The Key to Success? Grit
When
I was ____years old, I
left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job
that was even more demanding: teaching. I went to teach seventh
graders math in the New York City public schools.And like any
__________, I made
quizzes and tests. I gave out homework assignments. When
the work came back, I calculated grades.
What
struck me was that IQ was not the only difference between my
best and my worst students. Some of my strongest performers did
not have stratospheric IQ scores. Some of my smartest kids
weren't doing so well. And that got me ____________. The
kinds of things you need to learn in seventh grade math,sure, they're
hard: ratios, decimals, the area of a parallelogram. But these
concepts are not impossible,and I was firmly convinced that every one
of my students could learn the material if they worked
____________and long
enough.
After
several more years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that
what we need in education is a much better understanding of
students and learning from a motivational perspective, from
a psychological perspective. In education, the one thing we know
how to ___________ best
is IQ. But what if doing well in school and in life depends
on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily?
So
I left the classroom, and I went to graduate school to become a
psychologist. I started studying kids and adults in all
kinds of super challenging settings, and in every study my
question was, who is successful here and why? My
__________team and I
went to West Point Military Academy. We tried to predict which
cadets would stay in military training and which would drop
out. We went to the National Spelling Bee and tried to
predict which children would advance farthest in competition. We
studied rookie teachers working in really
____________neighborhoods, asking which teachers are still going
to be here in teaching by the end of the school year, and
of those, who will be the most effective at
_____________learning
outcomes for their students? We partnered with private
companies, asking, which of these salespeople is going to keep
their jobs? And who's going to earn the most money? In all
those very different contexts,one characteristic emerged as a
significant predictor of success. And it wasn't
__________intelligence. It
wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't IQ. It
was grit.
Grit
is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is
having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day
out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for
years, and working really hard to make that future a
reality. Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.
A
few years ago, I started studying grit in the ____________public
schools. I asked thousands of high school juniors to take
grit questionnaires, and then waited around more than a year to
see who would graduate.Turns out that grittier kids were
significantly more likely to graduate, even when I matched them
on every _____________ I could measure, things like family
income, standardized achievement test scores, even how safe
kids felt when they were at school. So it's not just at West
Point or the National Spelling Beethat grit matters. It's also
in school, especially for kids at risk for dropping out.
To
me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we
know, how little science knows, about building it. Every
day, parents and teachers ask me, "How do I build grit in
kids? What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do
I keep them motivated for the long run?" The honest answer
is, I don't know.
What
I do know is that talent doesn't make you gritty. Our data show
very clearly that there are many talented individuals who
simply do not follow through on their commitments. In fact, in
our data, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to
measures of _________.
So
far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is
something called "growth mindset." This is an idea
developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and it is the
belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can
change with your ___________. Dr.
Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the
brain and how it changes and grows in response to
challenge, they're much more likely to ____________when they
fail, because they don't believe that failure is a permanent
condition.
So
growth mindset is a great idea for building grit. But we need
more. And that's where I'm going to end my remarks, because
that's where we are. That's the work that stands before us. We
need to take our best ideas, our _____________intuitions, and
we need to test them. We need to measure whether we've been
successful, and we have to be willing to fail, to be wrong, to
start over again with lessons learned.
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