Some of
you may have listened to the NPR report on Grit earlier this week (1st article
summary below).
This week
I had a number of discussions with Trinity parents who listened
to this report and wondered how much grit can and should
be taught in schools. (I am a believer in teaching
kids to have a growth mindset with grit/resilience/perseverance being one
aspect of a growth mindset—meaning one must work at something to
get better at it.)
In the
summary, take note of Alfie Kohn's (whose niche in the
education market is to be a gadfly who poses provocative,
extreme ideas that ultimately are more ideal than practical)
rejection of emphasizing grit in schools. It's always good to read
the con or any idea.
I read
the second article last fall, but it obviously is a complement to the NPR
reports in that it's an interview with the guru of grit in education, Angela
Duckworth.
At the bottom
of this email is a link to a grit test. Take it to see how gritty you are on a
scale of 1-5. (Email me yours and I'll email you mine!)
Enjoy the
weekend!
Joe
Can
Focus On ‘Grit’ Work In School Cultures That Reward Grades?
It’s become the
new buzz phrase in education: “Got grit?”
Around the nation,
schools are beginning to see grit as key to students’ success — and just as
important to teach as reading and math.
Experts define
grit as persistence, determination and resilience; it’s that je ne sais
quoi that drives one kid to practice trumpet or study Spanish for
hours — or years — on end, while another quits after the first setback.
“This quality
of being able to sustain your passions, and also work really hard at them, over
really disappointingly long periods of time, that’s grit,” says Angela
Duckworth, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who coined
the term “grit” — and won a MacArthur “genius grant” for it.
Duckworth says
her research hows grit is actually a better predictor of success than
IQ or other measures when it comes to achievements as varied as graduating from
West Point or winning the National Spelling Bee.
But can grit
be taught?
“I hope so,”
says Duckworth, “but I don’t think we have enough evidence to know with
certainty that we can do so.” Part of the problem is figuring out how to assess
grit.
You can create
a classroom culture in which struggle and risk-taking is valued more than just
getting the right answer.
One way to make
kids more tenacious, the thinking goes, is to show them how grit has been important
to the success of others, and how mistakes and failures are normal parts of
learning — not reasons to quit.
Students also
get to practice being gritty themselves. When a kid struggles to answer a
question, for example, teachers resist the urge to swoop in and offer hints.
Instead, they let students squirm a little through an awkward silence. The idea
is to get kids comfortable with struggle so they see it as
just a normal part of learning.
If kids at
school kids experience nothing but success, then we have failed them, because
they haven’t learned how to respond to frustration and failure.
The message is
that life isn’t always easy. No matter how talented students are, they will hit
the wall eventually, so they can learn to pick themselves up, hit the wall
again and pick themselves up again, and ultimately persevere and succeed.
While this is
the right approach in schools, it can be tough for parents to understand.
Parents love the notion of grit in the abstract; they all want their kids to
have it. However, no parent wants their kid to cry.
In order to get
parents and kids on board with the idea of struggle, educators say, they first
need to be convinced that their struggle is likely to pay off. Or, as Stanford
University professor Carol Dweck puts it, they need to have a “growth mindset”
— the belief that success comes from effort — and not a “fixed mindset” — the
notion that people succeed because they are born with a “gift” of intelligence
or talent.
It’s really
hard to have high tolerance if you believe that your abilities or intelligence
are fixed. Because if you believe ‘I can’t change my own abilities,’ then
trying hard doesn’t make any sense. It’s like pounding your head against the
wall.
Indeed,
educators say they see it all the time: Kids with fixed mindsets who think they
just don’t have the “gift” don’t bother applying themselves. Conversely, kids
with fixed mindsets who were always told they were “gifted” and skated through
school tend to crumble when they hit their first challenge; rather than risk
looking like a loser, they just quit.
The focus is
always more on putting out effort than on getting the right answers. Teachers
have been trained to change the way they see students, and how they speak to
them/ Kids no longer hear “You’re so smart!” or “Brilliant!” Rather, teachers
praise students for their focus and determination. “You must have worked really
hard!” or “To have performed this well, you must have put out a lot of effort.”
The adjustment
isn’t always easy for teachers trained to focus on hitting high scores on
standardized tests. It’s really hard in certain subject areas to say that your
process is more important than your product, but that is the underlying
principle — to say that it’s all the effort that you put in that’s most
important.
“Grit as
a goal seems to be multiply flawed and very disturbing,” says education writer
Alfie Kohn. For starters, he says, “the benefits of failure are vastly
overstated, and the assumption that kids will pick themselves up and try even
harder next time, darn it — that’s wishful thinking.”
Kohn sees the
focus on grit as just the latest fad in education that will soon “burn itself
out,” like many have before. He doesn’t believe that kids today are any less
gritty than before. And he says the research showing that gritty people tend to
be more successful doesn’t really offer any new insight. As Kohn put it, “It’s
a pure circular assumption, like persistent people persist.”
Besides, Kohn
says, if there’s a problem with how kids are learning, the onus should be on
schools to get better at how they teach — not on kids to get better at enduring
more of the same.
“Grit’s taken
off as a fad in education, because that’s a convenient distraction that doesn’t
address the pedagogical and curricular problems in the schools,” he says. “But
the more we focus on [grit] … the less likely it is that we make the kind of
changes that can help our children go to better schools.”
Duckworth
agrees that schools, teachers and parents all share in the responsibility to
help inspire kids so they’re intrinsically motivated. “I don’t think people can
become truly gritty and great at things they don’t love,” Duckworth says. “So
when we try to develop grit in kids, we also need to find and help them
cultivate their passions. That’s as much a part of the equation here as the
hard work and the persistence.”
It’s a little
bit of a chicken-and-egg kind of question. Passion may drive kids to be gritty,
but being gritty and able to tolerate failure also enables kids to develop and
pursue a passion.
The
Significance of Grit: A Conversation with Angela Duckworth
One of the
first studies we did was at West Point Military Academic, which graduates about
25% of the officers in the U.S. Army. Admission to West Point depends heavily
on the Whole Candidate Score, which includes SAT scores, class rank,
demonstrated leadership ability, and physical aptitude. Even with such a
rigorous admissions process, about 1 in 20 cadets drops out during the summer
of training before their first academic year.
We were
interested in how well grit would predict who would stay. So we had cadets take
a very short grit questionnaire in the first two or three days of the summer,
along with all the other psychological tests that West Point give them.
Of all the
variables measured, grit was the best predictor of which cadets would stick
around through that first difficult summer. In fact, it was a much better
predictor that the Whole Candidate Score, which West Point at that time thought
was their best predictor of success. The Whole Candidate Score actually has no
predictive relationship with whether you would drop out that summer.
We’ve seen
echoes of our West Point findings in studies of many other groups, such as
National Spelling Bee contestants and first-year teachers in tough schools.
Grit predicts success over and beyond talent. When you consider individuals of
equal talent, the grittier ones do better.
The data shows
that grit and talent either aren’t related at all or are actually inversely related.
This was surprising to us because rationally speaking, if you’re good at
things, one would think that you would invest more time in them. You’re
basically getting more return on your investment per hour than someone who’s
struggling.
The inverse relationship
between talent and grit that we’ve found in some of our studies doesn’t mean
that all talented people are un-gritty. The most successful people in life are
both talented and gritty in whatever they’ve chosen to do. But on average there
are a lot of fragile gifted and talented kids who don’t know how to fail. They
don’t know how to struggle, and they don’t have a lot of practice with it.
Recently I was
reading The Big Test, which is the story of how the SAT came to be so dominant
in college admissions and how standardized testing became so prominent. The
author walks you through what happened in 20th century America: there was
a very well-intentioned shift toward a meritocracy and a desire to amide people
to the most elite schools on the basis of what they could do, not on the basis
of family lineage, last name, or color of skin. Around the same time, these
reliable, easy-to-administer standardized tests became available. So there was
a pendulum swing toward an emphasis on cognitive aptitude, IQ, and so forth.
What
we’re seeing now is a swing back toward a recognition that these standardized
tests, although they serve an important function, are limited in their ability
to pick up things like grit and self-control, gratitude, honesty, generosity,
empathy for the suffering of others, social intelligence, tact, charisma.
We are seeing a
pendulum swing away from the single-minded focus on standardized testing and
toward a broader view of the while child.
No comments:
Post a Comment