Ready-to-Use Resources for Grit in the Classroom

Activities and Mini-Lessons for Building Passion and Perseverance

Laila Y. Sanguras

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000495706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Experimental Methods in Education

Ready-to-Use Resources for Grit in the Classroom provides tools to help teachers, students, and families understand and foster passionate, creative, and curious grit in all students.

It can be difficult and time consuming to figure out how to develop grit in the classroom. This resource includes student activities and mini-lessons that can be completed in fewer than ten minutes, with activities on topics from goal setting, to re-examining failure, to optimism. Interactive and engaging, this book challenges students to rethink failure, push past obstacles, and passionately pursue their interests.

Featuring helpful teacher instructions and reproducible handouts for each activity, Ready-to-Use Resources for Grit in the Classroom is the perfect addition to any educator's social-emotional learning library.

Chapter 1: How Gritty Am I?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003237617-3

Raise your hand if you love taking quizzes – if you have taken the “how good a friend are you” quiz or the “what Harry Potter house do you belong in” quiz or “what kind of cheese are you” quiz. Well, I am right there with you. I take these quizzes because I am curious about the answers, but also because I want to see how the quiz creator is going to determine a quiz based on a few personality questions. Once I started learning about designing assessments, I learned that my curiosity actually stems from trying to determine how a construct is measured.

Think about this. If you were handed a bunch of questions related to balancing equations, you could probably deduce that you were holding an algebra quiz. Your brain is working to put the pieces together to provide a context for these questions. This is why I think it is important to really dive into the grit scale when we first start discussing grit with students. We can learn a lot about what it means to be gritty simply by reading the items that measure grittiness.

In this chapter, students will take Duckworth’s grit scale and explore the different dimensions of what it means to be gritty. There are seven specific activities included:

1. The Grit Quiz
2. GRIT Acrostic
3. SWOT Analysis
4. SWOT Review
5. Grit and Growth Mindset
6. Owning Your Power
7. Changes in Grit

The Grit Quiz

Before diving into the activities in this book of resources, it is important that we help students understand what grit is. One of the best ways to do this is to really look at the items used to measure grit. Tell students that we want to see how gritty they are. They should answer each question honestly; be sure to explain that there are no right or wrong answers.

You can have students complete Duckworth’s grit scale directly on her website ( https://angeladuckworth.com/research/). You can select from the 12-Item Grit-O Scale (Duckworth et al., 2007) and the 8-Item Grit-S Scale (Duckworth & Quinn, 2009), depending on what you think will be best for your students. The directions for scoring the instrument are provided at the end of each quiz. At the top of the “How Gritty Are You?” page, ask students to write their total grit scores. Then they also need to choose the two items that are MOST like them and write those in the top box. They will write the two items that are most NOT like them and write those in the bottom box. You can tell them that you will revisit this later in the year.

It is also a good idea to talk through each item after students complete the quiz. I suggest that you write each question on the board and then talk through it with your students. For example, one item is “I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge.” You might ask students to share times when they or someone they know has overcome setbacks. You might ask them to explain how it felt to overcome setbacks or how they know the difference between an important challenge and a not-so-important challenge.

GRIT Acrostic

Ask students about the two components to grit (passion and perseverance) and remind them that both are important. Explain that passion is what keeps us moving when we want to give up and that everyone who has ever accomplished something great wanted to quit at some point. Also explain that perseverance is when we can see the obstacles, but we choose to keep going anyway. Perseverance is what gets us to reach our goals, while it is the passion that keeps us moving forward.

Give students time to complete the GRIT acrostic poem. They need to start each sentence with each letter in the word “grit.” They can add additional sentences to explain themselves when necessary and can include examples. Students can also add drawings/images that coincide with each letter. You can have students present their poems to the class or in small groups. You also might consider displaying these in your classroom.

SWOT Analysis

An important component to being gritty is knowing who we are. We need to have a strong sense of our identity and a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis can help (Pestle Analysis Contributor, 2015)! Begin first by modeling your own SWOT analysis for your students and then lead them through their own. Depending on your students, this might be something they can work on with a partner or alone.

Students will identify their personal strengths, weaknesses, opportunities (the resources they have available to them), and threats (things that might hinder them). You may need to coax students to really think about their strengths. For example, they sometimes do not realize that being bilingual or being immersed in two different cultures is a positive thing. The same is true for opportunities. For some, they may have financial stability in their family, which is an obvious opportunity. For others, they may have a lot of siblings (which seems like a pain), but is actually a resource because they always have people around them. (This SWOT analysis is a really great one to talk through individually with students who are struggling in your class, are not motivated, etc. It is a great tool to help you connect to them.)

SWOT Review

The SWOT Review is an activity to complete at the end of a semester or school year. We want to provide students with the opportunity to reflect and connect back to their initial SWOT analysis.

You might begin this activity by displaying your own SWOT analysis and completing your review in front of your students. This could provide some ideas for how they can answer each of the reflective questions. Students can continue the reflection process by sharing with a partner or small group.

Grit and Growth Mindset

Growth mindset is the belief that effort and time result in higher achievement, and that we are in control of our success (Dweck, 2007). Sounds similar to grit, doesn’t it? The opposite of a growth mindset, fixed mindset, is when we believe we are just not smart/talented/gifted enough and that is all there is to it. Grit and growth mindset are obviously closely related, so I have curated three golden rules for how to cultivate grit by operating a growth mindset.

As you walk through each of the three golden rules, students can take notes around the words about what this means to them:

1. We work hard every day. That means that every single day we are giving everything we have. We do not complain about the work we are given because we know it is necessary to succeed.
2. We practice optimism. This means that we are going to believe in ourselves, even when things get hard. We know that life is going to throw us curve balls, but we believe that if we keep moving forward, things will get better. We shut down the voice in our heads that says we cannot do something.
3. We own our power. We have the power to be engaged and interested and motivated. Our teachers can work super hard to develop creative lessons, but it is up to us to engage our brains and be active participants in our learning.

Owning Your Power

It is time to ask students to think back on their academic and personal Super Stretch Goals (SSGs). Also, remind students that the key to having a growth mindset and grit is that we own our power – WE are in charge of how hard we work and how much time we put into achieving our goals.

Ask students to write down actions they can take in each column to show others that they are focused on th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Welcome
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: How Gritty Am I?
• Chapter 2: Goal Setting
• Chapter 3: Cultivating Curiosity
• Chapter 4: Overcoming Obstacles
• Chapter 5: Poised for Success
• Chapter 6: Pursuing Passion
• Chapter 7: Profiles of Gritty People
• Chapter 8: What Do I Stand For?
• Quotes to Use for Bulletin Boards, Websites, and So On
• Recommended Order of Activities
• References