Wrestling With Grit

Angela Duckworth's Ted Talk on grit celebrates perseverance in academic achievement. Duckworth correctly asserts that IQ and talent do not always lead to success. Her formula, achievement = talent x effort is another phrasing of the coaching maxim that hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.

I almost used the TedTalk in a professional development session because her basic message is so appealing: in addition to teaching content, we also need to teach work ethic.

It begs the question.......what's the best way to go about doing this?

Do we teach work ethic by pilling on more worksheets? Do we teach work ethic by assigning tasks with complexity beyond our students' skill levels and withholding any supports that would help them be successful? Do we make "responsibility" and "work ethic" a prerequisite for the opportunity to learn anything? For example, shaming a student for failure to complete an assignment in a way that guarantees disengagement.

These are the questions that Paul Thomas and Ira Socol ask in their respective posts, The Poverty Trap: Slack, Not Grit, Creates Achievement and Angela Duckworth's Eugenics. They force us to wrestle with "grit" by making us  question. Are there times when our students need slack? Is it possible to use "grit" like a hammer?

I try to avoid coaching analogies, but before I stumbled into administration I spent twelve years coaching wrestling, a sport requiring perseverance.

I coached athletes who struggled with certain drills. They would say "I can't do that," and I would respond "You can't do that, yet." I never let them off the hook completely for attempting the drill, but I never made their inability to do one task restrict them from a chance to learn another. I also coached talented and driven athletes who had to be required to rest due to injuries or family situations. There were times over the course of a season when training peaked and times when it tapered off. Even in the very "gritty" sport of wrestling my coaching instincts told me sometimes "slack" was more appropriate.

And so it is in classrooms.

Our students need grit and perseverance, and our best teachers constantly calibrate how to do this best. How much? How fast? Which student needs a challenged? Which student needs more support? Determining the slack/grit ratio is not a science waiting to be perfected; it is an art.

More often than not, our teachers excel at this art.

Teaching is a tough job, a gritty job, taken on by tough, and caring, people. It is far more complicated, and beautiful, than a talk, a blog, or a word.