[MUSIC] Welcome back to week six. This is lecture three, where we're going to be exploring the notion of grit and perseverance and mindset, and how important those ideas are for us as teachers. Making changes in our practice is not easy. Dylan William says that for teachers to change their assessment practices from a focus on grading and testing and reporting, to more of the coaching forms of assessment, that we've been calling assessment for learning, takes about 40 hours of sustained professional learning and practice. In the last week, Linda was talking about the importance of sustaining professional learning over time, and in this session, we're going to be talking about the importance of grit and perseverance, not only tied to our own professional learning, but tied to the learning of the young people that we're working with. We talked earlier on about Carol Dweck's work on fixed and growth mindset, and we want you to be thinking about yourselves in your planning for teaching, in your planning for learning, whether you're coming from a fixed mindset as yourself as a teacher, and about your learners, or whether you're in that growth mind set, where you believe that actually everyone can get better at everything if they put in the effort and have the right degree of support. Just want to show you a picture, this little boy's name is Caleb. He's in grade one in an elementary school in Camel River, British Columbia. And his teacher had been exploring the idea of mindset and had taught it to her learners, taught it to these very young children. And each child in front of them has an image of what they see as the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. You can see in this picture that his fixed mindset is dark and gloomy, and his growth mindset is bright, colorful, full of flowers, and in his hand, he's holding a small action figure. And he's been taught that at any point during the day, he hears himself saying, "I can't. This is too hard. I give up." That he has been taught the tools to change his thinking and to use his action figure as a way of reminding himself that he can, he will, and he is going to. Some people call this term grit. And grit is defined as perseverance and passion for long term goals. Building upon historical biographies of famous leaders, researchers and scientists have reached similar conclusions about high-achieving adults. Those individuals who are deemed more successful and influential than their counterparts typically possess traits above and beyond that of their normal ability. So, while their ability was important, what was more important was their grit, their zeal, their persistence and their motivation. This is a picture of the Grouse Grind in British Columbia. It's a very famous hiking trail outside of Vancouver. And people take pride in seeing how fast they can run up this incredibly rugged trail. And this young learner is just demonstrating what we call passion and grit. Also, using another Canadian metaphor, hockey is Canada's great passion game. And there's a term in hockey called the grinders. The grinders are the people, or the players that go into the boards and stay there until they can pop the puck out, so that the high-scoring players can have a crack at scoring a goal. So, the grinders aren't the stars, they're not the goal scorers but they are the ones that if they weren't doing that hard work in the boards, the game wouldn't progress. They'll do whatever it takes to get the puck out to the scorers. In many ways, we think of teachers as grinders. They're the ones that will do whatever it takes to move learning forward for their learners, short of throwing their body in front of a puck, but we see our very best teachers are consistently saying, what is it that I need to do so that my learners can succeed? So, that's what we call grit, and that's the way that we like to think about it. There's a book by a Canadian journalist called Paul Tough. This isn't necessarily a strong research piece, but it's an interesting piece for parents, and for non-educators to take a look at. He visited schools in the U.S. and Canada to understand what factors help children succeed, especially those living in conditions of poverty. And he says that protecting children from failure, from the kind of failure that's inherent in tackling big challenges, isn't helpful. He uses an example from an elementary school in Chicago where the teacher taught her learners, her young children chess as a way of helping them develop persistence, grit, self-control, zest and passion. And now, those 300 children in that school are winning chess competitions all over the world and she's using that as a way of helping them see that if they persist, they can succeed. So, we've used this book with parents. We think that it's readily accessible. And, it's an invitation for you to take a look at some of the thinking behind this. From a more research-oriented basis, we've been really impressed with the work of Angela Lee Duckworth at the University of Pennsylvania. She was very successful in industry and then decided that where her contribution was as being a classroom teacher, and has since gone on to being a researcher in Pennsylvania. And she's developed a survey that is particularly helpful for us to think about for ourselves as teachers, and also an application for our learners. So, here are just some of the sample questions, and we'll provide this reference to you and encourage you to take a look at how you might use these questions. But just think about yourself as a learner and think about the learners that you're serving. Let's take number three. "I have difficulty maintaining my focus on projects that take more than a few months to complete. New ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones." You have each made a big commitment to Coursera and to your own learning by signing up for this course. It takes real persistence to complete an online course like this, and we really commend you for the grit that you're showing in not only taking it on, but following up on it. Let's take a look at a few more samples. "I finish what I begin." "Setbacks don't discourage me." And "I've overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge." So, as we think about planning for our learners and planning in our classrooms, we need to think about the level of challenge that we're setting for our students. Is it high enough to create that real degree of challenge, and do they have enough support so that when it gets hard, they have the resilience to persist? I'd like to just remind you of some of the learning models that we talked about earlier, and for you to think about how the notion of grit and perseverance is inherent in each of these models. Remember when we talked about Kieran Egan's work on learning in depth, where a learner takes one particular topic and becomes an expert in it over time. Think about the perseverance that's required to stick with that topic and what a learner can learn from that experience. We also talked about the model of self-regulation and the importance of learners knowing which strategy to apply to which task. So, to think about how we can build in resilience in our learners if one strategy isn't working, that they have a second strategy to apply, or a third, or a fourth. We also talked about lifelong learning and the work of Guy Claxton and how we build resilience, resourcefulness, and reciprocity and reflectiveness into our teaching and into our learning. So, again to be thinking about that these are not just good things to be doing, but they will also build that whole characteristic of grit in our learners. And, finally we talked about the work of Lauren Resnick, and effort based learning and the importance of having fair and credible assessments and very clear learning intentions and clear criteria for success. Each of these models is directly connected with perseverance. And again, we just want to encourage you to be really conscious in your planning about what is it when you design a lesson, design a unit, design a course of study for your learners, are you building in the opportunity for them to persevere and to develop resilience? So, if we think about connect, extend and challenge, we want you to think about how do the notions of grit and perseverance connect with your own experiences as a learner and yourself as a teacher? We'd like you to think about how you might model and then build grit and perseverance with your students, or how you're already doing that. And, as we look ahead to our next lecture, and the final lecture in this series, we're going to be looking at the importance of networks, of trust and the impact that trust has on learners. So, we'll look forward to seeing you then. [MUSIC]
