Grit

Definition: Grit is passion and perseverance for long-term goals. I work hard to keep improving.

Motto: "I persist toward my goals despite obstacles, discouragements, or disappointments." ¹

“Excellence sometimes seems like the result of natural talent. But no matter how gifted you are—no matter how easily you climb up the learning curve—you do need to do that climbing. There are no shortcuts. Grit predicts accomplishing challenging goals of personal significance. For example, grittier students are more likely to graduate from high school, and grittier cadets are more likely to complete their training at West Point. Notably, in most research studies, grit and measures of talent and IQ are unrelated, suggesting that talent puts no limits on the capacity for passion and perseverance.” (Character Lab)

"To be gritty, in my view, is to have passion and perseverance about something in your life. This doesn’t mean that you necessarily engage in all possible pursuits with equivalent passion and perseverance. And indeed, the limits of time and energy suggest that focusing on one thing means focusing less on others. You can’t pursue becoming a great pianist and at the same time a great mathematician, and a great sprinter and chef and philosopher…But it’s also true, I think, that to be gritty means to pursue something with consistency of interest and effort. Some people choose not to pursue anything in a committed way, and that, to me, is lack of grit." (Dr. Duckworth)

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The Strengths Spotlight Podcast Series: Listen to the Institute of Positive Education descriptors of the strengths that include integration strategies.

What it Looks Like and How to Encourage:

• Enjoying the challenge of long-term projects

• Committing to, and completing, longer tasks and projects

• Practicing and working to improve

• Recovering quickly from setbacks

• Connecting actions to deep personal values and beliefs

• Viewing mistakes and failures as opportunities to learn

• Support with growth mindset language and strategies

• Promote a language around grit and wellbeing

• Don’t step in to fix it. Employ emotion coaching when frustration arises.

• Developing and using self-talk around how to take healthy risks, accept challenges and persevere

• Situational analysis (Teachable Moments)

Teacher Strategies to Personally Strengthen Their Grit:

• Build a deeper understanding of your grit Character Strength by taking Dr. Angela Duckworth's Grit Scale and by digging into her Grit FAQs.

• Gather strategies from the TED Talk by Dr. Angela Duckworth, the Character Lab founder and author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

• Grow awareness of your strengths by making them more visible. Depending upon your learning style and preferred modality, choose tools from your instructional toolkit to apply to yourself. Examples: Audio Recording (have a friend interview you to record your very own "strengths podcast"|Concept Mapping|Outlining|Sketchnoting. Find ways to show how you combine strengths in some situations while also connecting to your talents/abilities, skills, interests, and values.

• Learn about the research on resilience at work to strengthen your grit going forward. Look to measure your resilience by taking one of the offerings listed by Positive Psychology in their article "How to Measure Resilience With These 8 Resilience Scales".

• Read Positive Psychology's articles on developing resilience in children: Build Resilience in Children | Teaching Resilience in School

• Start with the CL construct of model, celebrate and enable to develop some strategies.

• Take a deep dive into variants of grit as shared by author Steven Kotler.

Character Lab Grit Teaching Strategies and Tips: How to offer age-appropriate versions of the strategies? Note: There are dozens and dozens of tips from Character Lab. These choices are filtered for elementary school and practicality to bring this strength into the culture of one's classroom.

• Expert Practice for Classrooms

• Choosing Challenge

• Hard Fun

• My Values

• Practice, Practice, Practice

• Preach What You Practice

• The Adaptability Advantage

• The Other Side of Stress

• Turn Weakness Into Strength

• Two Stories

• Use WOOP to set goals supported by Character Strengths. (WOOP Worksheet from Character Lab. A more scaffolded worksheet.) Grades 3-5 lesson. WOOP App: Android | IOS

• Agency - "Although no one has absolute control over destiny, we can do a great deal to control how we think, feel, and behave. By assessing our life situations realistically, we can make plans and preparations that allow us to make the most of our circumstances. By doing so, we gain a sense of mastery." (Hales, D., 2021)

The term "agency" is used a lot these days in describing the empowerment and self-confidence we want our students to experience as they make decisions in their lives. It connects to growing their sense of self-efficacy and understanding concerning their locus of control. These two concepts connect to the self-talk in whether we see ourselves as internals or externals regarding our belief regarding whether we are in charge of how we affect our lives or if we see life affecting us. No set strategy is offered here other than to continue to expand the vocabulary of your students by adapting these psychological terms to their developmental levels. You can search the web for lots of resources offering strategies to support student agency.

• Character Day - Find ways to participate and elaborate on the activities offered for this annual event.

• Getting Gritty - Think about a person you know and admire who displayed grit (perseverance). Draw a picture of the person and write text descriptor bubbles around him/her that explain the gritty actions. Share with your classmates.

• Lesson Databases - Find lessons at the Heart-Mind Online resource site provided by the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education. Find lessons at the Greater Good in Education resource site provided by the Greater Good Science Center (University of California - Berkeley).

• Self-Inventory Grit Scale - Dr. Duckworth provides a simple 10-question survey for students to complete to get a baseline reading of their "grit score". The results can be used in numerous ways. Students can journal about each response explaining in depth their thinking while providing an experience that exemplifies their reasoning. The results can be used in setting WOOP goals to exercise and strengthen their grit.

• Sketchnoting to Paint the Strength Picture - Guide your students to make visible their self-understanding of how they currently engage with each strength. A secondary activity is to have your students sketch out new ways they can exercise each strength. We know that going from thinking about ideas to then making them visible often leads to taking action with the ideas. The first step to this strategy is to teach your students about sketchnoting. You will find applications of this tool across all areas of your curriculum. :) Students can take pictures of their sketches to upload to Seesaw to then explain their thinking.

• Superhero Creation - Challenge your students to create a superhero who maximizes this strength. One approach is to have your students draw a picture of the character with a biography that describes how the superhero uses the strength in his/her life. You can provide categories such as physical, intellectual (thinking), emotional, and social as to how the superhero demonstrates the strength. This activity could take the form of playing cards that students then create games around.

• Other possibilities - Grit Superhero marketing design projects, student-created videos highlighting grit stories, class weekly sharing of their grit efforts, high school IB students using CAS time to produce age-appropriate videos for ES students answering the question of “What is grit? What does it look like in action?”, older student buddies and their ES partners meeting from time to time share grit stories, incorporate into co-curricular activities like field trips, after school activities, assemblies, etc.

Grade(s) Specific Teaching Strategies: The following ideas are offered as jumping-off points for teachers to build from and adapt to their needs.

EC-K>

• Lesson Listing - Access several teacher-created lessons and those from other providers.

• Look to find ways to build on the normal assignment of classroom community duties. What are opportunities for students to deal with incrementally more difficult tasks?

• Storybook readings, digital media, and share time by teachers and students to build understanding.

• Use visuals of toolkits and tools engaging language of creating our "strength toolkits" with strengths as tools.

1-3>

• Grades 1-2> Possibly doing some storybook readings and use of digital media. Eventually could lead to students writing their own storybooks that involve the display of grit.

• Do Makerspace activities with students designing and building.

• Draw A Picture Activity to move into one's stretch zone with a growth mindset. The target age is grade 3 so you can try this with younger students.

• Grit stories on a wall in each classroom. Build in weekly time for students to share their stories of perseverance and growth mindset. Have them draw pictures with descriptions to go up on a designated wall of the classroom.

• Lesson Listing - Access teacher-created lessons and those from other providers. (To be developed)

• Use visuals of toolkits and tools engaging language of creating our "strength toolkits" with strengths as tools.

• Weekly Grit Seesaw Journal post: Will need to develop prompt and potential categories for students to draw a picture of and/or take a photo of their grit in action. They then voice-record their response.

• Work with students' ideas to learn about and strengthen their grit.

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• Design a lesson around the question “How do you think people succeed?”

• Draw A Picture Activity to move into one's stretch zone with a growth mindset.

• Grit wall (and possibly a virtual one via Padlet) in each classroom where students post examples of their efforts. Build in weekly time for students to share their stories of perseverance and growth mindset. Have them draw pictures with descriptions to go up on a designated wall of the classroom.

• Journal: Good Doc or paper version. The teacher provided prompts and in time work with students to create new prompts. Could be a section of the portfolio.

• Lesson Listing - Access teacher-created lessons and those from other providers. (To be developed)

• Teaching Grit in a 5th-Grade Classroom: Develop an activity around the teaching grit video from Edutopia. One activity could be to have students choose one way they are persevering in their lives to storyboard what the sections of the video would present.

• Work with students' ideas to learn and strengthen their grit.

Learning About Grit:

Websites>

Character Lab

Books>

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool

Parent Engagement:

• Ask someone to video record the strength in action and publicize the efforts via social media (#----------) and the school website.

• Family Tree of Strengths: Provide parents with definitions and what strengths can look like in action. Provide a family tree graphic organizer with space for names and the individual’s main strengths. Offer prompts to guide parents to explain how family members and earlier generations lived specific strengths.

• Have students take their character cards home to teach their parents about their strengths.

• Strength-based Parenting - Share with your parents the Dr. Lea Waters website which includes resources and information on her book. Here is an article to help with your understanding of strength-based parenting.

• Teachers send specific reminders to have family talks around the grit reflection products the students produce.

• Teachers share with parents the idea of weekly sharing with their children examples of their perseverance.

• Use our various communication pathways to inform parents of their children strengthening their ability to persevere.

• VIA Strengths Survey: Send parents information about the strengths and the English language Strengths Survey that they can take. The results can offer a discussion starting point for families.

Character Lab Research References

Character Lab Image Source

¹ Niemiec, R. M., & McGrath, R. E. (2019). The power of character strengths: appreciate and ignite your positive personality. Cincinnati, OH: VIA Institute on Character.

² Embedding Character Strengths. Institute of Positive Education. With permission.