Tip: Grit & Growth Mindset
Like other pop psychology trends, it’s easy to over-apply ideas about grit and mindset, thinking that they provide easy interventions to improve student outcomes.
Thinking about applications of the ideas of grit and having a growth mindset continue to grow in popularity, and I am finding these ideas to be in an interesting juxtaposition with feedback I am hearing from colleagues about the challenges of teaching remotely. I get the sense that instructors feel a considerable amount of frustration with students who need more support navigating online courses this fall, while at the same time feeling diminished capacity to provide this level of hand-holding. There’s even a mask for it…
Humor aside, I think this semester more than ever we will see where “grittiness” and “having a growth mindset” stumble in explaining why some students are able to be successful and others are not. I am afraid that the students who will do well this year are the ones who come into the semester with advantages - technology, yes, but also freedom of physical and emotional space - that their peers may not all have. Equity issues are heightened this semester, and instructors are being asked to do more, in more ways, to address these concerns. In this context, what can we learn from grit and growth mindset theories that will help us help our students this fall?
GRIT
Angela Duckworth’s TED talk is a good place to start if you want an overview of what grit means. The basic claim is that grit = passion + perseverance. Duckworth famously based her initial theory on studies of West Point cadets and spelling bee national champions.
(More on the research behind the theory, and the TED talk, here.)
Trying to make our students grittier has been almost as controversial as it’s been popular, and Duckworth clarified her position a bit in a recent EdWeek blog, What Students Need Before Perseverance, where she argues that cultivating passion, especially for young people, is more important than demanding they become prematurely serious in their endeavors.
Yes, I believe in hard work. Yes, I believe resilience is a skill all students can learn. And yes, I see an important role for teachers to model hard work and resilience for students—now more than ever. But grit isn't just perseverance. Grit is passion, too, and when I think about which to prioritize for young people, passion comes first.
A major concern with the theory of grit is addressed by Bettina Love (author of “We Want To Do More Than Survive”). Love critiques how emphasizing grit ignores the social and cultural contexts of our students:
But what if your long-term goal is fighting to live, fighting racism? Is 400 years long enough? You cannot measure this type of grit, nor should you ignore it. African-Americans are resilient and gritty because we have to be to survive, but it is misleading, naive, and dangerous to remove our history on both sides of the water from the conversation about grit.
GROWTH MINDSET
Carol Dweck’s mindset model outlines two approaches to intelligence: either we believe it is static (part of who we are that largely doesn’t change over our lives) or we believe it can be developed (we can get better at doing things as we learn more & practice). If we can only get our students to adopt a growth mindset - praise the effort, not the outcome - they will learn to keep trying, and eventually will succeed.
Her talk (below) emphasizes the power of “not yet” to help students see that success is not either/or, achieved or failed - they may just not yet have achieved their goal.
Like helping students become gritter, helping them to develop a growth mindset has been exceedingly popular in press and education sources. Dweck has tried to correct what she calls “false growth mindset” by explaining that too many people are oversimplifying, or think they have a growth mindset when they really don’t, or have a growth mindset but are unable to pass that mindset on to their students. She wants teachers to focus on the learning process, not on effort alone:
A lot of parents or teachers say praise the effort, not the outcome. I say [that’s] wrong: Praise the effort that led to the outcome or learning progress; tie the praise to it.
In Aeon Magazine, Carl Hendrick critiques the foundations of Dweck’s growth mindset research, citing replicability issues as well as application issues. Hendrick (author of “What Does This Look Like in the Classroom? Bridging the Gap Between Research and Practice”) concludes:
The truth is we simply haven’t been able to translate the research on the benefits of a growth mindset into any sort of effective, consistent practice that makes an appreciable difference in student academic attainment.
Like other pop psychology trends (the persistent myth of learning styles, or the marshmallow test) it’s easy to over-simplify the research and over-apply ideas about grit and mindset to students, thinking that they provide easy interventions to improve student outcomes. As teachers, we know that there are no easy interventions that work in all contexts, for all students. I think this semester we will find that our compassion will be stretched just as much as our teaching skills and our technological savvy.
Read more here:
The Limits of “Grit” in the New Yorker, by David Denby.
Teen Vogue this summer - Coded Language Is Part of Our Racist Education System
Scientific American article on teaching a growth mindset
Growth Mindset: The Perils of a Good Research Story critiques easy adoption of any psychology-based intervention
Can Grit Save American Education, in the American Prospect
And, an in-depth conversation between Angela Duckworth and Neil deGrasse Tyson on his podcast, StarTalk