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Grit: The power of passion and perseverance

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Leaving a high-flying job in consulting, Angela Lee Duckworth took a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn’t the only thing separating the successful students from those who struggled. Here, she explains her theory of “grit” as a predictor of success.

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Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership -- starting with a golden circle and the question: “Why?” His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Wright brothers…

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The early results out of a Boston nonprofit are positive.

Alastair Grant / AP

And the science is clear-when brain capacity is used up on these worries and fears, there simply isn't as much bandwidth for other things.

Raising the most diverse generation of Americans ever
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Economic Mobility Pathways, or EMPath, has built its whole service-delivery model around this science, which it described in its 2014 report, " Using Brain Science to Design New Pathways Out of Poverty." The Boston nonprofit started out as Crittenton Women's Union, a merger of two of the city's oldest women-serving organizations, both of which focused on improving the economic self-sufficiency of families. It continues that work with a new name and a burgeoning focus on intergenerational mobility.

After years of coaching adults and watching those benefits trickle down to children, EMPath has brought children into the center of its model-offering a way out of intergenerational poverty with brain science.

Elisabeth Babcock, the president and CEO of EMPath, said people in poverty tend to get stuck in vicious cycles where stress leads to bad decision-making, compounding other problems and reinforcing the idea that they can't improve their own lives.

"What we're trying to do is create virtuous cycles where people take a step and they find out they can accomplish something that they might not have thought they could accomplish, and they feel better about themselves," Babcock said. Maybe that step helps them earn more money, solves a child-care problem that leads to better child behavior, or simply establishes a sense of control over their own lives. All of these things reduce stress, freeing up more mental bandwidth for further positive steps.

Intergen mentors visit participating families and facilitate conversations that prompt both adults and children to make future-oriented and contextualized decisions, ones that take into account other important domains. Their goal is to help the adults in the families become mentors for themselves and their children. Eventually, they hope, they make their own contributions obsolete.

Stephanie Brueck, the senior coordinator of the Intergenerational Mobility Project, recently sat down with a single mom, Ginnelle V., who asked her last name not be used to preserve her family's privacy, and Ginnelle's five children, four girls and one boy who range in age from kindergarten through college-aged.

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Over the last year, Brueck has helped the family think through both personal and family goal-setting. Ginnelle's youngest, 5-year-old Cyres, has a medical condition that likely will require an invasive surgery that can be delayed through certain exercises. The family's doctor gave them an overwhelming list of dozens of exercises, few of which Cyres can do on his own. Still, exercise became Cyres's personal goal for the Intergen Project.

Brueck created an easier-to-use fitness plan and helped Ginnelle think about working up to the doctor's original list-starting with five push-ups, for example, and helping Cyres eventually reach the recommended 25. Looking back, Ginnelle thinks it's strange she couldn't break down an overwhelming task into more approachable steps on her own.

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The early results out of a Boston nonprofit are positive. And the science is clear-when brain capacity is used up on these worries and fears, there simply isn't as much bandwidth for other things.

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10 Principles for Schools of Modern Learning

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10 Principles for Schools of Modern Learning

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Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories -- and maybe, a way forward.

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What Motivates Your Students to Work Hard?

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What Motivates Your Students to Work Hard?

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What motivates your students to work hard?

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Mindset Kit - Introducing students to the malleable brain, Teaching a Growth Mindset

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Researchers have learned a great deal about what works and what doesn't work, and we're still learning! Read about some of the lessons we've learned so far.

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10 Ways to Instill a Growth Mindset in Students

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10 Ways to Instill a Growth Mindset in Students

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Make math learning fun and effective with Prodigy Math Game. Free for students, parents and educators. Sign up today!

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Contrary to popular belief, high achievement isn't merely a product of talent and ability.

In fact, our internal beliefs about our own abilities, skills, and potential actually fuel behavioral patterns and predict success. Leading Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck argues that the pivotal quality separating successful people from their unsuccessful counterparts is whether they think their intelligence can be developed versus believing it is fixed.

"There is no relation between students' abilities or intelligence and the development of mastery-oriented qualities. Some of the very brightest students avoid challenges, dislike effort, and wilt in the face of difficulty. And some of the less bright students are real go-getters, thriving on challenge, persisting intensely when things get difficult, and accomplishing more than you expected.

A person with a fixed mindset believes that his or her intelligence is static, while a person with a growth mindset believes that his or her intelligence can be developed. The latter group is thus more likely to embrace challenges, persist in the face of setbacks, and see effort as a natural path to mastery. The distinction between these two extremes has tremendous implications for motivation, productivity, and confidence; in the pursuit of success, mindset is everything.

A growth mindset has a sizable impact on business efficacy and is a determinant of successful athletes. It is a critical factor separating high achieving students from those who struggle in the classroom, and is thus often discussed in the context of its applications for education. A growth mindset has been repeatedly identified as a robust predictor of academic success; it increases students' motivation, grades, achievement, and test scores.

The good news: a growth mindset can be taught. Dweck found that when students undertook an intervention to move them from a fixed to growth mindset, they immediately began performing at higher levels and achieved greater academic success. In fact, strategies and teaching methods geared toward cultivating this mindset in students are gaining widespread traction. It is accordingly well-documented that the most successful countries in the world base schooling on growth mindset messages and beliefs.

Integrating growth mindset-oriented learning processes into the classroom, then, can have a beneficial impact on learning. Let's talk about how to do it.

Strategies for helping students develop a growth mindset

1. Think about setting achievable micro-goals to encourage students' consistent, incremental progress. Small wins repeated over time can lead to a growth mindset (and increased confidence!).

2. When students succeed, praise their efforts and strategies as opposed to their intelligence. Praise for intelligence can actually undermine motivation and performance, as children praised for intelligence increasingly view intelligence as a fixed trait; in the face of failure, these children will display less task persistence, less task enjoyment, and overall worse performance.

3. Help students focus on and value the process of learning. Without this emphasis on learning, students will often base self perceptions of intelligence and worth to grades received, promoting a fixed mindset. While grades are important, the value of learning should be prioritized.

4. Design classroom activities that involve cooperative--rather than competitive or individualistic--work. Research suggests that students are more motivated and successful when working in groups. Students feel a sense of responsibility to the group to try their best, and thus will experience the positive feedback loop of effort and success, encouraging the development of a growth mindset.

Are there other strategies you use in the classroom to help your students develop a growth mindset? Which do you find most effective?

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4 Ways to Encourage a Growth Mindset in the Classroom - EdSurge News

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Contrary to popular belief, high achievement isn't merely a product of talent and ability. In fact, our internal beliefs about our own abilities, skills, and potential actually fuel behavioral patterns and predict success. Leading Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck argues that the pivotal quality separating successful people from their unsuccessful counterparts is whether they think their intelligence can be developed versus believing it is fixed.

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Resources and Articles

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Exploring Personalized Learning | NextGen Learning

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As you begin to explore personalized learning, it may be challenging to imagine this new form of teaching and learning in your school. You may find yourself asking, "What does it look like to have 25 students 'working at their own pace'?" or "How big of a role does technology play?"