ENGAGE AND PERSIST

Learning to embrace problems of relevance within the art world and/or of personal importance, to develop focus and other mental states conducive to working at and preserving art tasks. It is important to understand that people engage differently.

A project that is low stakes, temporary, and has no right answer may help someone with low confidence or who's confused to begin to engage. Engaging is what it takes to learn strategies to persist. Much of what develops this habit are the qualities of the assignments we design. When we look at students' work and working, we'll see evidence about what learners are demonstrating in regard to their skills and attitudes at engaging and persisting. What is their disposition to engage and persist at this particular point in time? If a problem is too unambiguous, if it's too explicit, then it doesn't call for the kind of engagement and persistence that students need to develop. If everything is too simple, with too few choices and decisions, or with all those made by the teacher, then the assignment is too structured to leave room for the student to find his or her own way, to find what is interesting and compelling. So you have to find what David Perkins calls the "optimal ambiguity" in your assignments. They have to be structured enough to guide, and open enough to discover our unique paths. ​(From http://www.everyarteverychild.org/​)