True Grit: Coaching, Teaching and Growth Mindset

Two of my children, Dan and Lucy, who both play hockey, attended Heartland Hockey Camp in Deerwood, Minnesota for over ten summers. Heartland Hockey Camp is owned and operated by Steve Jensen, a former NHL player with the Minnesota North Stars and the L.A. Kings. Steve also played in the 1976 Olympic Games and led that team in scoring with 52 goals. In any case, at the start of each camp, Steve would gather all the players in the camp fitness center for a talk. And every year for over ten years, my children heard the same message: you can be the most talented player on your team, but if you don’t work hard every day, all the time, you aren’t the most valuable player. Careers are made through determination, perseverance, hard work, not through talent.

This morning, I found this video of a Weekend Ted Talk on the front page of the Huffington Post. In it, Angela Lee Duckworth makes the researcher’s version of the same argument. Her research, she says, demonstrates that “grit” or the will to persist and not IQ or talent is the primary determinant of both academic and professional success. In fact, Duckworth says, “Talent doesn’t make you gritty. Our data show very clearly that there are many talented individuals who simply do not follow through on their commitments. In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent.”

Now, part of what constitutes grit, Duckworth argues, is “growth mindset,” a way of thinking about or understanding one’s own learning identified by psychologist, Carol Dweck. Growth mindset is “the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort. ” Individuals who possess growth mindset, say both Dweck and Duckworth, are much more likely to persist through failures because they understand that failure is not a permanent condition, but a learningful one.

In February 2011, the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project (U.S.) published a report entitled Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. The report identifies eight habits of mind necessary to write successfully at the postsecondary level. They are:

Curiosity: the desire to know more about the world

Openness: the willingness to consider new ways of being and thinking in the world

Engagement: a sense of investment and involvement in learning

Creativity: the ability to use novel approaches for generating, investigating, and representing ideas

Persistence: the ability to sustain interest in and attention to short- and long-term projects

Responsibility – the ability to take ownership of one’s actions and understand the consequences of those
actions for oneself and others.

Flexibility – the ability to adapt to situations, expectations, or demands.

Metacognition – the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes used to structure knowledge.

Interestingly, these habits of mind match up nearly seamlessly with the ways in which coaches of elite college athletes define coachability. Coachable athletes, coaches report, listen to and trust coaches. They are receptive to feedback; they learn well from indirective, formative feedback as well as directive or critical feedback. Coachable athletes become students of the game; they are inquisitive, ask a lot of questions and listen to the answers. They seek advice from many sources. Coachable athletes, say coaches, become their own coach: they internalize over long periods of time, a coaching voice that provides feedback to them in situ as it were: as they train, practice, and play. Coachable athletes are open to and seek change, growth, and development. They don’t frustrate easily, but persist through frustrations or disappointments. Coachable athletes are flexible and adaptable even and especially to the unexpected, whether they are surprised in the moment of performance or in training. Finally, coachable athletes partner with their coaches in their own training and development as well as in the coaching of a team; they cultivate reciprocal relations with their coaches and offer feedback to them, clarifying their own needs and interests as well as offering their insight to coaches. In other words, successful college writers and coachable student athletes share habits of mind. And these habits of mind, singly and collectively, sound a lot like “grit” and “growth mindset.”

Here’s the thing—and I’ll return to it in later posts as this one is already longer than it ought to be—I think those of us who teach at the postsecondary level and perhaps at prior levels as well should be asking ourselves whether or how our curricula, individual course design, assignments and feedback, and pedagogy actually support students in acquiring and sustaining habits of mind and qualities of coachability that constitute “grit” and “growth mindset.” Are we teaching/coaching these capacities? Or do we expect students to arrive in our classrooms with such habits already firmly in place? And if the latter is true, how do we respond to the criticism that our practices contradict what we know to be true about intelligence and ability: that they are not fixed qualities, but develop and grow over time?

I worry, I admit, that children and young adults are far more likely to find support in cultivating grit and growth mindset—the habits of mind for continuous learning and for success variously measured—at the rink (or on the field, or in piano or ballet lessons perhaps) than in the university writing classroom. At the very least, I think we, teachers, should show more grit than we have to date in our consideration of such questions.

Resources:

http://www.hockey-reference.com/players/j/jensest01.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tedtalks/angela-lee-duckworth-tedtalk_b_4277459.html
http://wpacouncil.org/framework