throughout the learning process.

Explicitly state or restate the goal.
Present the goal using multiple formats.
Break long-term goals into short-term objectives.
Use prompts or scaffolds to imagine outcomes.
Co-create standards of excellence linked to learners’ cultural backgrounds, identities, and interests.

Optimize challenge and support

Set high expectations and provide flexible tools and resources to support success. The UDL framework values the potential of every learner and aims to balance challenge with the resources needed to thrive. Productive struggle, tailored to individual needs, promotes motivation and growth.

Assume competence and believe in every learner’s potential.
Provide options for varying levels of complexity or difficulty.
Offer tools and scaffolds aligned with the goal to foster autonomy.
Focus on effort, process, and progress over external evaluations.

Foster collaboration and collective learning

Create opportunities for learners to grow through shared knowledge and experiences. Emphasize the value of interdependence, highlighting the importance of collaboration in creating a thriving learning environment. Support each learner’s needs while building strong connections.

Develop community agreements for collaboration and collective learning.
Establish teams with clear roles and goals.
Use prompts to guide when and how to seek help.
Encourage sharing diverse perspectives.
Promote peer support, such as tutoring or group activities.
Build communities around shared or differing interests and identities.

Foster belonging and community

Design inclusive spaces where learners feel valued and connected. Prioritize fostering a sense of belonging, especially for historically marginalized learners. Recognize that the meaning of community varies and offer multiple ways to nurture relationships and care.

Encourage learners to share ideas on fostering belonging.
Reflect on how bias may affect inclusion.
Welcome diverse identities and interests (guideline 7).
Provide opportunities to develop meaningful relationships.

Offer action-oriented feedback

Guide learners with feedback that emphasizes effort, growth, and actionable steps. Constructive and timely feedback sustains engagement and supports motivation by focusing on progress rather than innate ability.

Highlight perseverance, efficacy, and strategy use.
Focus on improvement and goal achievement over comparison.
Provide frequent, specific, and substantive feedback.
Model reflective practices and identify patterns to support growth.
Encourage risk-taking and explore alternative perspectives.

Action-Oriented Learning and Feedback

Action-oriented feedback encourages self-awareness and offers specific strategies to overcome challenges. This type of feedback is focused on goal achievement rather than comparing performance. The feedback is frequent specific and timely, and promotes reflection on strengths and challenges to develop future strategies. Ideally, it should also encourage risk taking and offer alternative perspectives to foster growth.

Learn More

John Legend: Success Through Effort (Runtime: 2:01 min).

In conventional learning environments, students generally move forward at a fixed or fairly fixed pace, doing the best they can before moving on. For many learners, this means moving forward before sufficient mastery has been achieved, often leading to a lower percentage grade. In this situation, a learner’s grade is not an indication of the learner’s ability. Instead, it is an indication of the effects of barriers such as lack of time and opportunity to practice and correct mistakes. With action-oriented learning and feedback, students are able to check their progress, address gaps, and revisit and review materials (as a grad student does) in order to achieve mastery before moving on.

Action-oriented learning is based on the idea that almost any student can learn almost anything given an infinite amount of time. As mentioned in Module 1, many institutional processes work against ideal conditions for learning, for example, by having a fixed end of term. However, within this constraint, we can offer the building blocks of action-oriented learning and feedback so that students can engage at their own pace, build new learning on previously mastered concepts and skills, and value mistakes when they’re made. In action-oriented learning, making mistakes is key to the learning process.

Reflect

How can you make it safer for learners to fail and share that experience with one another? What systemic framing of failure within educational systems needs to be discussed in the learning environment in order for learners to become comfortable with the discomfort of failure?

Educator Strategies for Minimizing Threats6:30 min

In this video, college professors Jeff Brown, Sarika Narinesingh, and Warren Ford share how they minimize threats that may prevent learners from taking risks and how they counter forces that lead to inequitable distribution of power and privilege.

Transcript of Educator Strategies for Minimizing Threats

Educator Strategies for Minimizing Threats

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>> So in looking at UDL and multiple means of engagement, I was asked the question, how do you minimize threats which may prevent learners from taking risk in their learning? And if I have to respond to that, I would say I always try to create open dialogue. Students have different perspectives and thought processes. And my goal is to create a space for natural discussion and conversation, and I kind of do this by telling students they have the expertise. By using relevant material to their industry, I think that, you know, this gives students the opportunity to learn from each other and create space for their own expression and how they want to express themselves. Now the next question, how do you counter forces that lead to inequitable distribution of power and privilege? In my opinion, we have essentially classrooms of, I would say, adult learners. I try to engage with all of them and so if I pose a question to the class and it's mostly the same people that answer, I will oftentimes call on others to respond, give them an opportunity to, you know, voice their opinion. I want to show that I'm interested in what they have to say as well. So while some might see this as like calling students out, I like to look at it as calling them in to be part of the conversation and let them know that they have equal opportunity to voice their opinion, engage, and have their say.

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>> At the beginning of every term, I'm excited to welcome new students into the college communication classroom because I know they walk in with different experiences, different levels of expertise, and different learning goals. The beginning of the term is also when I get to introduce myself to them. I say yes, on paper I am your teacher but in practice it might feel more like I'm your communication coach. I'm here to cheer you on. I'm here to check your form, and I'm here to give you feedback. I'll share with you what's worked for me when it comes to writing and communicating in different situations. But I also invite you to share what's worked for you in the past because just as much as you can learn from me, we can learn from you, and we will definitely learn from the process. And let me tell you, writing is a really mysterious process. And just like how we all learn differently, we all come to writing differently. So try on new techniques and strategies and, you know, see what fits you. Reflect on what's meeting your needs but also what's not working. What's not serving your communication goals? And if you get stuck in your writing or you're just not sure how to proceed, that's okay. I'm here to coach you through the process.

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>> When it comes to minimizing threats that may prevent learners from taking risks in their learning, it's about community. It's community that lets students take risks. This means building rapport and relationship with students. This is not an easy thing to do and it's highly contextual. I strive to create space and spaces for the students to have their own voice, to feel involved in the course. Interaction is key, whether in person or online. This could mean utilizing interactive features of the LMS like the student-led discussion boards, collaborative writing exercises using the Wiki feature, breakout group sessions. It means a lot of small group activities, discussions that welcome a diversity of perspectives. But again it's about the space belonging to the students. The key is that this space has to be defined horizontally, student-to-student, rather than vertically, teacher-to-student which of course brings us to the issue of distributions of power and privilege in learning spaces and countering forces that can lead to inequities, both among students as peers and in terms of the teacher-student dynamic. One strategy I focus on concerns how I present myself in my role. This involves acknowledging my own privilege not only as a teacher but as a white male. And by acknowledging it, I'm problematizing it explicitly. I also try to include assessment that promotes learner engagement. There can be a symbiotic relationship between student motivation and an assignment that lets students express themselves, but students can’t express themselves won't feel safe revealing their individuality if they don't feel secure in the learning environment. This type of assignment, scaffolded and with plenty of formative feedback, encourages students to tap into and draw upon their own interests while meeting the learning outcomes of the course. Students can also propose the format they will use, an assignment that students are motivated to work on at the same time enhances their engagement and willingness to try something new in their learning. It also puts students in the driver seat, so to speak, and takes the teacher out of it.

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