grit
Wednesday, August 5, 2009 at 12:04PM In recent years, psychologists have come up with a term to describe this mental trait: grit. Although the idea itself isn’t new — “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration,” Thomas Edison famously remarked — the researchers are quick to point out that grit isn’t simply about the willingness to work hard. Instead, it’s about setting a specific long-term goal and doing whatever it takes until the goal has been reached. It’s always much easier to give up, but people with grit can keep going.
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The hope among scientists is that a better understanding of grit will allow educators to teach the skill in schools and lead to a generation of grittier children. Parents, of course, have a big role to play as well, since there’s evidence that even offhand comments — such as how a child is praised — can significantly influence the manner in which kids respond to challenges. — The Truth About Grit
The article goes on to discuss that while intelligence is important, it isn’t nearly enough — and increasingly the focus is on the personality traits that help people succeed and be happy.
Our old friend Dweck is referenced as well as the praise problem.
What say you? Can grit be taught in schools?
See also: The Only Thing That Matters
Reader Comments (24)
I think it can be done, but there would have to be an up-front leap of faith by teachers, parents and school administrators that students can accomplish a long term project that teaches "grit." Because I don't think most adults believe that most kids are capable of it. I know that when we talk about Annika's project work with people who are or have been teachers, the primary response is "oh, but she's different. She's so smart and self motivated. Most kids would just sit around and waste time." Until teachers and schools believe that all kids are capable of that kind of work, it just won't happen. They'll just never provide the opportunity in the first place.
Hopefully that makes sense. I am currently under the influence of benadryl.
If grit is "about setting a specific long-term goal and doing whatever it takes until the goal has been reached" then it will only happen in schools where individual kids are allowed to choose their own projects which are perfectly captivating to them.
I agree with Sarah: I don't see this happening in schools as they are now, with their emphasis on standardization. That's a notion completely at odds with grit, which is all about the individual. I keep waiting for that education pendulum to start swinging back--not for my kids, but for most of the other kids in this country.
Now I can claim another benefit of homeschooling: my kids are getting gritty!
I think if we wanted to have grit taught in schools we would need our kids to have the same teacher all the way through elementary school (sort of like how waldorf does) and the same children. Also I think that we would need our schools to have children set goals and objectives for the school year and see how they are pursued and achieved. But, I think it would need to be tangible goals that the children set. Just my two cents.
my first thought was — you can’t teach grit! you either have it or you don’t! but then, can’t we learn, through life experience, that sticking with a goal pays in the end, that effort is worth it in the long run?
annika asked, when have schools ever operated that way, and this is what i was thinking — say, back in the 1950s. in the 50s, if you lettered in your sport, it really meant something. if you were valedictorian, it really meant something. we went through a period of deciding that honor rolls made some kids feel bad, and i personally received a letter in high school for some academic thigamajig. extremely ironic since i couldn’t do three sit-ups.
(and, aside to annika, i have to say, i had to laugh about montessori teaching grit — that 4yo just dreaming of the day he would polish well enough to be allowed to move up to cleaning the glass pitcher!)
in order to encourage the development of grit, wouldn’t we have to return to an old-fashioned program that rewards actual achievement — and defines achievement as something that comes at the end of a lot of hard work?
the reason we dropped that old-fashioned program was because it created a system that tiered students by ability, clearly shaking out the achievers from the non-achievers, the straight-A students from the average students. is there a way to reward grit without calling attention to those students who don’t exhibit it?
sarah makes good points about the difference between long-term projects and “broad survey education” with standardized testing. of course, i’m pro-project, as we all know, and re: the multi-year projects that sarah proposed, i can say that in my experience, even when students do change projects from year to year, they continue to have a deep interest in their former project topics *and* draw numerous meaningful connections between past and present work.
and projects mean working on something — whether the entire topic or some aspect of it — that is actually meaningful to the student. can we teach grit — resolve, tenacity, a willingness to sacrifice in the short term to reach a long-term goal — without allowing students to follow their own interests?
(sarah, those comments people say about annika — oh, but she’s so smart, etc. — is exactly the kind of thing we heard over and over at my school. “well, your students must be smarter”, “your students are more well behaved”, “you must have more supportive parents or more money or a better staff…” it’s just a lot of excuses for not pursuing the type of education that all kids deserve.)
i agree with patricia that you would have to, hypothetically, create a learning community in which grit could be developed. you have to “allow it to happen”, when mostly schools today are set up in such a way that individual kids’ long-term goals are not exactly relevant.
i didn’t mean this conversation to focus entirely on whether grit could be taught •in schools* — can it be taught at all? (say, at home?) again, there has to be an environment in which kids can exhibit and develop and recognize grit. they need to have passions and interests, time to develop them, and a host of attitudes that allow them to persevere when things don’t go exactly as planned. certainly parents play a huge role in whether kids become “gritty” at home.
i do think a year is long enough to teach some lessons about perseverance — if you have a project-based curriculum. there has to be time to set a goal that is far off enough and work toward it; there has to be time to make mistakes that you can then overcome. too much of education today is bite-size — and there’s no time to spend discussing or thinking about what went wrong, no time to devise and try another approach. project learning is slow learning; i think slow learning can begin to develop those habits of mind that would lead to having grit.
your examples of our throw-away culture are spot on, i think. if the handle broke off a pitcher owned by my grandmother or great-grandmother, a new handle would be whittled out of wood and wired on. wooden bowls were patched. clothing was patched and passed down. expectations were different — toward marriage, too. things were expected to break or have flaws, i think, and no one was expected to throw them away. you made do or did without.
now we throw perfectly good items away just to replace them with a different style. (or maybe we take them to goodwill and feel virtuous — even though our needless consumption far outweighs any good works our 2007 ikea pitcher is likely to perform.)
we can say we admire certain traits yet we design an educational system that our children grow up in for thirteen years that rewards an entirely different way of being.
our posts crossed each other, but i said the same thing about children setting their own goals and having their own passions — how can we teach grit if we assign everything? why should children exhibit tenacity and perseverance to work hard toward *our* goals?
My husband is very creative and very witty and quite quirky in his thinking, and when he was at school (boys' school), he was praised excessively for his artworks, (maybe the adults felt they had to compensate for their criticisms of his lack of academic achievement). Anyway, any time someone said to him that he should "do something" with his art, he resisted, he felt defiant, and he screamed on the inside "NO!!! Don't tell me what to do!" The result of all that was that for many years, he shut down that side of himself so that people would leave him alone and STOP praising him so much!
Now in his thirties, and we have our own children, he's learning to connect with his creative self again, and learning to really stick with things. He certainly didn't learn grit at school! Another reason to keep them home and kind of leave them a lone a bit...
thanks
But, I keep returning to the idea that much of what we call grit is an innate character trait. It's like ambition. Can you really teach ambition? That is not to say that grit can't be nurtured, especially by rewarding effort and teaching the habit of goal-setting, but I think that some people just have more of it by nature. Look at the differences among siblings. Maybe it has something to do with birth order, but there are wide variations among sibs who presumably get similar nurturing at home.
and i agree with you that we have a tremendous influence on whether these traits are developed!
thank you, kaecey! :D
nic, i love your story — thank you so much for sharing it. (and thank you for your kind words about the blog!) re: your husband’s experience, i believe presenting a neutral environment — without a lot of influencing praise, suggestions, emotional reaction, etc. — can create a peaceful space in which children can develop and *own* their talents and interests. :^) thank you for commenting!
anna, interesting point. i actually just read an article (and of course now i can’t find the link) about how some people are motivated by adrenalin and some are shut down by it! if you benefit from something to “push against”, i’m guessing you are one of those who are motivated by it. :^)
i agree re: we can nurture grit — influence it, create circumstances in which it can be allowed to develop. and on the flip side, we can certainly create circumstances that would train a child away from developing grit (or certainly, at least, a long-term point of view). i’m still waffling on whether it’s an inborn trait; i suspect it is.
The so called 'mother-bear' instinct could be another example of grit.
Lack of grit, rather than being innate, I would say that it is extinguished - rapidly or gradually, if at all, depending on how in tune we are with other people's wishes.
The so called 'easy babies' who give give up crying for what they want isn't forthcoming - the toddler who accepts the lolly in place of what they really wanted - the school child who learns what the teacher expects.......
Feisty children are full of grit - pity it is not widely recognised as a good thing.
Alice
alice, very interesting thoughts. this reminds me of an erma bombeck routine about "my child/your child" — where the other person's child would be stubborn, but *mine* would have "grit". ;^)
amy, i think you are too hard on yourself!
i was discussing this with my husband and questioning whether grit is a great attribute or simply a neutral one. for example, take the sample of the child mentioned in the article who drifted from one musical instrument to another rather than sticking with piano — mightn’t this child be just as happy and possibly happier than the child who practices two hours a day on piano forever? my family is a combination of happy drifters and single-minded gritties, and i don’t think grit is necessarily the key to happiness. of course, "society" and "educators" aren't concerned about what makes us happy; they are concerned with what makes us productive members of society who like to buy, sell, produce, and consume.
Lori, I am hosting next week's Carnival of Homeschooling and I would love to have an article from you. Think about submitting.
Peace and Laughter!
In the discussions I have with all the teachers in B's school they often refer to his drive as his ace in the hole - they tell me that it is this one trait more than any other that in their 30 years of doing this (they're a tight group of old-schoolers) that predicts "success" for their kids (and by this they mean acquiring language and communicating in general with "the population"). They tell me some have it and some don't. They nurture it like a precious pearl. It reminds me that not only is it a treasure, but to feed it myself - because it wears me out, quite honestly, and so it is nice to remember that it has tremendous value.
I am going to bottle his grit and sell it. I think there is a ring of it in the bathtub right now.