Positive psychology meets K-12 pedagogy. This course explores key ideas of positive psychology and shows how great teachers apply those lessons to maximize student engagement and accomplishment. Through lectures, discussions, interviews and footage of great educators in action, you’ll learn how to integrate character-based objectives into your own teaching.
Grit - Interview with Dr. Angela Duckworth
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En provenance du cours de Relay Graduate School of Education
Teaching Character and Creating Positive Classrooms
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The Science of Character
This module explores the research base that supports the teaching of character.
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Dave LevinCo-Founder, KIPP; Co-Founder, Relay GSE
>> One of the fundamental challenges in each of our lives is
how we stick with something through the hard times,
through the frustrations, the failures, the setbacks.
Virtually all meaning and accomplishment lie in the other side of such times.
How do we sustain effort through challenges, and over a long period?
This is the land of grit, and the expertise of Dr. Angela Duckworth.
If you're a teacher, how do you know a kid has grit?
Like, what's it look like?
>> So what grit looks like in a school-age child, right,
say late elementary school, early middle school.
Is a kid who, when frustrations, when setbacks, when bad grades,
when screw ups, when missed assignments happen,
it's not that they're not disappointed, but they come back.
The other thing though is this idea of really having deepening consistent
interests over time.
So, if you have a gritty student, that's a student who gets very interested in,
you know, the arctic.
And it's not just that they're interested for that week or
that month, but you know, their interest deepens and matures.
And, and maybe a year later they're still interested in, in that direction.
And I think that is one of the goals of education, not just that our kids can do
well on standardized achievement tests and teach learn what we've taught them.
But that they develop their own particular interests.
The ones that they're going to then go on to specialize in later.
>> What does grit and self-control lead to?
>> Grit and self-control are things that I study, because they predict success.
So grit in particular, predicting success in very challenging circumstances.
Grit predicts making it out of West Point Military Academy in
not only the first very hard summer where there's a sizable attrition, but
also making it out all the way through the four years, right?
So a dropout at West Point is roughly, you know, 20 to 25%,
and the grittier cadets are more likely to, to make it through.
Grit predicts winning the National Spelling Bee.
Grit predicts keeping your job if you're in sales,
which has a turnover rate of about 50% in the first year.
In a sample of thousands of Chicago public high school juniors,
grit predicts graduating one year later as a senior.
Grit actually predicts things where I think the challenge is to stay in
the game, right?
As Woody Allen said, 80% of success in life is showing up.
And grit predicts showing up and, and trying hard when you're there.
>> Can anyone be successful without grit?
>> I don't know of any counterexamples to the idea that, you know,
accomplishing something very, very, very worthwhile could be
done without this kind of determination in the face of adversity.
And also, this ability or this disposition to pursue, single-mindedly, a very small
set of goals as opposed to, you know, kind of being a dilettante and being all over.
>> What is IQ good for predicting?
>> Mm-hm.
>> What about, do grit and self-control really predict things that IQ don't?
How does that really work?
>> In my research, grit is usually either completely unrelated to IQ.
Or, sometimes inversely related, meaning that individuals who
are a little higher in IQ, on average, are slightly lower in grit.
And so I worry, actually, about those kids who are,
you know, very able, but haven't yet developed these other capacities.
>> Dominic describes that often as the fragile thoroughbred.
>> Yeah and actually my expression for it is fragile perfects, right?
>> Yeah.
>> The kids who are unblemished, right?
They've never gotten less than an A plus in their life,
and at some point, you know, you're going to disappoint your supervisor.
And at some point, you're going to, you know, lose the Fellowship or get rejected.
Or, or really screw up, right?
I mean I've made tons of mistakes and
I, you know, need to figure out how to cry about them.
But then how eventually to learn from them, and how to get up the next day and
keep going.
And I do think that if you defer that learning experience too far in life,
it becomes very, very hard to do.
>> How do you teach it?
>> How do you teach grit?
>> Yeah, how do you teach grit?
>> We're working on it.
You know, we don't know yet, really.
You know, do we even know for sure that you can teach it?
No, we don't.
we, we know that, that character skills like grit and
self-control are not entirely genetic.
So that gives you some hope that you can teach it but
not all of experiences didactic direct teaching.
So, so, so, here, here's where we are.
This is what we're, we're hoping will, will prove to be true.
In particular we're walking on the idea that kids may not have accurate beliefs or
understanding about practice.
one, how, how much practice matters, right?
They might know that practice matters, but when they see the student get all A's in
the class or they watch television, they see some, you know, basketball player
that, you know, watched the footage of the Olympics, they may think oh, well when you
look at really good performance, practice matters a little bit.
Where we want to tell them, no, it matters a lot.
Second thing we want to show them, is that practice is actually not fun.
Not even for people who are really at the top of their game.
When experts are doing the kind of practice that makes them better,
they're frequently failing.
They're frequently confused.
Not even, necessarily, seeing gain for what will feel like a very long time.
So, teaching kids not to expect that they will be succeeding the whole time, and
feeling really great about themselves, actually to anticipate that, you know,
these emotions, these feelings can be pretty hard, right?
And actually to reward themselves, like oh, I, I just studied for half an hour and
I was totally confused.
Like, great, like, you know, I must be doing the hardest kind of practice.
The other, you know, thing that we want to make sure kids understand about
effective deliberate practice is that there needs to be feedback.
If they don't know whether they're doing the right thing or
the wrong thing, whether it's studying the right way,
studying the right material, they need to be proactive in the classroom.
Outside of the classroom.
Make sure they're getting, they're closing the feedback loop.
>> If you could create a list of three to five things that you'd
want teachers thinking about or doing in their classrooms.
>> Mm.
>> To sort of facilitate the development of character skills like
grit and self-control.
>> Mm-hm. >> What, what would that list look like?
>> The teachers could think about these character skills not just in
their students' lives, right?
Students of whatever age.
But in their own life.
Self-control and grit, you know, social intelligence.
I think these are things that, you know, we're all working on, you know,
our whole lives.
And so, the first thing may be for teachers to do is to reflect on
how self-control and grit and other character skills do or
don't play out in ways that they're happy with in their own lives.
And maybe as a second, easy step is to share that with the students.
You know what?
Yesterday I really wanted to have the cheeseburger.
And I used this strategy you know,
I asked the waiter not even to show me the menu, and ordered a salad, right?
So I think if teachers can think, my kids not only know,
need to know what to do, but they need a little scaffolding.
They need a little help in figuring out,
you know, how exactly they're going to go and do it.
The work of Gabriele Oettingen and
Peter Gollwitzer, on this particular point, is really illuminating.
So rather than just saying, you know, your homework is page 36, do one through ten.
You know, what if the kids had to think, well, what's the homework assignment?
Why am I being given this homework assignment?
Well, what good thing will happen if I actually finish all this homework?
Well, what's the obstacle going to be that's going to stand in the way of
me doing this?
And now, what's my specific plan?
When and where am I going to do what, right?
And in that kind of work, it's shown that when kids are taught that skill,
and not just left to their own devices, they're actually better at
doing things like homework coming to school on time, et cetera.
The fourth thing that would be helpful for
teachers to, to think about is thinking of ways that they can encourage kids to
be the teachers of their own bedroom classrooms, right?
And, and saying, like well, you know, we've designed this classroom this way so
that you can see the boards.
So there aren't a lot of distractions, you know?
We've, we have a rule in our classroom that we don't use our cellphones.
Well, how can you then make a home environment that would be, you know,
equally well engineered for you to, to be the kind of kid that you want to be,
to act in the way that you want to act?
>> You got two kids.
>> Mm-hm. >> 10 and 12.
>> Yeah.
>> How do you think about grit and helping them develop grit as a parent?
>> We have a rule that everyone has to do a hard thing in our family.
This is really about grit.
And by something that's a hard thing.
It has to be something that requires deliberate practice.
Which means that it has to
be something that requires that you're setting specific goals.
That you're practicing at, outside of your skill level.
That you're getting feedback and
you're doing it with repetition to mastering, right?
I think it sends a message that doing hard things are sort of part of
our responsibility in life, and in our family.
And, I'll tell you that there have been times where they've wanted to
quit their hard thing.
And we have a second rule, which is that you can quit your hard thing.
But you can only quit them after the tuition payment is up, right?
So, if I have signed you up for
a semester of track, you are going to do a semester of track.
And at the end of that semester you can make a,
a mindful, and reasoned decision about doing something else.
You can't do nothing, so you have to pick something else, and
you can pick whatever it is.
You know, kids understand that they have some freedom, and some say in all of this.
But that they can't quit things in the middle.
And they can't quit on bad days, right?
So I think it sends a message that, you know,
the time to quit is when you've made a thoughtful decision, not when you got
yelled at or you had to miss, you know, a birthday party, because you had a recital.
So, so the hard thing rule is one thing that we do in our family.
And the other thing is, you know, we use language very intentionally.
I think in the same way that teachers use language in a very intentional and
mindful way.
So, when my daughters practice piano or viola and I'm listening to them,
I don't simply praise the times when it sounds really good, right?
Which is what I actually used to do.
Like, it sounds beautiful and
you say that was so beautiful, you know, play it for me again.
Now, I do that, but I also, more often, will say things like,
wow, that sounds like you're really working on the hard parts.
You know, you were really doing deliberate practice.
And of course those are the parts that don't sound good, right?
But you have to actually reward kids for the struggle.
>> Now let's look at a kid.
and, and, and in this case, you'll hear the kid talking.
And what evidence do you see that grit has been a subject at some point in the class.
>> Mm-hm.
>> On Khan Academy, I mastered points on the coordinate plane.
>> Points on a coordinate plane?
And how did you know to work on that?
>> Because I kept getting up just looking at the post board,
and seeing what other skills I had to do next.
>> Okay, and what character strength did you show by doing that?
>> I think I showed grit, because I think I kept getting some wrong.
And, and then I think I didn't master it the first time, so
I went over it and mastered it.
>> Okay.
Oh, great.
yeah, so that, that young female student,
I think couldn't have said it any better, right?
I, I saw what I was doing well, saw what I wasn't doing well.
And what I wasn't doing well I didn't,
you know, wasn't getting the mastery and I worked on it until I did.
so, I'm hoping that that kind of, that ability to articulate, right?
To sort of self monitor, to recognize character when, when you have it and
recognize when you need it, and then to, to talk about it with others.
My hope is that that actually does encourage the character skills themselves.
That that's part of the growth.
>> To me the, the thing that I appreciate the, about her articulation
here is that she was able to, to go to the specific behaviors.
because, a lot of times you'll hear teachers say,
you know, what character, well first of all, they say, was that grit, right?
>> Yeah. >> And they'll be like, yes.
>> Right, right.
Their brain shuts off, because it's like,
you know, exactly what your teacher wants, right?
>> Right, right. Yeah, or
the next level is, what character strength.
And then, you know, you still sort of probably, you know, grit.
>> Yeah. >> What, you know.
Then take it to, how did you know?
>> Right. >> To, you know, defend that.
>> Right. >> And then for
the, for, for a child to be able to say, well here's the behaviors.
>> Yeah. >> That let me know I was being gritty.
>> Yeah.
>> I think. >> The key word she said was because.
>> Right.
>> And and interestingly, I noted that she said it so that,
she didn't finish her sentence and the teacher didn't have to even prompt her.
So maybe that's the kind of classroom where kids know, when you say something,
you know you, you go further with the thoughts, but
I think the word because was the key there.
>> Right, yep.
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