Articles
As you find useful publications, suitable for your discipline, or for others, please contact Becki Williams so that this page can be updated.
Who Gets to Graduate?
Paul Tough, May, 2014, New York Times Magazine, chronicles work at UT Austin to help students feel that they belong at UT and persist when they experience challenge. Who Gets to Graduate?
Paul Tough, May, 2014, New York Times Magazine, chronicles work at UT Austin to help students feel that they belong at UT and persist when they experience challenge. Who Gets to Graduate?
How to Get a Job at Google
Thomas L. Friedman, in a February 2014 New York Times Magazine article,
quotes Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for
Google , “For every job, ... the No. 1 thing we look for is general
cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. How to Get a Job at Google
Taking a Look at ELLI
Maryellen Weimer, Penn State Professor Emeritus of Teaching and Learning, summarized the ELLI in an April, 2014 Teaching Professor Blog post titled "Taking a Look at the Effective Lifelong Learner Inventory."
"Is 'Grit' Doomed to Be the New Self- Esteem?"
NPR recently broadcast a segment dealing with “grit.” It runs about 4 minutes and is an interesting take on much of what we’re addressing including growth mindset, resilience, and how to assess these behaviors in students. The piece points out the problem of measuring success in these areas; in fact Angela Duckworth resigned from a California advisory board that is trying to test schools for “grit” before all the science is in place to justify its value. It makes a good argument for our research.
Here’s the link to the transcript and the audio version: http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/03/03/468870056/is-grit-doomed-to-be-the-new-self-esteem?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=educatio
The TCCTA picked up the story and posted it on their blog. Here is one blog post you might find interesting:
Is grit the new self-esteem? That's the question asked by some researchers, as reported in a great segment recently on NPR, as reported by Anya Kamenetz. Please read the piece, which contains a trove of useful links and historical context.
As teachers we observe often that students succeed for reasons that have little to do with academic ability. They simply persist when confronted with adversity, and hence succeed. The fashionable term for this quality (along with "resilience") is grit. The concept has much to say for it. If we can find a strategy for grit, student success rates will spike significantly, regardless of academic background.
We all know, for instance, that faithful class attendance correlates strongly with success. But is this because the student learns more through extra exposure, or is attendance simply a marker for prior resilience and fortitude? Such factors are hard to untangle in our data-driven world.
As the article indicates, one vexatious problem involves defining precisely and subsequently quantifying grit. A current practice involves asking students in surveys, for instance, whether they finish what they start or not. This might be useful information for an intervention, but it is susceptible to all sorts of spuriousness. For example, students can be coached in subtle ways to give the right answer, as with the famous "marshmallow test" (which is summarized in the piece).
More disturbing is the possibility that grit will parallel our experience with the self-esteem movement, which has been criticized by many authorities. Experts like Jean Twenge have argued that emphasizing self-esteem has led to rising narcissism among younger Americans, as the NPR article reports.
Here is a succinct parenthetical nugget from the NPR piece:
(The problem is inherent in the slippery language we use to describe them. If social-emotional qualities are "traits," then they might be fixed, even genetic. If they're "skills" or "habits" then, it stands to reason, they can be coached or taught.)
Exactly.
Incidentally, an alert blog reader (thanks, Dr. M!) sent in this article in Faculty Focus, by Gary R. Hafer, a professor at Lycoming College. The writer shares his pedagogical technique to evaluate students on their habits and effort. The post is worth a look. Ultimately it is not effort alone, but results, that we we must expect from students. But the former can lead to the latter.