Perkins-Gough

How are grit and resilience related?

Grit is related because part of what it means to be gritty is to be resilient in the face of failure or adversity.

But despite those disincentives, Upper Darby School District, a large urban public school district near the University of Pennsylvania, has partnered with us.

He walks you through what happened in 20th-century America— there was a very well-intentioned shift toward a meritocracy and a desire to admit people to the most elite schools on the basis of what they could do,
not on the basis of family lineage, last name, or color of skin.

the single-minded focus on standardized testing and toward a broader view of the whole child.

But I’ve heard other people use resilience to mean bouncing back from adversity, cognitive or otherwise.

In Carol’s work, she shows kids scientific evidence of brain plasticity— the fact that peoples’ brains change
with experience.

And some people use resilient specifically to refer to kids who come from at-risk environments who thrive nevertheless.

But on average—and I think many teachers would resonate with this— there are a lot of fragile gifted and talented kids who don’t know how to fail.

What we’re seeing now is a swing back toward a recognition that these standardized tests, although they serve an important function, are limited
in their ability to pick up things like grit and self-control—as well as many other traits that I don’t study—gratitude, honesty, generosity, empathy for the suffering of others, social intelligence, tact, charisma.

But I’ve heard other people use resilience to mean bouncing back from adversity, cognitive or otherwise.

Another important quality is being proactive—when a kid thinks, “I care about the whales, and I’m going to start an organization,”
and then actually goes out and does that.

Probably the finding that most surprised me was that in the West Point data set, as well as other data sets, grit and talent either aren’t related at all or are actually inversely related.

I think there’s been a pendulum swing toward the importance of noncognitive traits.

In
this interview with Educational Leadership, Duckworth describes what her research has shown about the relationship between grit and achievement, and she reflects on the importance of helping students develop grit and other noncognitive traits.

Every school has a three-tiered system of intervention to support positive student behavior.

Admission to West Point depends heavily on the Whole Candidate Score, which includes SAT scores, class rank, demonstrated leadership ability, and physical aptitude.

What we’re seeing now is a swing back toward a recognition that these standardized tests, although they serve an important function, are limited
in their ability to pick up things like grit and self-control—as well as many other traits that I don’t study—gratitude, honesty, generosity, empathy for the suffering of others, social intelligence, tact, charisma.

Woody Allen once quipped that
80 percent of success in life is just showing up.

Upper Darby’s intensive character- building program has yielded results at
the elementary level, middle school level, and even in the 9th grade: At this grade level, when many students commonly struggle, retention rates have decreased, discipline problems have fallen, and student achievement has risen.

It’s all about one specific definition of resilience, which is optimism— appraising situations without distorting them, thinking about changes that are possible to make in your life.

The attitude “I can get better if I try harder” should help make you a
tenacious, determined, hard-working person.

In that first 90-minute conversation and a follow-up meeting a week later, the two of them laid the groundwork for a thriving university–district partnership.

What we’re seeing now is a swing back toward a recognition that these standardized tests, although they serve an important function, are limited
in their ability to pick up things like grit and self-control—as well as many other traits that I don’t study—gratitude, honesty, generosity, empathy for the suffering of others, social intelligence, tact, charisma.

In terms of academics, if you’re just trying to get an A or an A-, just trying to make it to some threshold, and you’re a really talented kid, you may do your homework in a few minutes, whereas other kids might take much longer.