Grit, resilience, perseverance, tenacity, patience, tolerance for adversity, and persistence are all terms in the lexicon of current progressive education reform rhetoric. Though academic content is clearly important, skills such as problem-solving, collaboration, critical thinking, perseverance and other non-cognitive factors have proven important for building the human capital of students. Each year more research surfaces supporting the importance non-cognitive factors and many schools are attempting to teach these skills parallel to content standards in the hope of better preparing students for the 21st century workplace, which is becoming more complicated and abstract everyday.
Assessing non-cognitive factors has gained some traction in recent years and is the central theme of the book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character by Paul Tough. Tough emphasizes that kids need to take risks and experience hardship in order to develop resilience and a tolerance for adversity. So often children are shielded from failure and essentially taught not to take risks. In schools, failure is often ignored as part of the learning process and considered something to be avoided. Author Amanda Ripley of the new book The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way also found that many see failure as demoralizing, thus schools and parents insulate kids from it. There must be a sea change in this logic, since failure is part of life and is clearly documented to be beneficial to students. Too many students consider themselves failures if they don’t immediately succeed, which does nothing to develop a growth mindset. Leading psychologist and author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success discovered that individuals with a growth mindset: embrace challenges, persist despite challenges, accept criticism, and ultimately are more successful than those with a fixed mindset. Failure is part of learning, but if students avoid it and never really experience much challenge, they will not develop perseverance and resilience.
Perseverance is closely coupled with academic success which is correlated with higher earnings later in life. The research is clear that students who score well on tests, such as PISA, NAEP, etc. tend to earn more than their lower scoring peers. There are a plethora of factors that separate students, but one critical characteristic is how hard students work and more than that, how long they stay with a problem. For instance, on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS) test, students are asked to fill out a survey about their school, their parents, and other information regarding their demographics. High test scores on the TIMMS is closely correlated with how much of this survey students complete. The students who fill out the most information, demonstrate diligence and persistence, which serves them well during the actual test.
Students need to fail and realize that failure is part of the learning process. A required component of this is to take risks, which implies potential failure. Many students are not willing to do this, for fear of criticism from their peers. Schools sometimes lower standards or change the curriculum in order "help" students. Rigor is a necessary component of learning and a rigorous curriculum should be challenging. If a classroom culture provides for students to take risks, then students will likely not be stigmatized by saying something “wrong” or doing something that has the potential for failure. Students should understand it is more than just getting the “right” answer, but is about taking chances and learning from mistakes. Just to clarify, it is still important to be knowledgeable and to do well in school, but the point is that students are so paralyzed with the possibility of failure that the learning process has become corrupted. A simple and easy way to develop the learning process in school is to use frequent formative assessments, so that students who “fail” early on can learn from their mistakes, with no penalty or consequence. Furthermore, when it comes time for a summative assessments, they will be better prepared. Like anything, developing perseverance and grit comes through extensive practice. By experiencining challenge, through a rigorous curriculum, students will increase their tenacity and ultimately their ability to tolerate adversity.
In the book Outliers: The Story of Success, the author Malcolm Gladwell found that the most successful individuals are those who practice extensively and expend just a bit more effort at what they are doing. In short, success is not easy. As an overly simple analogy, an golfer who hits 100 balls for practice versus the individual who hits 90 per session will be better for that extra effort, regardless of how minimal this seems.
For decades, wilderness education schools such, as NOLS and Outward Bound have considered tolerance for adversity as a central tenet of their philosophies. As a former mountaineering instructor and course director for Outward Bound Alaska, I saw first hand the critical importance of grit. The weather and terrain of Alaska is notoriously brutal, with thick brush and frequent precipitation that can be soul crushing. To enjoy a two week mountaineering adventure requires an incredible reserve of perseverance and a high tolerance for adversity. What separated the successful from those who struggled was an ability to maintain a level of optimism in the face of daily physical, social, and mental challenges. Physical fitness, though important, was not the chief characteristic that led to success. Students who were metacognitive and able to embrace challenges as learning opportunities tended to be more successful while on course. Tolerance for adversity is developed over time and applies to all sorts of contexts, including work, school, and life in general.
To use climbing as an analogy, rock climbers often approach a route that they know is at their limit, if not a little beyond, but despite this will attempt the climb anyway; they take a risk. Always problem-solving, they work their way up, but sometimes due to a slowly declining supply of energy, they may fall off. This is normal! The climber regains their strength and composure, reassesses the terrain and makes another go. Likely they will have a better understanding of the problem and will make it to the top or conversely they could encounter another crux, only to fall again. This is the iterative process in action. Now the climber could have attempted a route they knew was well within in their limit and effortlessly made it to the top, but there would have been little learning or improvement from that experience. It is only through pushing ourselves into what noted developmental psychologist Vygotsky calls the Zone of Proximal Development, that we improve. Individuals must take risks, with the potential for failure, to improve whatever skill it is one is practicing and also to develop perseverance.
Though content is important and should not necessarily be eclipsed, non-cognitive skills should take more precedence in our Nation's schools. Teaching students to persevere in the face of challenges is a critical component of the learning process. Students shouldn't be afraid to fail, but should be provided opportunities to take risks in learning with no penalty. Hopefully, students will become more resilient to challenging situations and will ultimately become better learners with a growth mindset. Non-cognitive skills are essential for success in the 21st century workplace and ultimately for the continued economic prosperity of the United States.
References
Dweck, C. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Ballantine Books.
Gladwell, M. (2011). Outliers: The story of success. New York: Back Bay Books.
Tough, P. (2012). How children succeed: Grit, curiosity, and the hidden power of character. New York: Mariner Books.
Ripley, A. (2013). The smartest kids in the world: and how they got that way. Simon & Schuster: New York.
