Tag: Angela Duckworth

How to Teach Grit and the Growth Mindset

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

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Finding Flow through Effort: Intensity as the Key to Academic Success

At the intersection of challenge and skill, the state of flow emerges: a state of total immersion and enjoyment. Jason Barney’s book on flow, entitled The Joy of Learning: Finding Flow through Classical Education connects Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s study of flow with the classical Christian classroom. In this article I plan to build on Jason’s work by investigating some recent research that connects the concept of flow to grit and the growth mindset. My claim is that in order to achieve lasting flow, one must achieve an appropriate level of intensity. The first aspect of this claim to elaborate is the

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