Saturday, 12 August 2017
“Why some Students fail while others succeed”
There is a saying that
“Hard work can beat talent when the
talent does not work hard”.
Dr. Angela Lee Duckworth, an American psychologist wanted to
know, that why some students fail and other students succeed in their lives. So
she and her research team went to West Point Military Academy and started
studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings, and in
every study, her question was, who is successful here and why?
After some research, they tried to predict which cadets would
stay in military training and which would drop out. They went to the National
Spelling Bee and tried to predict which children would advance farthest in the
competition. They studied rookie teachers working in really tough
neighborhoods, asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching by
the end of the school year, and of those, who will be the most effective at
improving learning outcomes for their students? They partnered with private
companies, asking, which of these sales people are going to keep their jobs?
And who is going to earn the most money?. In all those very different contexts,
one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of SUCCESS. And it was
not good looks not intelligence, it was not physical health nor it was IQ. It
was GRIT.
“GRIT is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.
Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not
just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really
hard, to make that future a reality. Grit is a living life, like it’s a
marathon, not a sprint.”
Her comments about Grit:
A few years ago, she started studying grit in the Chicago
Public School. She asked thousands of high school juniors to take grit
questionnaires and then waited around for more than a year to see who will
graduate. The results showed that, out of many kids, the grittier kids were
significantly more likely to graduate, even when she matched them on every characteristic
she could measure, things like family income, standardized achievement test
scores, even how safe kids felt when they were at school. So it’s not just a
competition of West Point or the National Spelling Bee in that grit matters. It
is also in schools, especially for kids at risk for dropping out. Every day,
parents and teachers ask her about, “How do I build grit in kids? What do I do
to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do I keep them motivated for a long run?” The honest answer is, she doesn’t know. What
she does know is that talent does not make you gritty. The researched data
showed very clearly that there are many talented individuals who simply do not
follow through on their commitments. In fact, in their researched data, they
found that grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of
talent.
So far, the best idea she has heard about building grit in
kids is something called “Growth Mindset”.
This is an idea developed at Standard University by Carol Dweck, and it
is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with
your efforts. Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain
and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they are much more
likely to preserve when they fail because they don’t believe that failure is a
permanent condition. So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit. But
we need more. And that’s where I am going to end my remarks because that’s
where we are. That’s the work that stands before us. We need to take out our
best ideas, our strongest institutions, and we need to test them day in day
out. We need to measure whether we have been successful, or we have to be
willing to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned to come out
stronger. In other words, we need to be gritty about getting our kids grittier.
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| "Bad Habits are easy to form but hard to live with, where as good habits are hard to form but easy to live with" |
Article By: Saqib Hussain (14TL06)
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