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Perseverance through passions

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Teaching Grit Cultivates Resilience and Perseverance

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Angela Duckworth

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"The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is I'm not afraid to die on a treadmill. I will not be outworked, period. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me, you might be all of those things - you got it on me in nine categories. But if we get on the treadmill together, there's two things: You're getting off first, or I'm going to die. It's really that simple..." -Oscar-nominated actor and Grammy award-winning musician Will Smith

The metaphor of achievement as a race recalls Aesop's fable of the tortoise and the hare. This oft-told story, which many of us heard as children in one form or another, preaches the value of plodding on, no matter how slow or uneven our progress, toward goals that at times seem impossibly far away. At the starting line, it is the hare who is expected to finish first. Sure enough, the hare quickly outpaces the tortoise, accumulating so great a lead that he lies down to take a nap mid-race. When the hare awakes, the tortoise, who all the while has been laboring toward his destination, is too close to the finish line to beat. Tortoise 1, hare 0.

It may be obvious that effort and stamina are required to accomplish anything worthwhile in life. But how easy is it to forget this fact in moments when we feel tortoise-like relative to our seemingly hare-like peers? Who among us presses on even as we are passed by those stronger, faster, and/or smarter? Who among us stays the course, running the race we committed to rather than choosing a different, new pursuit, after stumbling and losing ground? Who lives life as if it were a marathon, not a sprint?

Measuring Individual Differences in Grit

Recognition of the necessity of hard work and persistence is age-old and universal. Nevertheless, individuals differ dramatically in their stamina for long-term goals. Gritty individuals are tortoise-like, distinguished by their propensity to maintain "effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress" (Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, & Kelly, 2007, p. 1088). Less gritty individuals are, in contrast, more easily discouraged, prone to take "naps" mid-course, and frequently led off track by new passions.

Early 20th-century psychologists attempted to measure trait-level persistence using tasks of physical fortitude (e.g., arm extension tasks) and mental effort (e.g., unsolvable anagrams). But whether perseverance in controlled laboratory challenges, lasting minutes or seconds, reflects the same trait that inclines individuals toward the dogged pursuit of their personally valued goals over the course of months and years is an unanswered question.

An alternative measurement approach, pioneered in the same historical era, entails asking respondents to judge their own or another individual's tendency to persist toward goals over time. For example, in one of the earliest published studies on personality, Edward Webb collected ratings by teachers of their undergraduate students on, among other items, the "tendency not to abandon tasks from mere changeability" and the "tendency not to abandon tasks in the face of obstacles." While Webb interpreted these items to mark a very general factor of strong character he termed will, re-analysis of Webb's data demonstrates that these items load on a more specific personality factor: Big Five Conscientiousness.

Following this tradition, we typically assess grit using self-report or informant-report questionnaires. The Brief Grit Scale, for example, comprises items describing consistency of interests (e.g., the reverse-coded item, "I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one") and long-term persistence of effort (e.g., "Setbacks don't discourage me," "I finish whatever I begin"). Consistent with the re-analysis of Webb's data, we find that grit clearly belongs to the Big Five Conscientiousness family, particularly overlapping with achievement motivation. Grit, however, is distinguished from the general tendency to be reliable, self-controlled, orderly, and industrious, with its emphasis on long-term stamina rather than short-term intensity.

Findings From Our Lab

Our research suggests that prodigious talent is no guarantee of grit. In fact, in most samples, grit and talent are either orthogonal or slightly negatively correlated. To the extent that talented people are, on average, less gritty, individuals who are both extremely talented and extremely gritty should be particularly rare. Indeed, objective measures of achievement are typically log-normal in distribution; the most accomplished scientists, novelists, artists and entrepreneurs are dramatically more successful than what would be expected were achievement distributed in a normal bell curve. A hypothesis we aim to test in future research is that talented individuals, for whom learning and advancement come easily, have fewer opportunities (or, more aptly, necessities) to develop a resilient approach to failure and setbacks.

In our cross-sectional analyses, grit increases monotonically throughout adulthood. One possibility is that people have a growing appreciation of the efficacy of effort as they age. Alternatively, consistent with the literature on identity formation, it may be that the value of specializing versus exploring diverse pursuits shifts as we age. Early in life, it may make more sense to privilege exploration over specialization. Until we develop a solid understanding of our own inherent interests and abilities, it may make sense to hold off on committing to lifelong goals. Later in development, it may be increasingly adaptive to stay with a particular vocational (or avocational) pursuit, especially since division of labor in our modern economy tends to reward specialization.

Most of our research on grit has taken the form of prospective longitudinal studies, in which we ask whether grit predicts a range of objective success outcomes, even after accounting for individual differences in ability. For instance, among West Point military cadets entering their first summer of training - a transition from civilian to military life known colloquially as "Beast Barracks" - grittier cadets were less likely to drop out. In contrast, an index of talent called the Whole Candidate Score, which integrates SAT scores, class rank, demonstrated leadership ability, and physical aptitude, did not predict retention.

What mechanisms link grit to achievement? One important behavioral mechanism is deliberate practice, defined as practice activities designed to improve specific aspects of performance. In a study of finalists in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, we found that grittier children completed more hours of deliberate practice, operationalized as the study and memorization of word spellings and word roots in solitude. A mediation analysis revealed that time spent on deliberate practice fully explained the prospective correlation between grit and spelling bee performance. Consistent with the broader literature on deliberate practice and skill acquisition, practice activities rated by spellers as more pleasurable and less effortful (e.g., reading for pleasure, being quizzed by their parents) were dramatically less predictive of spelling performance. Instead, it was the hardest, least pleasurable practice that really paid off - and the grittiest kids who were able to do more of it.

Getting Grittier

Paul Tough's recent bestseller, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and Hidden Power of Character, has fueled popular interest in grit. As a consequence, we are frequently asked by parents and teachers how grit could be intentionally cultivated. Are there specific activities or classroom practices that encourage young people to commit to something they really care about and to maintain their commitments in the face of challenge? Can students be trained to develop greater tolerance for effortful, focused, and not-altogether-pleasant deliberate practice? We are just beginning to explore the psychological antecedents of grit, work which we hope will someday generate concrete recommendations and interventions for parents and educators who want to foster grit. Our first step in this direction has been to examine the relationship between grit and optimistic explanatory style. In a study of novice teachers surveyed before they entered the classroom, we found that more optimistic teachers (i.e., those who tended to attribute good events to global and stable causes and bad events to temporary and specific causes) rated themselves higher in both grit and life satisfaction. Grit and life satisfaction, in turn, predicted teacher effectiveness assessed at the end of the school year.

At present, we are investigating the link between grit and growth mindset, which is conceptually related to optimistic explanatory style but more specifically refers to the implicit belief that intelligence is malleable rather than fixed. In as yet unpublished cross-sectional studies of school-age children, we have found moderate, positive associations between grit and growth mindset, suggesting that growth mindset, like optimistic explanatory style, may contribute to the tendency to sustain effort toward and commitment to goals. In separate work, APS Fellow Carol Dweck at Stanford University and colleagues have now accumulated an impressive body of correlational and experimental evidence demonstrating that a growth mindset encourages children to construe failures and setbacks as opportunities to learn and improve, rather than as evidence that they are permanently lacking in ability. Given this work and similarly conceived curricula aimed at teaching optimistic explanatory style, one promising direction for future research entails directly measuring the impact of directing attention to specific, changeable aspects of performance on trait-level grit.

Future Directions in Grit Research

Other than explanatory style and growth mindset, what else disposes individuals to be gritty? To pursue very long-term goals, sustaining effort and interest even when progress is halting, would seem to require the capacity to delay gratification. Thus, one intriguing possibility is that grit later in life is augured by early individual differences in the ability to forgo immediate pleasure for the sake of greater, deferred benefit. While this hypothesis has not been directly tested in prior research, it is consistent with the observation that preschool children who are better able to delay gratification tend to grow up to be more successful, competent adolescents and adults. It may also help to explain age-related increases in grit, since it is well-established that the capacity to delay gratification improves between childhood and adulthood. Thus, the growing experimental literature on strategies that facilitate regulation of attention, emotion, and behavior in the presence of immediate temptations, could be relevant to grit and its cultivation.

Another question we have pondered but not yet tested empirically is whether more grit is always better or, alternatively, whether there is some cost to being gritty that must be traded off against its benefits. There may be contexts in which grit begets lower achievement. For instance, grittier individuals may be more vulnerable to the sunk-cost fallacy, less open to information that contradicts their present beliefs, or otherwise handicapped by judgment and decision-making biases. Further, grittier individuals, by staying the course, may sometimes miss out on new opportunities because they are so focused on their original goal. Contrariwise, it is possible that a focus on valued long-term goals is compatible with active, open-minded judgment and decision making.

Moving Forward

In 1907, William James speculated, "We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental resources...men the world over possess amounts of resource, which only exceptional individuals push to their extremes of use" (James, 1907, p. 322-323). James advocated that psychologists direct their efforts at two main questions: First, what is the full range of human abilities? Second, through what diverse means are these abilities unleashed? In our view, the past century has witnessed more progress toward the first challenge than the second. Relatively less is known about traits that enable expression of the abilities in which we are now well-versed. We have, in other words, focused our attention on identifying and understanding the hares among us. It is time to think seriously about the tortoises and what keeps them going.

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"The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is I'm not afraid to die on a treadmill. I will not be outworked, period. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me, you might be all of those things - you got it on me in nine categories.

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Background

Any discussion of curiosity must begin with Daniel Berlyne, considered to be the seminal mind in the study of curiosity. He associated curiosity with exploratory behavior. He identified two forms of exploratory behavior:

diversive (e.g., seeking relief from boredom)

specific (e.g., uncertainty, conceptual conflict)

It is specific curiosity that is of most interest to educators.
Berlyne's colleague, Day, extended the work, representing it graphically as a curvilinear relationship between level of arousal (or stimulation) and efficiency (1982).

At the optimal level, a person enters the Zone of Curiosity characterized by exploration, excitement, and interest. Below the optimal level, the individual is unmotivated, disinterested, and inefficient. Beyond the optimal level, the individual enters a Zone of Anxiety with resulting behaviors including defensiveness, disinterest, avoidance, and inefficiency.

Other researchers have placed more weight on cognitive and information processing factors in explaining curiosity. Loewenstein (1994), for example, proposed an information-gap theory of curiosity where a feeling of deprivation occurs when an individual becomes aware of a difference between "what one knows and what one wants to know."

Whatever explanation one accepts, it cannot be dismissed that curiosity is a necessary ingredient for motivating scholarship.

Individual Differences

Not everyone is equally curious. Curiosity can be viewed as both a stable personality feature (trait) and as a condition that can be manipulated (state). Naylor (1981) describes trait curiosity as individual differences in capacity to experience curiosity and state curiosity as individual differences in response to a curiosity-arousing situation.
Strategies That Foster Creativity in Students
Most educators would agree that fostering the scholarly attribute of curiosity in learners is an important task. Providing students with adequate guidance while affording them the opportunities for exploration, however, is easier said than done.

As mentioned earlier, not all students are highly curious, and what might stimulate curiosity in some students might result in anxiety for others. It becomes the job of the educator to recognize these differences and control the classroom or other learning environment to accommodate all learners. With this caveat in mind, the following are ten strategies for fostering curiosity.

Strategy 1: Curiosity as a Hook

Use curiosity as a primary motivator at the beginning of a lesson by starting, for example, with a thought-provoking question or surprising statement.

Strategy 2: Conceptual Conflict

Introduce a conceptual conflict when possible. Learners will feel compelled to explore the conflict until it is resolved. When the student has resolved the conceptual conflict, he or she will have a feeling of satisfaction.

Strategy 3: An Atmosphere for Questions

Create an atmosphere where students feel comfortable about raising questions and where they can test their own hypotheses through discussion and brainstorming. (Not only does this foster curiosity, but it also helps to build confidence.)

Strategy 4: Time

Allow adequate time for exploration of a topic. If the teacher has been successful in stimulating curiosity, then learners will want to persist in that exploration.

Strategy 5: Choices

Give students the opportunity for choosing topics within a subject area. For example, in a writing class, the student can explore a topic of his or her interest while accomplishing the goals of the writing task. Being allowed to choose a topic that is intrinsically motivating will help sustain curiosity.

Strategy 6: Curiosity-Arousing Elements

Introduce one or more of the following elements into a lesson to arouse curiosity:

Incongruity

Contradictions

Novelty

Surprise

Complexity

Uncertainty

Learners will desire to explore the source of the incongruity, contradiction, novelty, and so on, and the resulting information will satisfy their curiosity.
Strategy 7: The Right Amount of Stimulation

Be aware of the degree of stimulation in learning situation. Remember, there are individual differences when it comes to curiosity. Some learners will become anxious if the stimulus is too complex, too uncertain, too novel, etc. They may quickly leave the "Zone of Curiosity" and enter the "Zone of Anxiety."

Strategy 8: Exploration

Encourage students to learn through active exploration. Encourage questions such as, "What would happen if . . .?"

Strategy 9: Rewards

Allow the exploration and discovery to be its own reward. Use external rewards judiciously as some studies have shown that extrinsic rewards given for a task that a learner finds intrinsically motivating may dampen future interest in the activity.

Strategy 10: Modeling

Model curiosity. Ask questions. Engage in specific exploration to resolve a question posed, and demonstrate enthusiasm.
Conclusion
When you instill curiosity in children, you are encouraging their desire to learn. That is one of the greatest gifts that you as an educator can give your students.

Berlyne, D. E. (1960). Conflict, arousal, and curiosity. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Day, H. I. (1982). "Curiosity and the interested explorer." NSPI Journal, May, 19-22.

Gorlitz , D. (1987). Curiosity, Imagination, and Play: On the Development of Spontaneous Cognitive and Motivational Processes. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Earl Baum Associates.

Naylor, F. D. (1981). "A state-trait curiosity inventory." Australian Psychologist, 16(2), 172-183.

Examples of Lessons That Spark Curiosity
Using Children's Natural Curiosity to Lead to Descriptive Writing (Grades: K-2)
URL: http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=52

Jacob Have I Loved (Grades: 6-8)
URL: http://memory.loc.gov/learn/lessons/99/jacob/intro.html

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Background Any discussion of curiosity must begin with Daniel Berlyne, considered to be the seminal mind in the study of curiosity. He associated curiosity with exploratory behavior. He identified two forms of exploratory behavior: diversive (e.g., seeking relief from boredom) specific (e.g., uncertainty, conceptual conflict) It is specific curiosity that is of most interest to educators.

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Recently, Angela Duckworth - the scientist behind the buzzy term grit - was planning her tour to promote her new book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, which was published last week. Someone floated an idea: Wouldn't it make sense for Duckworth to visit the schools that had applied her grit curriculum? This sounds like a great publicity tie-in, until, that is, you consider the fact that there is no grit curriculum - at least, not one Duckworth has everwritten.

It's a decent example of the problem with grit, an exciting idea for which the enthusiasm has rapidly outpaced the science. The concept as it's often understood holds that talent isn't the only key to success; it may not even be the most important key to success. Hard work, determination, and perseverance are what trulycounts.

These are alluring ideas, similar to the ones that helped propel Malcolm Gladwell's so-called "10,000 hour rule" to mainstream popularity. And so it's little wonder that grit has taken off. A 2007 academic paper lead-authored by Duckworth has been cited 1,157 times, according to Google Scholar, and Duckworth's six-minute from 2013 on the subject has been watched more than 8.4 million times. (Duckworth has said she was not thrilled with the title assigned to that talk: "The key to success? Grit.") But the concept has perhaps especially resonated with educators across the country: Earlier this year, school districts in the San Francisco area announced plans to begin testing students on grit and other forms of emotional intelligence; other schools have instituted things like Grit Week, in which students set goals for their scores on upcoming standardizedtests.

This is a problem. The existing research on grit is exciting, but it's too new to apply to educational policy in any meaningful way. As a result, too many of the current applications are shallow interpretations that only sort of capture the vague gist of grit, no matter how well-intentioned the educators backing them happen to be. In a review of Duckworth's book published by the magazine Quillette (and shared widely on social media over the weekend by educators and psychologists alike), writer Parker Brown references research published earlier this year that seems to poke a few holes in the theory ofgrit:

More importantly, they found that what Duckworth and colleagues defined as grit is hardly distinguishable from conscientiousness, one of the classic Big Five traits in psychology. The study, which included a representative sample of students, measured grit against conscientiousness. Grit, researchers discovered, accounts for only an additional 0.5% of variation in test scores when compared with conscientiousness. , on the other hand, accounts for nearly 40%, according toPlomin.

Here's the thing: Duckworth completely, totally, absolutely agrees with this critique. She would also like to add: It's missing half thepicture.

Grit, as Duckworth has defined it in her research, is a combination of perseverance and passion - it's just that the former tends to get all the attention, while the latter is overlooked. "I think the misunderstanding - or, at least, one of them - is that it's only the perseverance part that matters," Duckworth told Science of Us. "But I think that the passion piece is at least as important. I mean, if you are really, really tenacious and dogged about a goal that's not meaningful to you, and not interesting to you - then that's just drudgery. It's not just determination - it's having a direction that you careabout."

It's a strange thing, Duckworth said, to have played a significant part in the creation of an idea, only to have that idea run away from you and create a life of its own. In the case of grit, the enthusiasm for the work-ethic piece of the puzzle has outpaced the evidence, and schools across the country are trying to apply a concept that still hasn't had all the kinks quite worked out yet. Back to the test score example highlighted by Quillette: That research equated conscientiousness with grit, and so the finding that conscientiousness didn't predict higher scores - but did - led to the conclusion that grit doesn't live up to the hype. But this interpretation, Duckworth argues, leaves out the equally important other half of grit: passion. "That report was about, 'Well, maybe grit's not that important,'" Duckworth said. "And my thought when I read that was - how many kids who are 16 years old are passionate about their standardized reading and math scores forschool?"

Really, the sound of the word grit itself is not helping matters, Duckworth pointed out. The word sounds like sweatiness, or dirtiness; it brings to mind the unpleasantness of effort. You grit your teeth - or, for another example, think of the single-minded toughness embodied by the heroes in True Grit. Grit sounds serious; it does not, on the other hand, sound like muchfun.

As such, perseverance would seem to be the more difficult half of grit: How, for instance, do you get students to work harder on their schoolwork? And yet Duckworth's work has found just the opposite: It tends to be the passion part of grit that people need more help with. "I find that people's passion scores are lower than their perseverance scores," Duckworth said. She's not yet sure exactly why this is, but she has a theory. "One possibility is that people can learn to work hard and be resilient, but to find something that would make you say, 'This is so interesting to me - I'm so committed to it that I'm going to stick with it over years' - that kind of passion may, in some ways, be harder to comeby."

Recently, Duckworth heard about the school that was instituting a Grit Week in order to boost its students standardized testing scores, a goal she 100 percent would not have picked, for one simple reason: Who ever heard of a teenager being passionate about standardized tests? "The focus on just thinking about standardized test scores as being synonymous with achievement for teenagers is ridiculous, right?" she said. "There are so many things that kids care about, where they excel, where they try hard, where they learn important life lessons, that are not picked up by testscores.

"I mean, most kids, at that age, honestly, are finding their passions in things outside of school - being on the football team, or dancing ballet, or playing piano, or being in the school play. For some kids, it's getting a job, and finding that they really love selling things," she continued. "For that school ... I encouraged them to listen to me when I said, 'You know, I don't really think that's a great focus for Grit Week. Why don't we have a different focus, which is to talk about how to help them find goals that they do find meaningful?'"

The consequences of hasty applications of grit in an educational context are not yet clear, but Duckworth can imagine them. To be sure, it's not that she faults these educators - in many ways, she says, these are the best in the field, the ones who are most excited about trying innovative new ways of helping their students succeed. But by placing too much emphasis on grit, the danger is "that grit becomes a scapegoat - another reason to blame kids for not doing well, or to say that we don't have a responsibility as a society to help them." She worries that some interpretations of her work might make a student's failure seem like his problem, as if he just didn't work hard enough. "I think to separate and pit against each other character strengths on the one hand - like grit - and situational opportunities on the other is a false dichotomy," she said. "Kids need to develop character, and they need our support in doingso."

Currently, Duckworth is engaging in the somewhat meta challenge of applying a little grit to uncover the best potential ways to apply the existing grit research. Her Character Lab, at the University of Pennsylvania, is in the process of recruiting two dozen teachers, who will work together with scientists to come up with ways of translating the evidence into worksheets or curricula that would make sense for use in a classroom. One worry she has is that the initial enthusiasm over the idea may have led to some misapplications of grit in the classroom - things that inevitably will not work, and may in turn lead to grit being dismissed someday very soon as yet another passing fad. "I don't want to dampen the enthusiasm," she said. "But at the same time, I don't want us to get ahead ofourselves."

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Don't Believe the Hype About Grit, Pleads the Scientist Behind the Concept

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Recently, Angela Duckworth - the scientist behind the buzzy term grit - was planning her tour to promote her new book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance , which was published last week. Someone floated an idea: Wouldn't it make sense for Duckworth to visit the schools that had applied her grit curriculum?

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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Angela Duchworth

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Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance | Angela Lee Duckworth | TED

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Building the capacity to critique and revise

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critique and feedback - the story of austin's butterfly - Ron Berger

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Sir Ken Robinson

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Do schools kill creativity? | Sir Ken Robinson | TED

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Creativity in the Classroom

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Sparking Student Creativity: Practical Ways to Promote Innovative Thinking and Problem Solving

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Teaching isn't merely transmitting knowledge to students; it's also about teaching students to approach learning in engaging and unexpected ways. In Sparking Student Creativity: Practical Ways to Promote Innovative Thinking and Problem Solving, author and researcher Patti Drapeau explores ...