“Students aren’t as gritty as they used to be.” This is a sentiment I have heard frequently from educators and caregivers alike. I’m not sure anyone would argue with this statement, but what are we to do with it? What is actually sabotaging our students’ toughness? And how do we go about solving this resiliency problem that our students are struggling with?
First, we need to understand what grit actually is. Second, we need to determine why students are having difficulty being gritty. From there, we can take what we know and come up with effective solutions to their grit problem. Implementing these solutions in the classroom, and at home, is ultimately what is going to create change for the better.
What is Grit?
Grit is the ability to overcome challenges over a long period to achieve a goal. Having grit is important because it allows humans—young and old—to find the success they are looking for by being able to overcome adversity. We can all readily agree that being successful in many endeavors is of great benefit, and that the journey to success can often be difficult.
Challenges, Time, and Goals
In terms of conveying grit, a challenge is something that impedes someone’s efforts to achieve a goal. For instance, a fifth-grade student learning how to simplify fractions might face challenges like never mastering multiplication and division. To master one concept, she may need to first master a simpler one. Challenges are like this—they often increase in difficulty before a goal can be achieved.
The length of time it takes someone to achieve a goal, using grit, can vary. The time it takes a kindergartener to learn the difference between a triangle and square may be less than the time it takes his older brother to learn how to find the area of a triangle, but this doesn’t mean that he has less grit. The concept of time is different for a kindergartener than it is for a middle schooler. Age and developmental stage need to be considered when determining whether someone is displaying grit.
For a goal to require grit, it must involve significant time to achieve, based on a person’s age and developmental level, and challenges that are difficult to overcome. Even though it isn’t always the case, the goal achieved is often of great benefit to the individual and others.
Why the Decline in Students’ Grittiness?
Although I don’t have the years of research and data that grit expert Angela Duckworth has collected, I surveyed 30 people from various fields to determine why our students are lacking in the area of grit. Their answers revealed four main themes:
- Lack of Beneficial Support
- Lack of Expectations
- Lack of Self-Confidence
- Lack of Skills
Lack of Beneficial Support
Students who lack grit tend to have adults in their lives who are either overprotective, negative, or indifferent, rather than encouraging and empowering in a positive manner.
- Overprotective Adults: Sometimes called “helicopter parents” or “lawnmower parents,” these adults try to decrease the difficulty of challenges in their children’s lives or remove them altogether. Children become empowered to refuse and avoid challenges, so their experiences in finding success through hard work become minimal.
- Negative Adults: These adults may be condescending, mean, or downright abusive. Children with negative adult influences often feel unsafe and unloved, focusing their energy on surviving rather than thriving.
- Indifferent Adults: These adults may love their children and ensure their needs are met but are not proactive in their lives. Children who lack opportunities to learn, grow, fail, and achieve will have difficulty growing their grit.
Lack of Expectations
Students who lack grit might struggle with overcoming challenges because they’ve rarely been expected to do so. Adults may not exhibit belief in a child’s abilities, or they may want their child’s life to be comfortable. There’s also a growing trend in our culture not to encourage children to “power through” when they become discouraged by failure and difficulty.
Lack of Self-Confidence
Students who lack grit might struggle with self-confidence. It seems like you can’t peruse the news these days without coming across a report on the rise of anxiety and depression in our country’s youth. Many believe the main causes of a decrease in self-confidence include:
- Social media use and overuse
- An increase in isolation
- An increase in societal pressures
- Increasing rates of bullying/cyberbullying
- Lack of supportive relationships and/or environments
Lack of Skills
Students who lack grit might struggle to develop the skills needed to display grit as it has been defined. For example, a student lacking executive functioning (EF) skills will have more hurdles to overcome to achieve a tough academic goal. A colleague of mine put it this way: “We usually talk about grit in schools as if it’s a character trait, but it can also be very dependent on the brain maturity of EF skills such as planning, impulse control/regulation, temporal processing, and goal-directed behavior.” Sometimes a student may need more encouragement or more opportunities to convey grit, and sometimes a student may need more EF skills to do so.
Also, as mentioned before, sometimes a student may need to develop a simpler concept or skill before achieving a more complex goal. For example, you can’t expect a student to write a five-paragraph essay if they haven’t developed the skill to write a complete sentence!
Busting the Grit Busters
Now that we have determined what’s sabotaging our students’ resiliency, let’s come up with a plan to bust apart their grit problems!
Provide Beneficial Support: Students need adults in their lives to model grit, provide opportunities for grit, and give appropriate encouragement. By sharing personal examples of grit with our students, particularly journeys to goals we are currently on, we can become educational and inspirational models of grit to our students. We can also share countless nonfiction and fictional anecdotes of grit through class discussion, read-alouds, and even assignments!
Teachers can aid the development of grit by helping students determine appropriate goals, construct a plan to achieve those goals, and create authentic opportunities for them to try. Many educators have had numerous parent-teacher conferences; maybe we should set aside time to have student-teacher conferences, especially to help our students grow their grit!
Educators need to encourage effectively. Our students need quick, honest, and constructive feedback. They need help developing intrinsic satisfaction in their achievements, as well as consistent, authentic encouragement to learn from, and move beyond, failure.
Set High Expectations: Students need high—like “mission impossible high”—expectations! In our educational age of differentiation, we have inadvertently set many of our standards too low for our students. And with low expectations come low outcomes. If you set the bar high, and a student tries and isn’t able to meet the expectations, they will still accomplish more than if the bar was set too low. And better still, expectations that are set high will be reached and sometimes surpassed!
Build Self-Confidence: It is amazing when honest and bold confidence in a student is expressed by an adult. It truly does wonders. When trusted people in their lives emphasize a strong belief in their abilities, students begin to adhere to the confidence that has been poured upon them. It’s also important to help students grow in the ability to discern what boosts their self-confidence, what deflates their self-confidence, and what types of encouragement “boosts” are authentic.
Build Skills: The first step in building up your students’ skills is determining their weaknesses. This may seem like an obvious statement, but too many times adults find themselves providing challenges that are unattainable because they weren’t aware of the skills their students did not yet have. If a student is seemingly struggling with their grit, it may be because they don’t have the skills to achieve their goals—not because they aren’t resilient enough.
Collaborate with Families: We are never going to stop the grit busters if we don’t work with our students’ families to defeat them! Find the most effective way to communicate with your students’ families and let them know that you are trying to help their kids grow their grit. Develop a relationship of trust among your students’ families, and let them know the ways you are implementing tactics in the classroom to encourage grit. Encourage parents to actively participate in their children’s plans to achieve their goals.
Lastly, do what you can to share resources, promote workshops, and collaborate face-to-face with students’ families on the topic of grit. If we’re working hard to bust the grit busters in the classroom but not at home, or vice versa, then students will have a much greater likelihood of giving up on being gritty.
The Final Push: Grit in Action
We all know the old adage that no two snowflakes are alike. Neither are our students, and neither are their challenges. If our students are struggling with their grit, it is because they are struggling with unique circumstances. They have different support systems, different environments, different peers, different opportunities, different life experiences, and different personalities!
All of these circumstances need to be taken into account when helping an individual grow grit. Strong, trustworthy, respectful relationships with our students, along with a personalized plan to achieve goals, is going to be the best one-two combination against any grit buster.
AND there’s one last ingredient we need to help students cultivate their grit—we need grit ourselves to see the process through to success. It isn’t easy helping an individual become gritty, particularly if they have multiple obstacles. There will be failure, setbacks, and slow progress when helping a student with improving resilience. But whether your students become gritty within a school year or years later, every effort to help them overcome their grit busters will be well worth it.
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Grit-Building Checklist for Teachers
Use this checklist to evaluate your strategies for fostering grit in your students. Check off each item that you currently implement in your classroom:
- I share personal examples of grit with my students.
- I set high expectations for my students and communicate these expectations clearly.
- I provide timely, constructive feedback on student work.
- I create opportunities for students to experience and overcome challenges.
- I actively engage with students to set and plan for personal and academic goals.
- I collaborate with parents to support student resilience and growth.
Review the unchecked items to identify areas for improvement and plan actionable steps to address them.
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Self-Assessment for Parents: Supporting Your Child’s Grit
Rate each statement on a scale from 1 (Not at All) to 5 (Always) to assess how effectively you are supporting your child’s development of grit.
- I encourage my child to tackle challenges rather than avoid them. [1 2 3 4 5]
- I provide a balance of support and independence in my child’s tasks. [1 2 3 4 5]
- I set high but achievable expectations for my child’s academic and personal goals. [1 2 3 4 5]
- I offer constructive feedback and celebrate my child’s efforts and progress. [1 2 3 4 5]
- I collaborate with my child’s teachers to support their growth and resilience. [1 2 3 4 5]
Reflect on your scores and identify areas where you can strengthen your support for your child’s grit. Consider setting specific goals to improve in these areas.
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Follow-Up Resources
- Books and Articles
- “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance” by Angela Duckworth – This book provides an in-depth look at grit and offers practical advice for developing resilience.
- “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” by Carol S. Dweck – Dweck’s book explores the concept of a growth mindset, which is closely related to grit.
- “The Power of Resilience: Achieving Balance, Confidence, and Personal Strength in Your Life” by Robert Brooks and Sam Goldstein – Offers strategies for building resilience and grit.
- Websites and Online Resources
- Character Lab (www.characterlab.org) – Provides resources and research on character development, including grit and resilience.
- Edutopia (www.edutopia.org) – Features articles and videos on fostering grit and other key social-emotional skills in the classroom.
- The Greater Good Science Center (greatergood.berkeley.edu) – Offers articles, research, and practical tips on resilience and grit.
