Grit and Resilience

This past Coffee and Conversation, we continued with the theme that we started the school year with and focused our talk on Grit and Resilience. We deconstructed and amplified concepts from Angela Duckworth’s book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.  Parents took a moment to complete a short Parent Questionnaire, and I introduced the survey by stating: “These are a number of statements that may or may not apply to you. There are no right or wrong answers. Please complete all 10 prompts and we’ll debrief at the end of our talk.”

We started the conversation with a review of the meaning of grit as the combination of passion and perseverance for long-term goals. Grit is special in emphasizing goals that take a long time to achieve and how relative that is based on a person’s life span. A “long time” for a 6-year-old is two weeks. Comparatively, a long time for an adult may be a couple of years. 

Duckworth notes that parents often think grit is just about perseverance. She reiterates that being gritty is not just being hardworking or resilient - it’s also that “gritty” people truly love what they do and stay in love with what they do over extended periods.

While grit sounds like being a strong individual who figures things out all by themselves, it’s simply not true. Gritty people will utilize all their resources and try to find other people to make everything that they are striving to accomplish easier. This was an interesting point that we discussed at length. We talked about how gritty people rely more on their coaches, mentors and teachers. They are more likely to ask for help and feedback. It’s about developing relationships, being vulnerable, saying what you can’t do, and then with the support of others, figuring out how to do it. 

We concluded the first part of the Coffee and Conversation with thoughts about how we can help our students get this type of support. We landed on this very important truth:

Young people need an adult in their lives who is both supportive and demanding. This combination is the magic recipe for parenting.

We then debriefed how parents and families are processing the following takeaways:

1. Share gritty stories. Parents discussed ways that they are engaging their children in these conversations at home.
2. Emphasize the power of “yet.” We heard more stories about learning progressions that are taking place for children and adults alike in our community. 
3. The invitation for families to Follow the Hard Things Rule. Some parents shared their adoption of this rule for their family in giving various activities a proper “college try” in staying with a task, even though it is quite challenging at first. 

We workshopped two articles from the Character Lab at the University of Pennsylvania.

We discussed this first article, titled “Fail Safe” by Amy Edmondson, who is a professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School and the author, most recently, of Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well.

We also discussed this second article, titled “Good Enough” by Thomas Curran, who is an associate professor in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and the author of The Perfection Trap.

A key theme is how we at W+H can set up conditions for students to not be afraid of making mistakes. We discussed various ways that we adults can encourage students to take risks!  Equally important is the resilience that we want to foster in children: to get up when they fall, and to be prepared to get up again and again if needed. Additionally, how we (the adults) react to students making mistakes makes a difference in supporting their persistence to keep moving forward.

As parents and educators, we can help emphasize the importance of developing a gritty growth mindset. We debriefed the Parent Questionnaire taken from Duckworth’s Grit Scale. I appreciate that parents shared their thoughts and stories regarding their own challenges as they work toward their long-term goals, as well as how they have worked to promote a growth mindset in their children. We all recognized that this is definitely a journey!

This highly focused, heavy-lifting work towards building Grit and Resilience within our students is most powerful when we take this challenge on together as an entire learning community. When we collectively model these dispositions, we serve our children well. Thank you for being incredible partners in this work!