Over the years we have written about grit and growth mindset here at Educational Renaissance. These are important areas of recent research that align well with the aims of our educational renewal movement. But one of the really tricky issues is whether we can teach grit and growth mindset. Is it the case that children are either gritty or not? What do we do when a child comes to us with a fixed mindset? We might be committed to the ideas of grit and growth mindset, but to really have transformative classrooms, we need to consider the question of how we cultivate these dispositions in our students.
A Review of Grit and Growth Mindset
To begin with, let’s spell out what each of these dispositions are. Grit is the concept popularized by the research and publication of Angela Duckworth, professor of psychology and the University of Pennsylvania. In her 2016 book entitled Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, she simply refers to grit as the “combination of passion and perseverance,” (8) a point highlighted in the subtitle. A further definition is “the ability to sustain effort and interest towards long-term goals.” Grit, then, encompasses the ability to engage in effortful work and situate that effort within a long-range trajectory of growth.
A growth mindset is similar to grit in that it incorporates effort and goals. However, it differs from grit by articulating a belief that “your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others,” so states Carol Dweck in her book Mindset (7). Notice how it brings effort into contact with strategies and help. As teachers, we fit into the growth mindset framework by being individuals who can help students grow and discover new strategies where their effort can lead to accomplishing their goals. The opposite of a growth mindset is a fixed mindset, the understanding of oneself as incapable of change.
Let’s dig a little deeper by considering an illustration. There are many high performers who exemplify grit and growth mindset. For example, an athlete like Michael Jordan achieved greatness in the NBA through a relentless pursuit of excellence on the basketball court. Yet, early in his life, he encountered an obstacle. He was cut from his high school basketball team. Rather than playing varsity basketball at Laney High School, he was placed on the JV team. He shared in a Newsweek interview how this drove him to work hard. “Whenever I was working out and got tired and figured I ought to stop, I’d close my eyes and see that list in the locker room without my name on it. That usually got me going again.” This drive shows both grit – in that he applied sustained effort to reach long-term goals – and a growth mindset – practicing new skills and learning from coaches along the way. He could have easily taken a fixed mindset and decided basketball wasn’t for him. But instead he had a fundamental belief that he could grow and change the characteristics that were in his control.
Bringing this a little closer to home, we need not set ourselves or our students the goal of NBA greatness to instill the dispositions of grit and growth mindset. There are some simple practices that enable students to engage in effortful work that achieves forward momentum towards tangible goals such as better handwriting, faster times on math facts tests, or the completion of a quality essay. Here we will lay out several concepts and skills that we can use to encourage students along the pathway of grit and growth mindset.
The North Macedonian Study
In a study conducted with middle-school students during the beginning of the 2016 Spring semester in North Macedonia, researchers implemented a curriculum aimed at instructing students in the tenets of deliberate practice, with the goal of discovering whether grit can be acquired at this critical stage of development. I think it is instructive to observe the framework of the curriculum used. It was broken into two parts. The first lays down the deliberate practice framework: “(i) identify stretch goals, (ii) seek feedback, (iii) concentrate, and (iv) repeat until mastery.” (Santos, et al. “Can grit be taught?” 2022). According to Anders Ericsson, “Deliberate efforts to improve one’s performance beyond its current level demands full concentration and often requires problem-solving and better methods of performing the tasks.” (Ericsson, “Deliberate Practice and Acquisition of Expert Performance,” 2008). In other words, to grow a skill or improve performance, it takes focused attention as well as guidance to find new strategies in whatever domain we are working in.
Let’s consider the example of a timed math facts test. Begin by identifying a stretch goal. Ask students to write down for themselves a reasonable, yet moderately difficult time to beat. The feedback should be rather immediate, as students write down their time after completing each math facts test. Before each timed test, have students consciously focus their attention and remove any potential distractions. After each test – and this is often the important step that gets missed – have students analyze their test for problem areas or challenges they encountered. This is whether the teacher can propose new strategies to try. Similar procedures could be used for playing a line of music on the piano the exact same way two times in a row, making four free throws in a row, or entering a written narration into a copybook for eight minutes uninterrupted.
The second part of the curriculum used in the North Madedonian study consisted of training in motivation. This can be a difficult concept. But to begin with, the locus of motivation ought to be personal – self-motivation. Dweck describes motivation with words like “interest” and “positivity” (Mindset 61). She cites how Tiger Woods approached practice by making it fun, “I love working on shots, carving them this way and that, and proving to myself that I can hit a certain shot on command.” (102). In the language of grit, Duckworth uses the word “passion” to describe motivation. She challenges to notion to “follow your passions,” because our passions are often untamed and untrained (Grit 95-116). We need to discover what we are passionate about, or in the terms of motivation, what provides us with joy, interest and a feeling of positivity. There should be an amount of playful discovery, and repeated exposure to the intrinsic interest that captivates the heart.
The result of the North Macedonian study offers encouragement and a caution. It is clear that through training, students can acquire new beliefs about the value of their effort. Deliberate practice can be learned. The study showed that positive impacts on students were greater when the contents of deliberate practice training “were delivered by teachers.” What this means is that higher achievement occurs through not only goal setting and effort on the part of the individual student, but with support by what Vygotsky calls a “more knowledgeable other.” Now, while the study showed an increase in what is called “the perseverance-of-effort facet of grit,” there was a decrease in the “consistency-of-interest facet.” In other words, students grew in their willingness to work hard towards a goal, but they lost interest in that goal. They suggest that given the age of middle school students, they are not settled in their interest in long-term goals. To that end, it may be more important to provide shorter-range goals as well as a diversity of interests that students can sample as they learn how to implement deliberate practice.
Practical Tips for Training Students in Grit and the Growth Mindset
In her book Mindset, Dweck shares how to pass on the growth mindset. Her discussion points out that many parents and teachers who have a growth mindset encounter difficulties passing it on to students. Let’s begin by listing the three major pieces of advice she delineates.
Praise your students the right way. Instead of offering general praise (“good job”) or praise of the child’s ability (“you’re great at math”), be sure to offer specific praise that focuses on the “child’s learning process” (219). For instance, “You really worked hard to get that answer. That must feel good!” By praising effortful practice and overcoming challenges, we encourage and support their perseverance.
Embrace setbacks and failures. Parents, children and teachers suffer a fear of failure. But “setbacks are good things that should be embraced” and “setbacks should be used as a platform for learning” (219). One approach is to highlight the challenge as an obstacle to overcome. Imagine a student struggling to pronounce a multisyllabic word. The teacher who responds, “Johnny found a challenging word, let’s work through this one together.” Finding a response that ennobles hurdles, difficulties and failure supports the growth mindset.
Work towards understanding instead of mere memorization. There is a place for memory work, but the value of memorization can be fairly shallow and can lead to a fixed mindset. Helping students understand what it is they are reading or calculating promotes a growth mindset. Now in mathematics, it is imperative that students learn math facts and formulas by heart. I spend time working on this very skill. But more important than having instant recall is the ability to apply formulas and operations to the correct problem. So, asking the “why” question repeatedly moves the work toward understanding, and therefore growth. Other questions that can be asked to highlight understanding are, “What are typical errors we might find with this kind of problem?” or, “Is there a different way we could approach this problem?”
Model the growth mindset in the work you do. Both grit and the growth mindset can be caught through modeling or a mimetic approach. When we are teaching, we often think we need to be perfect experts of our content. This notion is a fixed mindset. Instead, we should view our knowledge as growing, even in subjects we have taught for many years. When students hear us say things like, “Oh, this is a concept I still struggle with” or “Here’s how I approach this because it always trips me up” we are communicating that learning is a process and that some areas of learning require effort.
Similarly, share stories of failures and challenges you have overcome. Relating to the stage of learning your students are in can help them envision themselves as growing into a more mature version of themselves. This is a core concept in habit training – envisioning the more mature self. I have shared with students about poor grades I received in school, ways I have needed to learn how to study or organize my calendar. Even though I was fairly poor at managing assignments while in high school, I grew in this skill during my college years. There is a concept of the “resume of failures,” which was a viral sensation when Princeton professor of psychology, Johannes Haushofer, uploaded his “CV of failures” online. Keeping track of these failures can provide a storehouse of stories we can share as we guide and mentor our students in the ways of the growth mindset.
Not only should we share our own stories, have students share their past experiences of overcoming challenges. Even our youngest students can share moments they have had to apply themselves through grit and determination to accomplish something. They likely have all the materials needed to cultivate a growth mindset from their own past experiences. It only takes a little reminding to get them engaged in a proper mindset for effortful work.
Finally, get students talking about approaches to overcome challenges. This means we need to be equipped with questions that get the students thinking in the growth mindset. A simple question that could be applied across all situations is, “What’s a different way you could approach this?” Finding new strategies can be very empowering to students. Too often we think we ought to be providing answers and strategies – and there’s definitely a role for that. But beginning with student talk about the nature of the challenges they are facing and providing them the tools to overcome those challenges through guided questioning can powerfully shift them out of the fixed mindset into the growth mindset.
Watch an in-depth training session on how to implement deliberate practice in your classroom. Learn what it means to aim for excellence and to cultivate virtues, drawing upon modern research into high performance practice.
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