It’s also in school, especially for kids at risk for dropping out. So it’s not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee that grit matters. Turns out that grittier kids were significantly more likely to graduate, even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure, things like family income, standardized achievement test scores, even how safe kids felt when they were at school. I asked thousands of high school juniors to take grit questionnaires, and then waited around more than a year to see who would graduate. Grit is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint.Ī few years ago, I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools. 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 passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. It wasn’t good looks, physical health, and it wasn’t IQ. In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. We studied rookie teachers working in really tough 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 improving 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? We went to the National Spelling Bee and tried to predict which children would advance farthest in competition. We tried to predict which cadets would stay in military training and which would drop out. 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 research team and I went to West Point Military Academy. So I left the classroom, and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist. But what if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily?
TED TALK GRIT HOW TO
In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is IQ.
But these concepts are not impossible, and I was firmly convinced that every one of my students could learn the material if they worked hard and long enough.Īfter 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. The kinds of things you need to learn in seventh grade math, sure, they’re hard: ratios, decimals, the area of a parallelogram. Some of my smartest kids weren’t doing so well. Some of my strongest performers did not have stratospheric IQ scores. What struck me was that IQ was not the only difference between my best and my worst students. When the work came back, I calculated grades. And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests. I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools. When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching. At Hals & Hounds we believe in growing and elevating our team members, but empowering them to harness their passion and perseverance.
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