Grit

Self-Assessment Survey: Grit

On the Self-Assessment Survey: Grit I scored on the high side of “You fully understand the issue of grit.” This score did not surprise me. I have always been driven to calibrate my failures and celebrate my successes with passion and perseverance to reach my long term goals.. This started from a young age when I trained to get on the United States Junior Olympic Ski Jumping team and to come back from a career ending accident. Grit is what keeps teaching fresh for me and helps me continually improve my practice with innovative practices that in the short term fail but with lots of grit eventually end up in success. In my teaching of Grit, I make sure that I recognize the disadvantages that society places on some of our students (race, ethnicity, Socioeconomic status, and religion) and use grit as one way to try to succeed despite those unfair disadvantages.

Helping Our Students Dig-In With Grit!

Grit is the combination of passion, persistence, and the tenacity to work towards a long-term goal.

• Establishing the Environment
  Setting Expectations
  Teaching the Vocabulary.
  When we are teaching students grit we start by Establishing the Environment, Setting Expectations, and Teaching the Vocabulary. Do this by stressing the importance of reflection and creating an environment that all students need to work their hardest to succeed, recognizing that reflecting on failures to learn from them and plan to move forward is pivotal to success (Smails - Smart Failures and comfort zone). In our classroom, we have a Making Learning Visible board that recognizes calibration of failures and celebrates successes. In our classroom, we should encourage smails to recognize when we or students work to turn a failure into success. Implementing a Grit chart where students keep track of their goals as a part of learning could work.

• Create Frustration
  Monitor those Experiences
  Reflect on our Learning
  We can work hard to create challenges that Create Frustration, Monitor those Experiences, and Reflect on our Learning. Students partake in Genius Hour projects to grapple while having fun learning new skills, reflect on their progress, and take pride in reporting back to the class how they overcame those struggles to reach success. We have student-led discussions on how an assignment pushed students out of their comfort zone and how they struggled with that. We are also working to expand our portfolios and other tools to capture student Grit and prominently display it.

Recommended Resources: Grit

• "The Key to Success? Grit"

• "Got Grit? Teaching Success"

• "5 Steps to Foster Grit in the Classroom"

• "True Grit"