Fostering Student Grit

A major emphasis for learning in Mounds View schools is the development of grit proficient students, or what Tough (2012) would define as students with a passionate commitment to a single mission, and an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission. In her Ted Talk entitled The Key to Success? Grit, Angela Duckworth asks "What if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn fast and easily?" There is ample evidence to support Duckworth's query. Despite knowing colleges are increasingly interested in measuring applicants' performance character, and that Fortune 500 companies like Google view grit as the it-factor,  neither we, nor science, know much about fostering academic grit in students. With luck (and by luck I mean sustained effort, resilience and grit), we'll one day be able to measure grit as well as we measure IQ. Until then, what follows are seven things teachers should consider when helping their students become determined and irrepressible learners.

1. Learn students' stories.
Disadvantaged students rarely view their unwillingness to succumb to the obstacles in their life as a potential school strength. They're often too busy thinking intelligence is fixed. To develop resilient learners, we have to illuminate the ways in which our students are already grit proficient. The kids that challenge us most are puzzles, not problems. They often arrive to school immersed in struggles far greater than anything teachers have experienced. When educators work to intentionally discover what gives students their edge, they can then validate their personal experiences of hardship and grit, with the goal of building an important bridge to academic perseverance.  Student grit further develops as a result of authentic teacher-student relationships. We have to learn about our students' lives in order to recognize and build upon examples of their performance character.

2. Share your story.
Everyone struggles. If you wish to develop a culture of learning whereby students view challenge and mistakes as a natural byproduct of life and learning, you need to openly share your greatest failures. The second step of fostering grit is sharing personal stories with students that model goal-setting, failure, adaptation, will-power, persistence, and optimism. I shocked my students when I told them I pursued teaching only after getting fired from a previous job.  I openly shared with them that I'd never felt more defeated or embarrassed as I did in the hours that followed my termination, but that it was in those moments where I took inventory of the things in my life for which I felt most passionate. I had loved every second of the time I'd spent coaching high school track and field and quickly decided  I would go back to school to earn a license to teach en route to a Masters in Teaching Special Education. Student response to my story was palpable. Many later reciprocated with their own personal stories of hardship and struggle, solidifying a connection and authentic relationship that allowed me to further foster a culture of grit.

3. Teach the advantage of disadvantage
Students don't inherently know the character traits developed through struggle can become an enormous advantage.  Although not all difficulties have a silver lining, Gladwell (2013) shows there is potential benefit to living in unfavorable circumstances. What appears on the surface to be a potentially crippling obstacle might actually be a catalyst for developing strengths that can carry an individual far in life. Teachers need to be of the mindset that when a student is grinding, they'll manage or overcome their struggle better if asked to think more critically about and discuss their experience (Gladwell, 2013). If we can help our learners articulate how they compensated or strategized during or after a personal or academic struggle, we can help them to claim resilience and grit as a defining characteristic of who they are. For more from Gladwell, view the brief video below:



4. Care differently - Learn to be comfortable when students are uncomfortable.
"Teachers don't go to work to do a bad job, but some go to work and do the wrong job" (Hattie, 2014). Most teachers care so much for the students they teach, they become susceptible to the unintentional lowering of expectations. We care differently when we push students, even those with a history of struggle, to persist when grappling with increasingly difficult content. Hattie (2014) says that when teachers ask challenging questions of their students, 40-50% of the time teachers provide the answers. If we are to place learners in situations where they have to operate on the edge of their ability, we must learn to become comfortable when they are uncomfortable. For most students, avoiding failure is a strong motive, much stronger than any motive to succeed (Hattie, 2014).  It is important that we take the time to validate for students that thinking and learning is hard. Then, after establishing requisite surface knowledge (students have to know stuff before they can relate stuff), we need to let them know we're going to make their brain hurt, while also providing clarity around what we intend for them to learn as well as what success will look like. The more students can compare their understanding to well articulated success criteria, the more likely they are to strive for progress. Positive progress motivates students to persist even when the progress is small; when students have no sense for the end goal of learning, they're much more likely to experience prolonged feelings of being stuck, which has three times the negative effect on motivation (Hattie (2014).

For more on caring differently please view the below video titled "What Students Really Need to Hear":

"

5. Manage error. Teach students how to fail (as opposed to how not to fail).
Deeper levels of learning occur if/when teachers improve error management. It is much harder to foster student grit when we don't first create a culture of learning that embraces mistakes, error and failure.  Hattie (2014) writes that the gap between what students know and what we intend for them to learn has to be perceived by them as bridgeable, and that students have to engage in practice right near the edge of their ability so as to stretch their thinking. Error management is about finding the sweet spot for learning whereby students are forced to slow down, make errors, correct them, and reflect upon the process.  Coyle (2009) writes that learning happens when we struggle in certain, targeted ways - operating on the edges of our ability, where making mistakes makes you smarter. This is teaching students how to fail. Unfortunately, too many teachers are more apt to teach students how not to fail by emphasizing compliance -- threatening to take away points for work that is late or below expectation, arbitrarily taking away points for behavior or under the guise of participation, granting extra credit for non-academic tasks, or using grades or a score of zero punitively.

6. See learning through the eyes of the students most challenged by your content.
Due in large part to Hattie's research, it is now a widely held notion that teacher content knowledge is not a major influence on learning. A teacher infinitely strong in content likely didn't struggle to learn it, or at least didn't struggle to the same extent, as those in the bottom fifteen percent of their grade book. Hattie writes that an empathy gap exists when teachers fail to see learning through the eyes of students most challenged by their content. To make learning more visible to us and our learners, we have to provide ample opportunity for students to articulate what they know as well as how they came to know it. When I first set out to investigate the learning experiences produced by my teaching, I was stunned by what I learned. Yes, students blamed themselves and many revealed a fixed mindset about their ability, but they also told me I talked too  much, and that the books I had chosen for them to read were nothing like their lives. They said I used words they'd never heard before, made references they knew nothing about, and rarely provided time to discuss, ask questions, or work together. The reality of my students' learning experiences forced a major shift in my mindset -- my students' failure to learn was my fault, not theirs. I needed to vary my approach to instruction, increase the capacity of my students to view each other as learning resources, and shut my big dumb mouth so as to hear and see what learning actually looked and felt like through their eyes. It was clear that when I began to own students' learning as a result of what I did or did not do, while simultaneously sharing my my belief in their scholarly ability, they became far more willing to remain engaged.

7. Teach self-discipline & self control. 
If grit is the end curricular aim, students need to master self-discipline and goal-setting as sub-skills en route to becoming grit proficient.  Tough (2012), in fact, writes of grit as self-discipline wedded to the dedicated pursuit of a goal. The hard truth for teachers is that learning is rarely fun for kids. While it feels good to do well on a test or receive high marks on a report card, the work that led to that success was probably quite arduous. This is especially true for struggling learners, who aren't often rewarded with high marks even when they do engage in a similarly long and laborious process. To compound this, learning is at odds with the instant gratification students receive via Snapchat, Vine, Instagram and every other device enabled euphoria. The current generation of learners is even less likely than their older counterparts to embrace the delayed gratification of learning because much of their life is experienced instantaneously. Although I too am an instant gratification junky, I benefited from a teacher in high school that took the time to teach self-discipline and delayed gratification. During my junior year, my Marketing teacher, Mr. Anderson, began a lesson by showing us an odd equation: TP=MDD. He followed with this explanation:  Temporary Pleasure leads to Massive Delayed Displeasure. "Think about it", he said. When we choose to do things that provide instant pleasure, it often results in massive delayed displeasure. For example, you have missing work so you copy your friends' assignments only to fail the test, which has a much higher impact on your grade. TP=MDD. You sneak out of your house to hang with friends only to get caught and end up grounded for a month. TP=MDD. Then Mr. Anderson dropped this nugget: TDP=MDP. Temporary Displeasure leads to Massive Delayed Pleasure. "Think about it", he said. You go off to a four year school, only to grind out difficult courses in computer science or Engineering. You're up late studying while friends are out partying. You're broke and stressed. You're experiencing displeasure...but...you graduate on time and with honors and start a career that pays $50,000 a year. TDP=MDP. For the rest of the year, all Mr. Anderson had to do when we were grinding through our business proposals and marketing projects was point to the equation hanging above his dry erase board. We understood delayed gratification. He taught us the importance of self-control and self-discipline and it stuck with me (and others, I presume) in exactly the way that Mr. Anderson predicted.

For more information on fostering student grit, and to continue this important conversation, please consider watching Angela Duckworth's inspiring TED Talk.