Daniel Engber, a writer for Slate, reviews Angela Duckworth’s new book about “grit” and how to become grittier.
He first places it within the context of a genre of self-help books that are a perennial staple on the bestseller list. How to Be Successful; How to Achieve Your Dreams; How to Win Friends and Influence People. or,“Every day in every way, I’m getting better.” Or grittier. One thinks of Dr. Pangloss.
He then considers it in the context of current psychological theories about how to be successful, or why some people succeed and others don’t. He wonders whether the term “grit” is a synonym for old-fashioned virtues like industriousness, perseverance, fortitude, conscientiousness.
Engber thinks there might be better ways to improve than working on grit, for example, by improving one’s study habits or showing up for school everyday.
He writes:
“If Duckworth’s book can tell us anything at all, it’s that we shouldn’t lose our focus every time we come across a new idea in shiny packaging. It might be better if we persevered and stuck to things that work.”
But then, Engber may be somewhat biased. He took the grit test and discovered that he has a low grit rating.
“It could be that having too much strength of purpose is worse than having not enough. At least that’s what I’d like to think: I took Duckworth’s test last week and learned to my dismay that I’m among the nation’s least gritty citizens. The trait is scored from 1 to 5, and I came in at 2.9. That sounds like it could be right around the average, but in fact it’s very low. According to Duckworth’s book, my grittiness puts me in the 20th percentile of American adults—more mercurial and weak-willed, less inclined to follow through, than four-fifths of the U.S. population.
“That’s OK with me. As a journalist, I thrive on flexibility, flitting around from one topic to another; I don’t believe my job lends itself to grit. Mine is not the only field where inconstancy can be a virtue. If you want to win forever on the football field, or join the military, or write a book about a big idea, then it might be best to stay on target, compete in everything, and finish strong. But others find their path through mindful wavering and steer away from simple answers.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
My book, MY CHILD LEFT BEHIND: HOW GOVERNMENT STANDARDIZATION IS CORRUPTING OUR MOST PRECIOUS ASSET is now published. You can get it with this link: https://www.tatepublishing.com/bookstore/book.php?w=978-1-68333-060-8 and on AMAZON KINDLE. Soon to be on Barnes/Noble.
The book is a total expose of the shameful, corrupt system of education in America today: uncommon core; disstandardized testing, and the ridiculous teacher evaluation rubrics. It has proof that Governors Cuomo and Christie have taken money from hedge funds and other sources to promote this diseducation of our children. It has proof that the whole “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top” is only about greasing some influential people’s palms. Read it–it’s all true! My Child Left Behind We all know the educational system in America is broken. It has been for some time. What if we could actually put the people responsible for this mess on trial, and ask them pertinent questions that they would have to answer, and hold them accountable for their educational sins? Sent from my iPad
>
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you, Gary!
LikeLike
According to Duckworth, more grit leads to more success.
So she’s also saying that less grit leads to less success.
Blaming the victim.
Poor kids don’t need more grit to succeed; they need all of the advantages and resources wealthier kids get.
Shame on Duckworth.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It depends how we articulate “grit”. As articulated, it sounds like an ontogenetic quality. It’d be more helpful if we articulated using tractable terms grounded in a science of behavior. For example, if one recast “grit” to discussions of thinned schedules of reinforcement – then it would be possible to have a more meaningful discussion without casting blame on the victim (Moore, 2003.
Moore, J. (2003). Behavior analysis, mentalism, and the path to social justice. The Behavior Analyst, 26(2), 181–193.
LikeLike
At best, she’s confusing correlation with causation.
Provide the “inputs” that guarantee a rich learning and teaching environment and you will get the “outputs” associated with the putative cure-all of grit.
An example is easy to come by. Lakeside School. Bill Gates. His two children.
For one instance out of many, see the following posting of 6-15-2016 entitled “GSL kicks off with pre-trip learning”:
[start]
Seventy-five Lakeside students arrived on Tuesday for the pre-trip curriculum component of the Global Service Learning program. Over the course of four days, students take language classes, finalize logistics, work in their groups on service projects, and hear from guest speakers about global poverty and sustainable development goals, climate change, and global health, among other activities.
“It is inspiring to see all the students and trip leaders on campus working together, learning about the countries they’ll be traveling to, thinking about challenging global issues, and reflecting on what it means to be a global citizen in today’s world,” said Associate Director of Global Programs Lisa Devine.
Lakeside’s GSL program combines on-site service learning with cultural immersion in mostly rural areas in the developing and near-developing world. Students will leave Seattle this weekend and travel to the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, India, Nicaragua, Tanzania, and Thailand to live with families and work on service projects.
Watch for blog posts in the coming weeks as students share their experiences!
[end]
Link: http://www.lakesideschool.org/podium/default.aspx?t=204&nid=1045389&bl=/default.aspx
Funny, though, but not in a ha-ha kind of way, is that there is no indication that they are going to grade the experience on a grit scale.
Wonder why?
😎
LikeLike
It was reported recently (in a metaanalysis by Credé et al (“Much Ado about Grit”) that Duckworth basically renamed “conscientiousness” (which has been recognized for half a century) to “grit” and indicated that it can be quantified and perhaps taught.
She also greatly exaggerated its importance because she made a major error in the interpretation of one of the studies that she had based her conclusions on.
Duckworth goofed big time and people should certainly not be basing important decisions on her work.
Here’s a link to an article that summarizes Crede’s findings:
From the article:
“Gross error in results
The most well-known data source on grit is based on West Point cadets who complete basic training at the United States Military Academy. According to one paper describing these cadets, those with above-average levels of grit are 99 percent more likely to finish the training than cadets with average levels of grit. However, Credé says the original data were misinterpreted. His analysis shows the
increase in likelihood is really closer to 3 percent, rather than 99 percent. “It’s a really basic error and the weird thing is that
no one else has ever picked it up. People just read the work and said, ‘It’s this massive increase in people’s performance and how likely they are to succeed.’ But no one had ever looked at the
numbers before,” Credé said.
“Don’t invest in grit interventions
Credé wants to make others aware of this error because many educators have bought into the concept of grit and are exploring ways to improve this trait. In the paper, Credé cited examples of schools that are training teachers to foster grit in students as well as school districts considering adding grit to the curriculum. A 2013 U.S. Department of Education report also recommended incorporating grit in school interventions.”
“Nobody wants to hear that success in life is made
up of many small factors that all add up. It’s your
education, it’s how hard you work, it’s your
conscientious and creativity – all these little pieces
that add up,” Credé said. “We want to be told here’s
one big thing that explains everything.”
But if educators want to improve student academic
performance, Credé says there are other more
effective ways to accomplish that goal.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Topping the national news not long ago was the story of the escape of two dangerous criminals from a high security prison in New York State. They had spent long months in preparation, garnered assistance from prison employees, dug a route to the outside from their cell, worked late at night to avoid attracting notice and, when their preparations were finally complete, went through rehearsals before actually carrying out their plan. A few days later those criminals were recaptured far from the prison site in a place where they had had no opportunity to plan or practice any of the skills they’d learned through “grit”.
It is clear to me that human beings develop grit only when they are so dedicated to reaching a particular goal that they will push on through obstacles, rejections and repeated failures. Not tyrants, prison guards, nor teachers can develop grit in those who don’t care enough about a goal or believe in their own power to reach it.
Teachers need to be empowerers not tyrants.
LikeLike
Like Engber I took Duckworth’s “measurement” of my “grit” test. As usual on these pop psychology (hell it can be main stream psychology, wouldn’t make a difference) I had questions about the questions that remain unanswered. Any way like Enber my “score” was 2.9. I guess I’d better just give up on being PC* and losing weight since I don’t appear to have enough “grit”. Fast food, pre-packaged processed goodies and ice cream delights here I come!!
*No, not “Politically Correct” but “Portion Controlled”, i.e., counting and limiting caloric intake-works quite well, even when I couldn’t exercise due to lower back issues.
LikeLike
Long Post…”And steer away from simple answers.” There are a number of major initiatives to market “character” education, for pre-K to adult life.
In the case of K-12 education, I think these marketing efforts are a by-product of several decades of honoring “academic learning” only–but a version of academic learning stripped bare of passionate interests as a reason to learn. What we have instead is “pass the test policies” as these are the most indicators of learning.
Perhaps the stale, dry, drill-to-mastery-of-minutia version of academic learning, combined with a restoration of the 3R’s back-to-basics in the Common Core, were pushed as a way to kill off vestiges of thinking from an earlier era. Some of us may recall the Bloom et.al., taxonomies that directed attention to cognitive, affective, and psychomotor dimensions of learning. Eliminating the “affective dimensions” of teaching and learning, and what Phillip Jackson called the “untaught lessons” in going to school gave us the absurd categories of academic and non-academic subjects, a bizarre distinction between “cognitive” and “non-cognitive” learning.
So here we are with the hot new stuff–corrective interventions I suppose.
1. Grit as just one aspect of research and marketing at The (Angela) Duckworth Lab, University of Pennsylvania. She and her students/associates are also working on concepts about personal attributes/dispositions that favor academic learning. This work has a sharp focus on two traits that seem to predict “achievement” (of a certain kind): grit and self-control. According to the website, Grit is the tendency to sustain interest in and effort toward very long-term goals. Self-control is the voluntary regulation of impulses in the presence of momentarily gratifying temptations or diversions. See http://www.characterlab.org or a TED talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H14bBuluwB8.
2. Mindset theorist and psychologist at Stanford University, Dr. Carol Dweck, has TED talks, several best selling books for business, and a “Brainology®” website replete with teaching materials and a full-spectrum “professional development” package (cost about $6000) designed to help all students acquire a “growth mindset,” one oriented toward learning, especially through repeated practice and what my generation knew as “the power of positive thinking.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X0mgOOSpLU Today’s Wall Street Journal (June 18, 2016) has a column reporting on improved persistence in post-secondary education for “at risk” students (low-income, minority) students who had a “dose” of online instruction about Dweck’s version of getting the proper growth/success-oriented mindset.
3. A big center of activity is the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) in Chicago http://www.casel.org/. CASEL’s work is rooted in sociology, especially Bandura’s demonstrations of learned aggression in young children. In addition to advocacy, CASEL serves as a clearing house and evaluator of assessments for social-emotional learning (SEL). With help from CASEL staff, Illinois developed SEL standards for pre-school then 100 additional standards extending to grade 12 and organized around ten themes.
The Illinois standards are intended to help students to “establish and monitor their progress toward achieving academic and personal goals.” These concepts are similar to those popularized as Grit, Mindset, and heal-thyself handbooks and therapies. In the Illinois standards, I found an astonishing expectation that students in K-4 should be able to “recognize and accurately label emotions and how they are linked to behavior.” (That sounds to me like a challenging assignment even for a person with a Ph.D in psychiatry or linguistics).
4. A fourth center of activity is Rutgers’ Social Emotional Learning Lab (RU-SELL), directed by Dr. Maurice Elias, Professor of Clinical Psychology. The Lab is described as “a focal point for school-based efforts at prevention, social-emotional learning, social problem solving, violence prevention, and character education. The Lab serves as a consultant for various school districts and, in some cases, plays a very active role in fostering the development of school-wide efforts and programs targeted at specific populations, to build character using empirically supported, evidence-based approaches.” More at http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~melias/
In a February 03, 2016, press release for a suite of commercial apps from a company called “Ripple Effects,“ Dr. Elias said: The “The 400,000 kids who have access to Ripple Effects digital self-help programs through their schools will no longer have to wait until 2nd grade to access the popular motivational counseling and behavioral training programs.“ in a related pitch, “The release of two new apps: Bouncy’s You Can Learn School Edition and Bouncy’s You Can Learn: Teacher Edition now make the evidence-based learning system available to early learners and their educators.”See the short video and learn more here http://bouncykids.net/schools/.
5. Not to be outdone, the US Department of Education (ED) announced in April of this year that “it is dedicated to helping keep students safe and improving their learning environments.” In particular, “ED has developed the new, high-quality, adaptable ED School Climate Surveys (EDSCLS) and associated web-based platform that allows States, local districts, and schools to collect and act on reliable, nationally validated school climate data in real-time.”
“The EDSCLS web-based administration platform, including a suite of school climate surveys for middle and high school students, instructional staff, non-instructional staff, and parents/guardians, can now be downloaded free of charge.The platform processes data and provides user-friendly reports in real-time.”
“Education agencies administering the survey can store the data locally on their own data systems. The U.S. Department of Education will not have access to the data.
In 2017, ED will survey a nationally-representative sample of schools to create school climate benchmark scores. These benchmark scores will be added to the platform’s reporting functionality to enable comparisons between local and national scores.”
“Schools administering the survey to instructional staff and/or noninstructional staff can examine these scores for the entire school and by gender or race/ethnicity.
Districts administering the surveys will have the additional ability to produce reports that compare EDSCLS data between schools and compare individual schools with the entire district.” (Just what we need, more stack ratings. I have looked at some of the survey questions. They are poorly crafted. They assume that students, teachers, and other staff have an omnicient grasp of the “affective ambience” conveyed by schools, teachers, peers. Most call for agreement, or not, with generalizations (e.g., “Teachers at my school treat all students fairly.”)
This is to say nothing about the proliferating use of Tripod, Panorama, and other survey-based ratings of so-called non-cognitive skills, and versions of customer satisfaction surveys. Of course, the ESSA legislation now says, in effect, it’s “OK to use alternative measures.” That has created a market for these measures.
So just when you thought there might be a let up on acadmic testing, there is a rush to new forms of surveillanceof students, teachers, parents–for character, social interactions, and “emotional skill sets” (whatever the heck those are).
LikeLike
Grit is how we measure sandpaper. We should leave it there. The rest is nonsense.
LikeLike
Grit was also what I used to sprinkle on top of the paper in the bottom of my parakeets cage when I was a kid.
LikeLike
Well said.
LikeLike
Love it, Duane. Thanks for the chuckle! This grit stuff is getting old. If someone enjoys what they are doing, they’ll keep at it. My uncle spends hours making intricate birdhouses that are works of art. An account friend doesn’t know the wrong side of a nail but loves poring over balance sheets. When I was teaching math, I tried to give the kids what they could handle plus a bit more. Pushing for grit stressed them out and lead to problems.
LikeLike
At the risk of remaking a point, education has always suffered from simplistic views of brains, learning, children, families, often as a way to make money, become famous, or to influence the system. Left brain, learning styles, grit all fall in these camps.
And by the way that “Grit” was what the parakeet needs to grind and digest it’s food, so maybe there is a useful different metaphor for fostering success.
Looking at successful people, some have the ability to overcome challenges, to persist on dull or repetitive tasks, and their resiliency contributes to their success. I think this is interesting. Somewhat as I look at motivation where understanding the combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, the ability to find a reason to succeed, the idea that as we grow and mature we should be more in control, more aware, is useful as the vast majority of learning happens outside formal instruction. Except with all this its wrong.
For example young children love to learn and play. As parents know, they will persist on some tasks for a great deal of time, in fact repetitively as they mature. We are wired to learn and the motivation is play. We like and seek challenges, cross word puzzles, playing baseball, so grit isn’t just persistence. Maybe grit is meaning-making.
If you want to play ball you practice, often by yourself. And in time the culture, the people who play with you, help to create an extrinsic/ social cultural expectation for playing.
So where’s the grit? In 20/20 hindsight.
LikeLike
“My Favorite Things” (parody of Sound of Music)
Testing of students and VAMming of teachers
Scoring of nebulous character features*
Race to the Top that is tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things
Cream colored Chromebooks and new Apple iPads
“Personal learning” and latest ed tech fads
Wild pigs that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things
Vouchers and charters with cheek puffing scholars
Donors that pay me with millions of dollars
All of the money that Billy Gates brings
These are a few of my favorite things
When Diane blogs
When the fact stings
When I’m feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don’t feel so bad
*Grit,
LikeLike
Excellent…
LikeLike
Here is a very recent academic critique of Professor Duckworth’s work on grit: https://www.academia.edu/25397556/Much_Ado_about_Grit_A_Meta-Analytic_Synthesis_of_the_Grit_Literature
Here is an NPR story about this critique: http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/05/25/479172868/angela-duckworth-responds-to-a-new-critique-of-grit
Basically, the correct parts of her work on grit are old, and the new parts are wrong. Maybe UPenn should have hired one of the authors who write this new paper. They seem to have a better handle on things than she does.
Personally, I find her definition of grit to be tautologous, and I see no reason to think that her survey measures much of anything.
LikeLike
Duckworth does have grit. I’ll give her that much.
Most people would not pursue (and peddle) such pseudo-scientific nonsense for so long (unless they are simply out to make a buck) — even after their “gross errors” have been pointed out to them.
LikeLike
“True Grit”
Angela has grit
And peddles piles of it
While most would bend
And reach an end
Ms. Duckworth just won’t quit
LikeLike