I am suggesting another new topic, with perhaps more room to explore new avenues of shared thought: Can people be taught character traits like determination to succeed and to persevere? Or is there an overriding biological nature that determines such traits in humans?
My suspicion is that it varies from person to person how strongly wired they are.
Further, I suspect it is easier to drag somebody from inclined toward what we think of positive traits to the negative than the other way around, just as it is easier to diminish their physical, intellectual, and emotional potential through application of substances (alcohol, nicotine, etc.) and/or deprivation of positive intellectual or emotional stimulation.
We know from identical twin studies that their being raised together leads to divergent personalities, while being raised apart and not knowing each other leads to convergent personalities.
We know from family studies that siblings raised by the same parents by no means turn out with the same moral senses!
Have you read any of the work of Angela Duckworth on grit? I find it interesting, and I think that some of us are more wired to persist in the face of difficulty. But she seems to think it is a trait that can be taught.
I am not so sure. I know for sure, though, that many people are ignorant and unsuccessful by choice.
I'm pretty familiar with her work as well as the work on conscientiousness. Wikipedia has two sentences that resonate for me in this area:
However, meta-analyses have found no evidence that grit is linked to superior performance. Moreover, Duckworth's operationalization of grit has been criticized as a mere renaming of the previously established construct of conscientiousness.
The first of these is more key to me than the second, as the second is "merely" about her possession of the "intelligence" that Harvard's Howard Gardner neglected: marketing! (He, too, renamed some previously established constructs and got famous for it.)
Teaching grit does not seem to work appreciably better than teaching resilience, another vital (IMO) aptitude.
It's too bad. I wish they seemed more teachable than they do. {i]Empathy[/i] seems more teachable than those two traits do!
I think that both Duckworth and Gardner shouldn't be blamed for what they've tried to bring to the educator's toolkit. The problem with most education "reformers" is that they glom onto frameworks for thinking about ways to educate as education itself.
Duckworth and Gardner have shown that we should continue to be looking at children as individual learners, as individuals who bring a certain orientation to the world, with certain innate strengths as learners, and the education we provide should work to develop those strengths by exploiting the learner's interests.
So, for example, when we have students who present as Gardner would call them "bodily kinesthetic" or "Spatial" learners, we should be aiming our teaching with that in mind. We should be praising effort for all students for moving towards a goal---teaching how to create short-term and long-term goals and how to celebrate them, and I think that reflects Duckworth's contribution to examining our students. But, I don't think that either theorist has captured the entire dynamic nature of all learners.
Nor do I think anyone can. I do think, though, that we need to encourage systemic change that affords individual educators to have the flexibility to meet individual students' needs by teaching in a manner similar to what I outlined in the last paragraph.
a) Figure out what a students strengths and weaknesses are---for THEM.
b) enlighten the student first.
c) engage the student through his/her/their interests
d) be sure to imbed self-assessment into the process
e) use that self-assessment and teacher assessment to demonstrate student progress and where adjustments need to be made by both teacher and student.
f) consistently promote effort. There may be reasons for something being difficult to learn, but there are reasons to continue to work towards a goal, if it has true relevance to the learner. The teacher enables that relevance by working within student interests.
So, for example, suppose I wanted to teach the concept of a circle as a set of points that share the same distance from a center point, and the student was that bodily kinesthetic learner of Gardner's Multiple Intelligences. Let's say I also know that this student is highly motivated to play hockey. We might literally examine hockey rinks and the number of circles that are contained within them, and the rules for hockey face-offs require staying on the perimeter of the circle until the puck is dropped, and then we might gather several students, placing one as the center of that circle and using a tether/rope/ribbon of some sort of exactly the same length place other students around our "center" equidistantly to create the circle. From there we might then look at ice rink models to examine the circles of each---or, if we could go to an actual rink---or the basketball court to measure the circles, there.
And assessment would work from there, with questions designed to afford the student a chance to investigate various circles as we find them in the everyday environment, and then to the more abstract circles encountered on paper or through computer graphics.
And perhaps, then we'd extend it further to ask a student to design a rink of their own by modeling it in some fashion of his choosing.
And move on from there. And when that student struggles with any part of this process then I'd ask them to review what they know, what they still want to find out, and how far we've come to date, and that is the student's effort that has produced what he has accomplished towards the ultimate goal of fully grasping a the concept of a circle, it's use in every day life, its purpose in design, how to measure one, how to find its area, its perimeter, and how to see it used to create cylinders like a...puck.
All along, of course, this is a very simple example (and it could use more thought, btw) of trying to use Gardner and Duckworth in concert as frameworks for teaching. But the approach is more in line with John Dewey's theories than Gardner's or Duckworth's contributions alone. To me their work has value in letting me as a teacher thinking both broadly in terms of how I can create the kind of learning experience to which individual students will respond and develop.
But, does that teach determination? Maybe. And can the learner generalize the concepts and apply to other situations that may not be of particular interest to him/her/them? Perhaps, if assessment, carefully thought-out assessment, comes in to play.
My experience tells you that this can work well in terms of student engagement and student learning, but only when faculty is given the freedom to teach this way. Too many teachers today are trapped in systems that do not afford this kind of work. Sadly.
I spent the last decade of my career expanding my thoughts in this area and trying to apply this essential method to my work. But I don't think I actually taught grit as much as I stressed finding a way to persevere when stressed.
I used to tell my kids "if you're not uncomfortable, you're not learning".
I wanted them to understand that learning was worth the effort. And that is why I never stressed grades. What I'd say about grades is, "don't learn this to produce and A on a test, or to get a good report card, or to please your parents, or to please me. This is for you to learn for
you. At the end of the day, grades don't matter. Learning matters. Make it matter to you, and you'll never have to worry about grades."
Okay, I strayed from grit discussion alone.
Empathy? Harder to teach in the virtual world, don't you think?
