AP Annual Conference 2013: Keynote Presentation -True Grit

but I'll tell you that the two best teachers I've had in my life were my AP French teacher so shout-out to you guys um an AP English and yeah so mr. Carr dr. Rowland wherever you are this is for you and I just wanted to say two things at the start before we go to the slides and really the point of today's hour whatever we have left of the hour is to share with you the research on on my work and also the work of of related scientists my colleague Carol Dweck whose work on mindset I'm quite sure given that you flew all the way to Las Vegas for a conference like this you you likely know something about but before we dig into that I just want to give you a quote from mr. Carr I remember this now however many years later right more than 20 mr. Carr said in my AP English class one day as we were shuffling in all tired before he said anything else to us he turned around and he said knowledge at the library is free but you have to bring your own container this is even before the internet mind you right where things are even more free even more available and I think this idea that there's so much in life that's out there for our students for our kids and we urge them we exhort them we so desperately want them to show up and bring their own container and and and and keep going back and and I think it's a non-trivial problem actually relatively complex and monumental problem even to figure out as a teacher how do you get the kids to take their own container and and keep going back so it's a great question some of you actually I was talking to just before we got started and I said I don't know that I have all the answers but I have a hundred and ten percent conviction that this question of effort the psychology of student effort in the classroom and beyond the classroom is a great question I think particularly now where not only is knowledge at the library free but it's free so many other places right and now we have to get our kids you know to do what they can do which is so much more than I think the they realize the second preparatory comment is about gratitude which is actually for the subset of you that went to David's talk just an hour or so ago is what how he framed his talk about being grateful that the College Board is grateful to you and that gratitude maybe it seems on the wane particularly in our highest achieving kids so I wanted to give a shout out if you will for the things that are not grit I want to give a shout out to the things that as a psychologist I know are important for kids development that I won't be talking about today and those are generosity kindness compassion social intelligence honesty zest curiosity sense of humor I think that it's not just that I would like policymakers and superintendents to think beyond narrow kinds of standardized tests although they're great but kind of narrow ways of thinking about a child and their development it's not just that I want them to think about grit it's also I think that we want to just be inclusive and and think about students the way we think about our own children right I don't think any of us think about our own children in very narrow ways and I think the spirit of this work really is to broaden not just to grit but these other things okay enough in the way of preparatory comments let's listen to Will Smith only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is I'm not afraid to die on a treadmill right I will run you would not be out work I will not be outworked period you know you might have more talent than me you might be smarter than me you might be sexier than me you might be all of those things you got it on me in nine categories but if we get on the treadmill together right there's two things you're getting off first or I'm going to die it's really that simple so I love Will Smith I'm just gonna say that that's one reason I show this because I love listen second reason I show that is because I think in in the world of entertainment there's this word talent that is used a lot and in fact is overused and I would argue that at least in some of the schools where where we teach it's also overused or over emphasized from the beginning I want to acknowledge that I personally and professionally believe that there are differences in talent it's a naive and idealistic view to think that kids show up to class on completely even ground some kids you'll say it's like this and they'll say yeah I got it and other kids it's not that easy and I think that acknowledging that there are differences in talent is important but just like in entertainment I wonder in education whether we say that word too much whether we emphasize it too much whether we put so much emphasis on whether you're naturally good at math or not naturally good at math whether you're BC calc material or not BC calc material that were obscuring the enormous amount of progress that kids can make when they really try hard and honestly you know David gave a very um actually a very polished a little autobiography of what I've been doing before psychology but I'll tell you that it was the five years I spent the classroom that brought me to this research question and I know why I never got to teach a AP calc because I never got good enough honestly in my high school I was teaching at Lowell High School in San Francisco public schools and you didn't teach BC calc until you were good enough and I didn't get there but I knew from my experience in teaching other math classes that the material we wanted the kids to learn was challenging complex profound but it was not the kind of intellectual material that I personally would say yeah you know you guys over here your brains are good enough for this material but the vast majority of you or maybe those of you who are sitting over there you know I don't think so so I think this idea of psychology of effort is important but particularly because if we think hard about the kinds of things that we need the kids to do for us at least it's my firm conviction that that many of them can do it many more than are doing it now so here is my agenda for us I want to give you a framework for understanding psychology and its relevance to achievement in particular as a teacher and even frankly as a psychologist it's it's rather daunting you you read article after article or you hear you know different kinds of words you know self esteem self efficacy growth mindset optimism perseverance academic tenacity that's the word the Gates Foundation uses agency grit how do you put it all together so I'm going to give you a framework that at least helps me organize this morass of information that's coming out of the social sciences I want to very briefly go through what grit predicts and also emphasize that in my research we find that the grittiest kids on average are slightly less talented so as the AP stats teachers will tell you that doesn't mean that every gritty kid is low in talent it just means on average there's a weak negative correlation it certainly means that if you have a really gifted child intellectually it's not a guarantee that they're going to be a hard worker and stick with things so I want to show you what grit predicts but also emphasize in those studies how grit relates to talent then I want to say a word about selecting or at least measuring grit selecting for grit is probably what companies worry about I think for teachers we don't really think about selecting our students as much as assessing them in ways that could be helpful giving them assessments that actually can be ways to help them grow and then finally what I think and know about building grit in young people so let's get started with Francis Galton Francis Galton in 1869 published the very first scientific treatise on achievement he was the less famous half cousin of Charles Darwin and himself prodigiously gifted with an estimated IQ of 200 Jarrid personally fascinated with achievement what francis galton did was to study the biographies of eminent men I should say men and women but unfortunately was 1869 eminent individuals in a really very diverse array of crafts and domains so he studied judges mathematicians musicians there was a chapter on wrestlers in North Wales for some reason so a little bit the US and Craddock and a summary conclusion is that if you want to be a real outlier in achievement if you wanted me in the right tail the distribution on success you need not one thing not just talent but three things talent plus zeal and the capacity for hard labor zeal or I would put it as passion and the capacity to keep working hard are the kinds of questions that you just answered on the little ten item questionnaire that was on your seat I apologize for the dim lighting in the room if you look really hard in a bright place you can see that there are numbers in the bottom right hand of each box you add them up and then divide by ten by moving the decimal point which I only say because you know I get to pretend I'm a math teacher for five seconds and that's your grit score and that's actually the same questionnaire or more or less that we actually use in research so you know I give it to you not so that you can see how gritty you are necessarily although that can be fun and interesting but really to give you a real intimate feel for what I mean by passion and perseverance importantly the questions you just answered about how passionate you are have less to do with intensity as they do with stamina and that's a real difference I think in the kids that we see in terms of who's successful in life and who's less successful surprisingly less successful unfortunately the kids who have tremendous intensity you know who can burn like an incandescent bulb but who then move on to something completely different who lose interest who change for some kind of you know new thing that's exciting to them those tend not to be the students who actually go on to achieve great success in contrast it's those who actually stick with their interests I would say and I'll venture this it's the same about teaching right the people that you can think of who are the master teachers they're not master teachers because they worked incredibly hard for three years their master teachers because they worked every day of their professional lives for years and years and years at least that was true of the teachers that I can remember right now more than 20 years later who taught me when I was in high school so Francis Galton's said this based on looking at biographies of eminent individuals Charles Darwin read the book and he wrote back I by the way I put up the picture of this letter that's actually Charles Darwin's letter to Galton to show my students that in fact there was this thing called handwriting which we no longer do and you know then they tell me right that's why we don't do it anymore nobody could read that but just to translate it here Darwin actually starts off this saying you've made a convert of me in a sense for I have always maintained that individuals did not differ much in intellect but only in their zeal and hard work and then he goes on to say well yeah I guess it could be actually all three Darwin himself not considering his mental capacities to be extraordinarily prodigious exceptional in any way the overarching equation that I use to organize this morass of facts that are now coming out about the psychology achievement is this it reminds me actually of my physics class where we all learn distance equals rate times time you remember calculating how far is this car going to go well I need to know how fast it goes and how long it goes for and I think the same is true for our students we actually want to know both how quickly they're going to learn and for that we can give them an IQ test but crucially we also want to know how long they're going to go for and that's what my lab works on not the rate part not the talent part not the IQ part but the effort part because I think their kids actually can be given strategies to do more to go longer in particular I want to emphasize and I want to review what I think after studying the topic of achievement for more than a decade is the final common path for kids to learn anything in your classes and I'm going to generalize here I think this is the final common path for learning anything in life so what I say here I think applies to AP French but I think it also applies to learning tennis or being a good friend or learning to communicate in front of large audiences so let me go through that and see see if I can make good on that claim this is a graph from Anders Ericsson he's a psychologist we like to call him the world expert on world experts he studies world experts in as many different domains as he can so like Gault in he tried to actually examine many different things like Erikson studies chess masters concert level violinists Olympic swimmers World Cup soccer players he goes to the annual Sudoku championship the Scrabble championship it's a fun job and what he's looking for in these very different samples is what what are the grand unifying principles the essential features of skill development no matter whether you're trying to learn chess or whether to try to improve your backhand and here's the graph summarizing what he's found what he's found in particular first is that children are not born anything kids talk about oh you know he was born for math she was born for art but nobody's actually born knowing anything all skills that human beings have acquired that are complex like calculus like French are learned so we can have that expression a born natural but it shouldn't stand into mean that you and you were born with the math already imprinted or the French imprinted now you know that but I think sometimes students use that language and it almost seems to men like the kid it came to them right it came on them or with them so everybody starts skill at zero which was on the y-axis and and then under shows you this gradual sigmoidal curve that goes up which is skill increasing with years of practice and there's a horizontal dotted line there to represent what in his research studies are reliably the number of years that are needed before you achieve world-class performance in whatever it is that you do and he sometimes calls this the 10,000 hour mark or the 10 year rule because reliably across studies that's the average number of hours of or years of practice that is a minimum of the requirement for world-class accomplishment Malcolm Gladwell famously summarized this in his book outliers just because you are who you are I need to do this raise your hand if you were going to read outliers or in fact did read outliers and I'm not going to add K so look around right that yeah you're here at the AP conference so right that doesn't surprise me so up for those of you who raised your hand and actually did it finish the book now you have this graph and I think you can pretty much not read the book the four features of deliberate practice that make it different from the kinds of practice that kids usually do and I would argue from the kinds of experience that kids usually get in their formal formal schooling are as follows when I describe them to you I want to think about how this applies to your own classroom and your own life okay so how many minutes or hours do your students get of the following one if you're doing deliver practice the practice has to have a very specific intention or aspect of performance that is trying to be improved right so you're not they're trying to get better at calculus you're they're trying to learn you know one very particular kind of differential equation and you're working on and conceptualizing it right and the same really for anything the analogy actually is very facile when you think about sports or music and since so many of your students are involved in sports and music if you try to communicate this to them I think using that as a sort of a you know a metaphor or a starting point makes sense when music teachers give you assignments for the next week they don't send you off to just practice they send you off to practice something in particular when I ask my daughters when they come home with homework I have a 10 year old an 11 year old so they're pre-ap and I say you know what's your homework tonight they say things like this page 37 evens and I say no but really you know the literature on deliberate practice you know I'm asking for the specific goal for improvement and they roll their eyes but then I say no really I'm serious what is that what do you think is in your teachers head like why why 37 evens what do you think these problems all have in common and half the time they don't have a good answer and I would argue that many kids kind of go through the factories of formal education not sort of thinking okay my teacher did this why did my teacher do that what's the specific goal here so that's the first feature of deliberate practice that distinguishes it from less effective forms of practice the second feature of deliberate practice is that challenge must exceed skill easier said than done but challenge exceeding skill is the second feature so you cannot learn anything when you can already do it again you know preaching to the converted here because you're AP teachers at least my AP teacher certainly knew this but but children need to be pushed maybe more profound than the insight that challenge must exceed skill is the observation that children do not like it when challenge exceeds skill at least most of them don't and I'll tell you as a psychologist who studies achievement full-time and thinks about it pretty much all the time including when I'm dreaming I don't like it when challenge exceeds skill either right so I go to yoga because you know I'm a yuppie like now all yuppies have to go to yoga so my yoga teacher and I think actually I'll say this yoga teachers are great teachers they didn't go to ed school but they are great teachers and my yoga teacher says things like well you know I know you can all do this tree position but as a Sunday Funday challenge I want you to close your eyes and see if you can do it you know put your leg a little higher and I don't want to do that and I think to myself wow this is the second feature of deliberate practice I should probably do it because otherwise I'll never improve and I still don't like to do it right so maybe more important than challenge exceeding skill which I think actually most kids know is the insight that most kids will still reluctantly go into that space unless urge to exhorted to encourage to made to buy their teachers and their parents okay so third feature of deliberate practice is there should be feedback and ideally immediate feedback for those of you who did sport or musical training when you are kids you got a lot of feedback and you got it more or less immediately you know you swim the lap you see how fast it was you play the music you hear it but for many kids in many subjects in many schools and in many classrooms the lag between performance and feedback is too long sometimes it's infinite because the teacher never gives you back your work not I don't think in the classrooms that you guys lead but the third feature being immediate feedback I think is a challenge to teachers because how will you given your constraints living in a conventional classroom with more students than maybe is ideal how is it that you can give individualized and ideally immediate feedback to your students okay fourth as the UCLA basketball coach says repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition you cannot become truly fluent in any new skill until you have repeated it to a level of automaticity that you can practically do it without conscious effort and again I will tell you from my autobiographical experience that my AP teachers knew that but I took a lot of classes with teachers who seemed not to have that intuition my teachers expected mastery if not perfection and we weren't going on to the next part of the lesson until you really got it but I think in most of K through 12 education it's like okay good enough b-minus next right kids cannot go from a level of shaky foundations to any further level of advancement continuing to build shaky foundations without at some point the entire edifice crumbling so these four features of deliberate practice mean that many of us are actually not ascending a steep skill curve like this we're doing practice but it doesn't have a specific goal for improvement well we're getting experienced but we're not really doing things that are too hard for us yeah we're doing stuff and you know maybe it's too hard but we're not getting the feedback that we need or we're moving on so much in the curriculum pushing forward so quickly that we're not allowing our prior skills to go lately on autopilot before we start working on new skills now when I learned all this about deliberate practice I had one question for Andre's Erickson which is why are we not all in the Olympics right or the equivalent right I mean why is it that I am continually disappointed by humanity you know why can't everyone be better at their jobs and do things excellently right Aristotle said that really the meaning of life was arattai excellence well okay if it's so simple why are we not all excellent and onder's then actually amplified a point that we just made which is that in his studies even when he studies world-class performers and music or Olympic athletes and you ask them how much deliberate practice they do a day it is so effortful it is so taxing that even world-class performers only sustained on average about three to four hours of deliberate practice even at the peak of their career , and they don't like it so subjectively we would much rather be in flow right that's where challenges meet skills we don't like to be in this other place it takes all of our attention you cannot multitask you can't do anything else and by the way you feel stupid because you're screwing up right you're closing your eyes and yoga falling over and feeling dumb so I think the reason why we're not all doing deliberate practice the way we ought to or the way we could is because it's aversive for us to do it another point for you a sort of fact to take back as a teacher challenge now to take this practice and somehow get your students to do it anyway there's an expression in Chinese called Qi GU eat bitter eat bitterness and I think that though we would love education to be as entertaining as possible right I read these editorials in the New York Times about how we are going to gamify education it's going to be so fun that kids are going to be like breaking down the doors to do times tables right to do algebra to revise their essay again and my complaint with that is not that we shouldn't be engaging right of course we should but just as Aristotle said that the roots of Education are bitter only the fruit is sweet just as there's an expression of eat bitterness in the Chinese language just as William James in 1899 delivering a lecture just like this which he called talks for teachers said that no matter how entertaining and wonderful a teacher can be at the end of every school lesson in there there is an amount of drudgery and difficulty that no child will spontaneously approach right so I think that one lesson of deliberate practice is that to balance this sort of I don't want to caught an obsession but an interest in making education more fun more entertaining more like Facebook there is the reality the psychological reality of learning human beings don't like doing things that they can't yet do moving on I want to say that grit is the one personality trait or if you like the term character you can say grit is the one strength of character or if you don't like either of those words the one aspect of social and emotional learning competence or if you don't like that you can call it a non cognitive skill grit is the one characteristic of kids and adults that we find predicts the number of hours of deliberate practice you're willing to do and that is why I work on it you just took the survey so I won't say too much more about what it is I'll just quickly say that at the National Spelling Bee we studied grit by giving kids questionnaires like this completely fake able by the way right so kids gave them back to us and in in some sense we thought maybe they'll all be five out of five because the right answer is pretty obvious but just like you did they were actually relatively honest in completing the questionnaire we think because the number of grid points that you got this this grit score actually ended up predicting how far you would go in final competition not just the first year we ran it but it was replicating our own research as the EP stats teachers will tell you is important finding the same finding the second year the second year we also did something which relates to deliberate practice we had kids keep a journal of what it is that they did to train for the spelling bee there were three kinds of activities and these are essentially what kids are recommended in these books that that they buy on how to win a spelling bee deliver practice was defined as doing things in spelling that you couldn't do and actually typically alone which is a feature of deliberate practice which is not part of the definition but it's certainly characteristic most people when they're really doing deliberate practice don't do it in front of other people and the same was true of these kids so they were looking up word routes and practicing spelling things vertically on a page they actually rated these in terms of enjoyment and effort as well as keeping track of how many hours they were doing so the graphs tell you that deliberate practice was the least enjoyable of the three practice activities and the most effortful compared to being tested by mom or dad mom says wisp rocked you say you spra CHT that's being tested compared to verbal leisure activities reading a lot playing word games which by the way if you look at that dark grey bar that's how joyful the kids rated it on a scale from one to nine on average was about the same as eating ice cream so not a normal sample of children by any means but very adorable and here's what we found when we tried to link the data on grit to the number of hours of these different kinds of practice activities to performance grit more than any personality trait predicted the number of hours deliberate practice kids did and deliberate practice was the only kind of practice that predicted their final performance and this certainly resonates with my few years of classroom teaching experience it's the number of hours that kids devote focused concentration not to the easy parts right not to the beginning of the music piece that you know so well not to the words and the concepts that you understand but to the exact aspects of weakness where you're going to have to work the hardest at Westpoint we've been studying grit for over a decade and we consistently find graphs like this if you measure grit on day two that cadets get to West Point right and as you know this is a an arduous admissions process that actually makes even applying to Harvard look easy congressional recommendation psychologists value raishin of your leadership potential rigorous physical aptitude tests in addition to the SAT high school rank extracurricular involvement etc and what we find is that cadets who actually have higher grit scores on day two of coming to West Point are dramatically more likely to make it through what West Point cause beast barracks the difficult summer of training that changes you from being a civilian to a member of the military the very first summer of your experience at West Point which from a psychologists point of view is fascinating because during that be sparox program none of your objective measures of performance are really actually being formally recorded so when a cadet drops out of beast barracks it's really before they've had any mark indelibly written on their official record we wanted to know in that context who's going to stay in and who are these people who are dropping out we found that grit was the best personality variable in fact it was the best variable in the entire West Point dataset just as a contrast here's hole candidates score this is going to sound like a very familiar average to you it's the weighted average of your SAT your high school rank they threw in physical aptitude because you know it is West Point and expert ratings of your leadership potential it does not matter if you are in the top 25% of talent or the bottom 25% of talent you're just as likely to drop out of West Point and we found that every year for the last ten years there's a study I wanted to include because I didn't do it this is a research done by the world marketing Leadership Council they don't think a lot about AP exams they think about how to make money and they weren't interested in the question of whether in the 21st century instead of needing things like good old-fashioned persistence and hard work you would need something more 21st century e right like flexibility agility cross-fertilization that kind of thing what they did was they identified five different kinds of marketers who fit five different personality profiles and they were expecting that the agile marketers right the cross fertilizer is that they would actually be the winners in this new economy where as good old-fashioned grit would actually end up being at the bottom of the pack they found exactly the opposite if you look at the five types of marketers that they studied in this in this survey actually which not only included quantitative data for performance but also qualitative data like ratings of Supervisors that these focused gritty individuals who quote prefer depth over breadth who stuck with things who are a little bit stubborn those were by far the most successful marketers in their study and agility and three other kinds of ways of approaching marketing we're actually not nearly as predictive I think the findings that grit matters are banal for teachers because you may not have bar graphs but you have your years of experience and and for many of you this resonates or it rings true the question then turns to well how would you measure this right how do we actually give weight to things in public policy today if it doesn't have a number on it it doesn't look like anyone's paying attention so can we measure these things can we measure them for other reasons as well right formative assessment wouldn't it be great if you could give kids an odometer of how hard they're working and they could try to push that needle right so is there a way that we can we can look at this we're just at the beginning of this but I will say this I don't think you can give questionnaires because they're fake ballif it's any kind of high-stakes setting I think that you can see a kid who's gritty through their extracurricular involvement and I'm saying this up to an audience that actually includes people from college board I'll save this on a historical note in 1985 there was a researcher named Willingham who came up with a measure for college board and ETS called follow-through and he was looking at high school seniors let me tell you exactly what he did he coded when you were in the spring of your high school senior year your extracurricular involvement and he did it in a very particular way he gave you more points for multi-year commitments and actually no points for any of those activities that you did for one year or less he gave you additional points if you demonstrated objective evidence of advancement giving you more points for the highest advancement and some points for moderate advancement in other words he was trying to quantify this follow-through in the extracurricular activities in ways that he thought that guidance counselors wouldn't do on their own in fact in contrast to the follow-through rating he had a expert guidance counselor holistic rating and he used these two ratings to then predict in a sample of over 4,000 high school seniors who would then become successful at the end of their four years of college and what he found was that actually in the data set that include over 100 personal characteristics follow through or I would say grit was the best predictor of college success not just GPA but high honors right you know starting the play or running it at the college community service faculty ratings of students who really demonstrated leadership so we took that measure of follow-through he adapted it cleaned it up a little bit and just to summarize what we look for not only in high school seniors biographies but when I hire people you know what do I look for in 22 year olds or 26 year olds I look for warning signs of who not to hire right people who skip around a lot who don't have any objective of advancement or progression and what I do look for is that kind of multi-year commitment for which there is clear progression over time creating a rubric to do that we can do things like measure and predict all the same things actually that we can do with our questionnaires so if you take resume ratings of grit without asking a single self-report questionnaire you can predict things like this is among novice teachers who persists versus who resigns actually mid-year which you know we can all agree is bad to quit on your kids in the middle of the year and then also we can predict things like teacher effectiveness in the same sample so if you do show up your resume rating of grit your demonstration of multi-year commitments and progression predicts now how many years of academic progress how much academic progress your students will make in the classroom I like to study a lot in part because it measures teacher effectiveness not by how much your teachers how much your students like you but how much they learn under your careful watch that's kind of interesting to policymakers that's actually very interesting to policymakers but I think as a practitioner we're most interested in building grit so let me share with you in the last fifteen minutes that we have together my intuitions about building grit in young people I'm going to start off by saying something which is an empirical reality it is a fact we are the product of our genes and our environment and when I'm asked by by teachers by parents well you know how much of this is changeable and how much is this is not and maybe IQ you inherit but grit you learn I have to tell them what the research very clearly shows and that is that every trait that psychologists study from being gritty to being smart to being a Democrat to liking chicken really I'm not kidding is heritable in about the same ratio forty to sixty percent of the variability in these differences lay you know liking chicken not liking chicken being an extrovert being an introvert being gritty not being so gritty forty to sixty percent of that variability we can chalk up to DNA and the last time I checked none of us could actually easily change our students DNA so just to acknowledge at the start that there are limits to what teachers can do and and part of those limits are biological right any of us who have had more than one child knows this already right you know they kind of come out and you're like oh I'm such a great parent and then the next one comes out and you're like or genes right could be genetic - like what happened and and I just want to say that at the beginning that it's not that iq is heritable but grit isn't or vice-versa that everything that is true about us as human beings is a blend of our our genetic heritage from mom and dad and our experiences as teachers you'll be particularly interested to know that when scientists have looked to see okay so the glass is half-empty and a temple well about half of the variability in human beings is due to environment when the scientists ask well how much of that is Paran ting versus oh for example having a great faith grade teacher the answer was very clear and still a puzzle for science which is that the estimates of the parents contribution to child personality is about zero and it's a puzzle because you know these scientists are also parents and they're like oh that can't be that can't be but when you take twin samples and you take twins who are raised apart or raised together fraternal twins identical toons and you do the statistics and you say okay here's what the correlations are now let's estimate how much of the variability here is parenting you you actually get and it's not about 0 the estimates are zero right so we still don't understand that and as a parent I'll say this that that can't be exactly right right there's got to be more to the story than that I didn't work so hard last night arranging their summer camp to tell me that it didn't matter at all but I do think that suggests indirectly that what happens to a kid when they show up to class in kindergarten you know like having a great coach not having a great coach having a series of truly excellent teachers going to a school where they really feel important and included these things science tells us could have as much if not more of an effect on a child's development than even the house that they grow up in now moving on to specifically what I think about grit in particular I want to begin with Carol Dweck I said to Carol the other day because we collaborate on some research together she's a complete Idol of mine she's nice too you know isn't it great when like super accomplished people are also nice I have found in my experience that that is usually not the case but in Carol's it is she's a saint she's a saint David so not me she is so I was saying to her that she's more famous now in education than Freud and she sort of chuckled and said that couldn't be true and I was like no pretty much I think that could be and I think the reason why so many of us in this room know about Carol's work is because mindset the idea that the preconceived notions that kids bring to us before we have even met them in August or September so dramatically influence everything that they do from from from day one that this idea is so powerful we see it as educators let me define growth mindset for you in Carol's own words to have a growth mindset means to have the belief the conviction that your ability to learn can change that's what growth mindset is believing that your ability to learn can grow so wherever I am today well that that may or may not be where I am tomorrow that's growth mindset fixed mindset is the opposite fixed mindset is the way I grew up right my dad actually for reasons I cannot explain about every other day would say things to me like you know you're no Einstein pass the salt you know it's like out of them like okay right so he enforced in me I think this notion that you know you are or you're not I'm Stein you know you're smarter you're not you know here's where you are here's where your cousin tom is you're probably a little smarter than your cousin pay but you know there's a strict hierarchy and it's not changing brain science tells us very clearly that the brain is plastic not just in infancy not just in the preschool years actually but all through lifespan development and the plasticity of the brain means that at a biological level it must be true that the capacity to learn can change it can improve it can also decrease by the way right but it can improve and I think that very simple fact is so very powerful in Carroll studies what she does is she encourages kids to think that there is a growth mindset by showing them data from neuroscience showing that the brain changes and grows with effort and experience and by changing beliefs about intelligence from being fixed to growth she shows dramatic longitudinal gains in objective measures of academic achievement the connection to grit is this we find in our new data that on average kids who tend to have a growth mindset about how much they can learn how well they can learn are the ones who are gritty it's not a one-to-one correspondence and I don't think growth mindset is the only thing that makes you gritty but it's definitely an important ingredient and I wanted to begin the other because Carol is actually now working entirely in K through 12 education right she can do whatever she wants at this point in her career she's decided the money is in K through 12 education not the money money the important money right if you're going to try to change the world we're going to try to change society work right here you know work essentially where you're working right she knows everything about the lifespan she decided not to work on 27 year olds not to work on 43 year olds to work on children as they're developing and in particular most of her work is on middle middle school and high school kids you might be interested to know so at the end of the slides I have a link to the website where she has intervention materials we're working on putting together intervention materials with the support of the Gates Foundation that we can put up for free use by anyone but I wanted to flag that as possibly the most important thing that we can do to make our kids grittier we're piloting work in our own lab this is independent of Carol on changing another kind of belief not the belief that your talent can change but rather the belief that regardless of your talent effort is incredibly important I'll walk you through this graph but before I do I'll have to confess I think this is a little the Asian in me coming out it's now documented that people who grew up in an Asian culture grow up in a culture where effort is differentially emphasized valued praised relative to talent and that's in comparison to Western countries like the United States so sure they have the word talent right in Chinese but there's more praise more emphasis on what you can do to work hard to do well in school versus just be gifted in what you're doing the graph that I'm showing you is from pilot work if you're really interested in this we are now recruiting schools to partner with us in this research I'll show you this this is data that we just collected at a school in New Jersey what we did on the y-axis is at the end of this intervention which I'll tell you about kids took the Khan Academy fractions module and we had them also take a pretest so on the left there you see the kids a low pretest score and the right they had a high pretest score on the same con kinds of problems on fractions right in the control group which is in the light blue you get the same pattern on the post-test as you do on the pretest right so kids who start off low stay low kids who start off high remain high right what happened in the green group the treatment group is that we actually gave them essentially this lecture we told them about deliberate practice we told them that deliver practice isn't like normal kinds of practice we told them that most kids don't like to do deliberate practice but if you can do it you will get better and by showing them the evidence graphs anecdotes videos only for 30 minutes we were able to in this study essentially eradicate that advantage that happened at pretest so now whether you came in at low or came in at high it seems that there was no difference in your post-test performance preliminary findings just the beginning of a very long journey but I do believe that carols on to something when she thinks you know if you want to change behavior you have to look upstream from behavior okay why are they not showing up for help why do they give up so easily why are they such a pain in the neck right okay upstream from that among other things are your beliefs beliefs Drive behavior in important ways and we would like to change beliefs to be more adaptive the important thing about all of this of course is that it's not just changing the kids beliefs it's also changing teacher beliefs so in this study we measured grit in August before teachers went into the classroom and we measured performance one year later right so we are trying to see whether grit predicted your subsequent performance as a teacher as measured by gains and achievement of your students here is a plug for something that I don't study all that much but happiness that's life satisfaction we wanted to know whether in addition to being gritty whether happy teachers were more effective that was certainly my experience it's very hard to learn from people who are miserable with their lives we've all had those teachers David won't say it but I will we all know those teachers and their students don't learn very well from them right so in addition to grit we measured life satisfaction and upstream from those two things was something like growth mindset which is called optimistic explanatory style when I tell you what it is you'll see the overlap with growth mindset right away to be an optimist is to explain bad things and of course they happen to all of us right in ways that immediately turn your attention to what can be changed specifically about that so that the adversity is less likely to happen in the future right it's the opposite of catastrophizing you know you go and get a job interview and it doesn't go well to be a catastrophize er is like oh god I blew the interview I am so stupid I can't do anything right and just to assure you we've all done that so you're not all you know off the deep end we all do that but if you're a pessimist you do that more often right if you're an optimist you do that less often because after you cry and you say oh my god it blew the interview I'm such an idiot then you say what did I do wrong that I can not do next time what did I do not well that I can do better right there is the overlap with growth mindset looking for change you know not thinking that everything can change but looking for that little corner where you can do something about and in this study we found that optimistic teachers were both grittier and happier and in fact the grit and Happiness then in turn predicted their performance you're going to have to be gritty for your kids sometimes and I call that surrogate grit so I'm just going to whip through these last few slides and try to stay almost on time I'm also going to blame David for starting us later I think it's important I want to read you this quote that we realized that even though we want our kids to be gritty there are going to be times where they're not and that's why they have teachers and parents and sisters and brothers and Friends here's a quote from a young man who interviewed in his 40s after making it to the Olympic swim team about his childhood he says at age 11 I wanted to bag it because I was doing very badly my dad at that point did something that was very important he said if you want to quit that's fine but I don't want you to quit simply because you're losing so I'm going to continue to drive you to workouts and force you to swim and once you are 12 and are at the top of your age group you'll start to do well and if you want to quit then that's fine the happy ending to this story is that when someone had Sarah grit grit for this kid he made it you can easily imagine years of psychotherapy and another ending but in this case it all turned out well and of course that's your challenge right we've all been there do I push this kids crying do I push him or do I not push them you know this kid wants to give up he wants to drop out in my class do I push them or do I not push them we've all been there you know as parents as aunts as uncles so I'm not saying it's easily done and the judgment is important but I do think that it's a reality that we cannot always be gritty all the time when I started graduate school I turned to my husband and I said after I had these wonderful experiences doing manager consulting and everything else I want to do something really well and I kid you not I said don't let me quit for ten years that was before I knew the research actually right and there were times where I was ready to give up and he wasn't ready for me to do that he had what we would call in psychology psychological distance he was with me but not so with me that he was crying in exactly the same way right and we've all had somebody do this for us and I just wanted to remind us all right we live in this on American culture that so emphasizes the individual that we often forget that we are social animals and it's unrealistic to expect that even our grittiest kids are not going to need someone to pick them up dust them off wipe away their tears and frankly not let them quit when they want to the way I handle this in my own family is when my kids want to quit which they often do X Y or Z right I do let them quit but not that day so I tell them they can quit but just like that father I say absolutely you can quit ballet completely maybe ballet is not for you but you can't quit today come talk to me about it next Thursday right next Thursday rolls around I say do you want to quit ballet and they're like why just wandering right it's often like that because then next Thursday they have the same thing that you had right away which is psychological distance right the emotions are flooding what we need to do is decide to quit at times where we have our wits about us finally there's the idea of school culture and classroom culture I think actually naming grit out loud telling kids about deliberate practice telling them how hard it is telling you how hard it is for you to get negative feedback for you to learn and grow is very important in the schools where I work most closely the Kipp charter schools the kids actually get this in large doses and both the teachers and the students embrace a culture of coaching of learning of screwing up of feeling badly when they're doing things like oh that was really hard actually didn't want to stay up all night and grade your essays but I did here they are right so it's not faking it like you know everything is so easy the coaches in the school the teachers they provide what coaches do in any domain which is these specific goals for improvement that are necessary for deliberate practice and also strategic tips right on what the kids need to do next to achieve those goals and then finally they're there for surrogate grit and feedback right these are things that your teachers did for you and that as teachers you're doing for your own students to end with will power or Will Smith I consider myself really to be of basically average talent the same thing that Charles Darwin said the same thing that Thomas Edison said right I can name more the key to life is on a treadmill when I say I'm going to run three miles I run five and with that mentality with that mindset it's actually difficult to lose so thank you very much for your attention I'm going to stick around here a little bit of you have any questions zhan now right voice of God is going to come on but I'm going to stay right here at the foot of the stage of anybody wants to talk to me

Channel: Advanced Placement

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Keywords: AP, Advanced Placement, Advanced Placement Program, APAC, AP Annual Conference, Angela Lee Duckworth

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Length: 52min 45sec (3165 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 22 2013