Fostering Grit

How do I prepare my students for the real world? (ASCD Arias)

Thomas R. Hoerr

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781416617075
• eBook ISBN: 9781416617150
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

For too long, educators have focused only on getting students ready for the next test, for the next grade, for graduation, or maybe for college. Students must be prepared to succeed in school, and they must know how to read, write, and calculate. But that's only the beginning. Our job--whether we teach kindergarten, 5th grade, or high school or we lead a school or district--is to prepare students for success in the real world. To do so, we must also teach grit. Grit is a combination of tenacity and perseverance--a willingness to take risks even if it means sometimes failing and starting again. Knowing how to respond to frustration and failure is essential whether a student struggles or excels. Veteran school leader and popular Educational Leadership columnist Thomas R. Hoerr shows what teaching for grit looks like and provides a sample lesson plan and self-assessments, along with a six-step process applicable across grade levels and content areas to help students build skills they need to succeed in school and in life.

Why Grit?

Is our job to prepare students for success in school or for success in life? How we answer that question has powerful implications for what and how we teach. For too long, educators have focused only on getting students ready for the next test, the next grade, graduation, college, and so on. The test-score mania under which we’ve worked for the past decade—with students, teachers, and schools judged on percentiles—has exacerbated our short-term focus.

Don’t misunderstand me: Students must be prepared to succeed in school; they must learn how to read, write, and calculate. But that’s only the beginning. Our job as educators is to prepare students for success in the real world. A focus on success in life means that, beyond teaching the three Rs, we must also teach character, emotional intelligence, responsibility, and an appreciation for the complexity of human diversity. We must also teach the virtues of grit—tenacity, perseverance, and the ability to never give up.

Teaching grit can be difficult for educators because the concept appears to run counter to the caring school environments that we all esteem. It is very important that students enjoy learning and want to come to school, but teaching grit necessarily means that students will experience—and perhaps embrace—some frustration and pain. We do our students no favors if we fail to prepare them for the real world because they do not know how to respond to frustration and failure. Learning how to respond positively to setbacks is essential. Regardless of their academic performance, students are bound to encounter frustrations and failures in the real world; everyone will hit the wall sooner or later. Responding appropriately when things go wrong—turning a failure into a good failure, one from which we learn—is key to success in life.

Executive Functions and Grit

Our executive functions regulate and monitor our ability to organize, focus, and control our experiences. Our grit helps us determine how to respond when things go wrong. Most of us have developed routines that enable us to plan, work, and be successful. Grit gives us resilience. It not only keeps us focused on a task but also enables us to persevere when we fail. The self-monitoring and emotional control that grit provides is an important component of our executive functioning.

Research on Grit

Here are some key resources related to grit:

• A 2011 New York Times article by Paul Tough titled “What If the Secret to Success Is Failure?” discusses the work of Angela Duckworth, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who focuses on the importance of grit in an education context. (She took the term grit from the title of the 1969 movie True Grit.) Duckworth first became interested in grit when trying to understand why certain students stay in college despite facing personal hardships and difficulties. (See TEDxTalks, 2009, for a talk on grit by Duckworth.)
• Paul Tough also discusses grit in his book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (2012), which examines the effect of grit on students who are academically prepared for college but encounter real-world obstacles.
• My own March 2012 Principal Connection column in Educational Leadership is devoted to grit (see Hoerr, 2012).
• The importance of grit is indicated in a 2013 report from the U.S. Department of Education titled Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance: Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century, which expresses concern for students who are learning to “do school but are not developing the life skills to persevere in the face of challenges they will face in the real world” (p. 18). As the report notes, “Educators, administrators, policymakers, technology designers, parents, and researchers should consider how to give priority to grit, tenacity, and perseverance in curriculum, teaching practices, teacher professional development, programs, technology adoption, and out-of-school support” (p. xii). The reason for this is quite clear: “Meta-analyses of a growing body of educational research suggest that these factors can have just as strong an influence on academic performance and professional attainment as intellectual factors” (p. 1).
• In his 2008 book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell notes that grit in the form of devoting at least 10,000 hours to practicing a craft or skill is essential to mastery. (He uses Bill Gates and The Beatles as examples.)
• Carol Dweck champions grit in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2007). Dweck believes that there are two principal modes of thinking: fixed mindsets and growth mindsets. Fixed mindsets keep intelligence static, avoid mistakes, and prioritize looking smart over learning. Because people with fixed mindsets seek situations in which success is practically guaranteed, they are unlikely to develop grit. By contrast, people with growth mindsets acknowledge that even though mistakes may not be pleasant or make things easy, they help us learn. The grit of those with growth mindsets stems from knowing that the harder they work and the longer they try, the likelier they are to succeed.

Differentiation and Grit

Just as we need to differentiate our teaching of long division, sculpture, or the Magna Carta based on students’ scholastic readiness, we also need to differentiate how we teach grit based on students’ emotional readiness. We must know what degree of frustration our students can presently accept. In the same way that we work to improve students’ scholastic skills by beginning with their current proficiency level, we work to improve students’ grit by beginning with their current capacity to handle obstacles.

Working to develop grit means occasionally and thoughtfully presenting students with learning obstacles that they must overcome to find success. When doing this, we should support our students by providing them with clear tasks, strategies, care, and encouragement. Consistent success is not the goal here; the real goal is for students to feel frustration so they can learn how to respond to it. This approach is a far cry from the usual, in which we seek to avoid frustrating students, but teaching children how to respond to frustration and failure requires that they experience frustration and failure.

Differentiating for grit can occur in three contexts—process, content, and product:

• Process. We can elicit grit in the learning process by having students learn in a way that does not come easily to them. From a multiple-intelligences perspective, this means having students use one of the intelligences that is not a strength of theirs. For example, strong writers might be asked to learn about life during the Renaissance by drawing inferences from paintings or listening to music; interpersonal and gregarious students may be asked to work individually while introver...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• content
• Encore Divider
• Encore
• References
• Related Resources
• About the Author
• Copyright