What is Grit and can it be used in schools?
On the day that the Chair of the Independent School's Council has stated that the best GCSE grades do not go to merely the brightest, they go to the ones that work the hardest, is there a better time to look at the idea of grit, perseverance and resilience?
I am currently reading Angela Duckworth's book entitled 'grit'. She is a former teacher, turned consultant, turned psychologist. In the book, she explains her fascination with the idea that hard work, passion and perseverance are more important that just 'talent' alone.
Duckworth states that we, as humans, have a fascination with 'talent' yet often fail to see hard work and perseverance as a talent in itself.
Barnaby Lenon today says that pupils that work for 7 hours per day should see a real improvement in exam results on the back of the productive work that they put in over the next 2 and a half weeks. I usually suggest 6 hours for pupils broken into two hour chunks but this still follows the same principle.
When I suggested 6 hours a day last year to one pupil, he laughed and thought I was joking. Needless to say, that boy did not perform excellently in his exams.
Talent and the idea of some pupils being able to take in extra detail and absorb information easier than others is a reality and some pupils really don't have to work as hard. However, to feel that this is not fair and to not work because things don't 'come easy' is just counter-intuitive. Many pupils are left behind when they fail to put in the effort needed.
The comparison I often give to pupils is that of their primary school spelling tests. Why is it that at the age of 6 they were willing to sit down and work for hours learning a list of about 10 words? They would take a week looking at the words, covering them, writing them and checking them. At the end of the week, the spelling test happened and they scored 9 or 10 out of 10, brilliant! Why then take a system that worked at the age of 6 and not trust it at the age of 16. I know that there is a lot more to learn and many more subjects but when pupils say to me 'I just can't learn it', I point them to their spelling tests at the age of 6.
Yes, we can find shortcuts for certain pupils. In my evening revision sessions in House, we look at revision strategies and we quickly identified a couple of visual learners where pictures help - their parents were informed and hopefully they are using a few cartoons in their revision notes this holiday. Another pupil was identified as what I call a reflective learner. In this case nothing goes in unless you ask them a question straight away afterwards. Once they had commented on the last topic and repeated the ideas from their own head, this then gave them a really good chance of learning. This was also communicated home.
This brings me to the final help point; Parent/sibling help. Let's go back to the spelling tests at primary school. The other factor that is usually a constant is parent help. Mum, dad or whoever is around would often work with the child to help them learn, to pick out mistakes and support them through what would otherwise be a lonely experience. Why, again, has this stopped? Why do the same parents think that they are no longer needed now that there is more to learn, more to take in, more to correct and more support needed. This is not about criticism and negatives, it is about quick checks, testing and avoidance of distractions (R.O.S. Fortnight, snapchat to name just a few easy distractions for over Easter).
Just because you may have forgotten the 3 finger theory for physics, cannot remember titration from osmosis and didn't know an ox bow lake needed mention of the thalweg - doesn't mean that you can't help them with it.
Now the final factor is stress, anxiety and their ability to cause a roadblock on this path to development and learning. If we believe that resilience and 'grit' are key to development then anxiety can cause our whole tower of building blocks to come crashing down. This is where the recent lecture by Steve Bull (professional performance coach rather than the Wolves Striker) comes in. He came into school last week to talk about a 'coaching approach' and his ideas weave well with those of Sally Bonneywell of whom I have spoken about before.
His key ideas are:
1. MOTIVATION
ATTITUDE is a talent
CHOOSE to get better every day
LOVE the challenges
Making the boat go FASTER
These ideas follow the ideas that attitude must be considered a talent. Just like the Men's 8 at the Olympics, the attitude must be 'what will make the boat go faster?'. With everything that you do over the Easter break, it all needs to add up to make you more prepared for these exams.
2. Confidence
CONTROL the controllables
‘Can do’ SELF TALK
Use CUES
Steve's second category are all best suited to reducing anxiety. The first idea is that you can only control the controllables. Don't worry about things of which you are not in control. Self Talk is the idea that it is ok to 'coach' yourself. Remind yourself of what is important. I know that in one boarding House at my school they draw on the bathroom mirror to help with this. Chalk pens can be bought at most good stationery shops and they enable you to write on mirrors and windows- it can also be rubbed away with a damp cloth. The final point is cues. If you cannot remember the controllable, the write them down.
Breathing, focus, keep going, time limits, friends and family members names. These are all road signs that help you to navigate to resilience (see the STEER blog).
WARNING - Don't do Don'ts. If your cues include a don't ie - don't look at your phone screen. With a cue like this, the first thing you are likely to think about is the phone screen. If someone says 'don't think about a pink elephant'. The thing you are trying to avoid is the thing that is most likely to appear in your head!!!!
3. RESILIENCE
REVIEW successes
The confidence PEAK chart
REFRAMING and perspective.
These final points from Steve again help to avoid anxiety and build resilience. Remember that if you can keep pushing on, you can do the 6-7 hours and the end goal becomes that much easier to achieve.
First is review successes. This can be lifelong successes in a coaching session or daily successes at the end of the revision day. Write them down, give yourself a visual proof of the hard work that you have done. This is also the joy of the 6 hour day. 8-10 (break) 11-1 (break) 3-5 (break). If at this point you then review and you feel short of an hour then you can add an extra hour session and this could be a re-cap session with your mum or dad as they get home from work. This means that review can be done, an extra hour can be done, look cover write check type approach can be done, parental involvement can be done and this all adds to the confidence and hence resilience - if you think it, you can feel it!
A peak chart is taking a chart of mountain peaks and on each peak writing something of which you are proud. Again, it is a positive re-enforcement tool. It can be done on anything and can be as simple as a list (see iplayer for a Radio 4 programme from Sunday on 'the power of the list').
Finally, we come to reframing. None of Steve Bull's ideas are particularly new but he packages them well to make them clear and easy to use. I am sure that most of you are just sat there thinking that this is all so obvious. Yes it is obvious but people forget to do them. When was the last time that you could not get to sleep worrying about uncontrollables? A cue list would have helped you to calm, breath and drift off knowing that you had controlled what you were capable of controlling and the worries strangely drain away.
Reframing is also an easy way of doing this. When you are stressed in the middle of revision and worried about exams, it is easy to take the exams and give them too much importance. Reframing is taking the exams and reminding yourself that they are merely you writing what you already know onto a piece of paper 'reframing' to put the worry into context. Jonathan Edward's when asked about the importance of a jump to win an Olympic Gold just said that his job was merely jumping into a sand pit! 'Reframing!'.
So as the Head of Harrow makes his point today about hard work. It is easy for us all to say that Harrow boys take a strenuous entrance exam, they are hand picked at the age of 14 to go to an elite school but the fact of it is that they also work hard and the hard work is the differentiating factor in the end. Grit, resilience and hard work are key concepts and as you sit down to revise today keep in mind your controllables, set yourself time targets and revision really becomes brilliant when you remind yourself that learning can actually be fun! But the science of fun and enjoyment will have to be saved for a future blog.
I am currently reading Angela Duckworth's book entitled 'grit'. She is a former teacher, turned consultant, turned psychologist. In the book, she explains her fascination with the idea that hard work, passion and perseverance are more important that just 'talent' alone.
Barnaby Lenon today says that pupils that work for 7 hours per day should see a real improvement in exam results on the back of the productive work that they put in over the next 2 and a half weeks. I usually suggest 6 hours for pupils broken into two hour chunks but this still follows the same principle.
When I suggested 6 hours a day last year to one pupil, he laughed and thought I was joking. Needless to say, that boy did not perform excellently in his exams.
Talent and the idea of some pupils being able to take in extra detail and absorb information easier than others is a reality and some pupils really don't have to work as hard. However, to feel that this is not fair and to not work because things don't 'come easy' is just counter-intuitive. Many pupils are left behind when they fail to put in the effort needed.
The comparison I often give to pupils is that of their primary school spelling tests. Why is it that at the age of 6 they were willing to sit down and work for hours learning a list of about 10 words? They would take a week looking at the words, covering them, writing them and checking them. At the end of the week, the spelling test happened and they scored 9 or 10 out of 10, brilliant! Why then take a system that worked at the age of 6 and not trust it at the age of 16. I know that there is a lot more to learn and many more subjects but when pupils say to me 'I just can't learn it', I point them to their spelling tests at the age of 6.
Yes, we can find shortcuts for certain pupils. In my evening revision sessions in House, we look at revision strategies and we quickly identified a couple of visual learners where pictures help - their parents were informed and hopefully they are using a few cartoons in their revision notes this holiday. Another pupil was identified as what I call a reflective learner. In this case nothing goes in unless you ask them a question straight away afterwards. Once they had commented on the last topic and repeated the ideas from their own head, this then gave them a really good chance of learning. This was also communicated home.
This brings me to the final help point; Parent/sibling help. Let's go back to the spelling tests at primary school. The other factor that is usually a constant is parent help. Mum, dad or whoever is around would often work with the child to help them learn, to pick out mistakes and support them through what would otherwise be a lonely experience. Why, again, has this stopped? Why do the same parents think that they are no longer needed now that there is more to learn, more to take in, more to correct and more support needed. This is not about criticism and negatives, it is about quick checks, testing and avoidance of distractions (R.O.S. Fortnight, snapchat to name just a few easy distractions for over Easter).
Just because you may have forgotten the 3 finger theory for physics, cannot remember titration from osmosis and didn't know an ox bow lake needed mention of the thalweg - doesn't mean that you can't help them with it.
Now the final factor is stress, anxiety and their ability to cause a roadblock on this path to development and learning. If we believe that resilience and 'grit' are key to development then anxiety can cause our whole tower of building blocks to come crashing down. This is where the recent lecture by Steve Bull (professional performance coach rather than the Wolves Striker) comes in. He came into school last week to talk about a 'coaching approach' and his ideas weave well with those of Sally Bonneywell of whom I have spoken about before.
His key ideas are:
1. MOTIVATION
ATTITUDE is a talent
CHOOSE to get better every day
LOVE the challenges
Making the boat go FASTER
These ideas follow the ideas that attitude must be considered a talent. Just like the Men's 8 at the Olympics, the attitude must be 'what will make the boat go faster?'. With everything that you do over the Easter break, it all needs to add up to make you more prepared for these exams.
2. Confidence
CONTROL the controllables
‘Can do’ SELF TALK
Use CUES
Steve's second category are all best suited to reducing anxiety. The first idea is that you can only control the controllables. Don't worry about things of which you are not in control. Self Talk is the idea that it is ok to 'coach' yourself. Remind yourself of what is important. I know that in one boarding House at my school they draw on the bathroom mirror to help with this. Chalk pens can be bought at most good stationery shops and they enable you to write on mirrors and windows- it can also be rubbed away with a damp cloth. The final point is cues. If you cannot remember the controllable, the write them down.
Breathing, focus, keep going, time limits, friends and family members names. These are all road signs that help you to navigate to resilience (see the STEER blog).
WARNING - Don't do Don'ts. If your cues include a don't ie - don't look at your phone screen. With a cue like this, the first thing you are likely to think about is the phone screen. If someone says 'don't think about a pink elephant'. The thing you are trying to avoid is the thing that is most likely to appear in your head!!!!
REVIEW successes
The confidence PEAK chart
REFRAMING and perspective.
These final points from Steve again help to avoid anxiety and build resilience. Remember that if you can keep pushing on, you can do the 6-7 hours and the end goal becomes that much easier to achieve.
First is review successes. This can be lifelong successes in a coaching session or daily successes at the end of the revision day. Write them down, give yourself a visual proof of the hard work that you have done. This is also the joy of the 6 hour day. 8-10 (break) 11-1 (break) 3-5 (break). If at this point you then review and you feel short of an hour then you can add an extra hour session and this could be a re-cap session with your mum or dad as they get home from work. This means that review can be done, an extra hour can be done, look cover write check type approach can be done, parental involvement can be done and this all adds to the confidence and hence resilience - if you think it, you can feel it!
A peak chart is taking a chart of mountain peaks and on each peak writing something of which you are proud. Again, it is a positive re-enforcement tool. It can be done on anything and can be as simple as a list (see iplayer for a Radio 4 programme from Sunday on 'the power of the list').
Finally, we come to reframing. None of Steve Bull's ideas are particularly new but he packages them well to make them clear and easy to use. I am sure that most of you are just sat there thinking that this is all so obvious. Yes it is obvious but people forget to do them. When was the last time that you could not get to sleep worrying about uncontrollables? A cue list would have helped you to calm, breath and drift off knowing that you had controlled what you were capable of controlling and the worries strangely drain away.
Reframing is also an easy way of doing this. When you are stressed in the middle of revision and worried about exams, it is easy to take the exams and give them too much importance. Reframing is taking the exams and reminding yourself that they are merely you writing what you already know onto a piece of paper 'reframing' to put the worry into context. Jonathan Edward's when asked about the importance of a jump to win an Olympic Gold just said that his job was merely jumping into a sand pit! 'Reframing!'.
So as the Head of Harrow makes his point today about hard work. It is easy for us all to say that Harrow boys take a strenuous entrance exam, they are hand picked at the age of 14 to go to an elite school but the fact of it is that they also work hard and the hard work is the differentiating factor in the end. Grit, resilience and hard work are key concepts and as you sit down to revise today keep in mind your controllables, set yourself time targets and revision really becomes brilliant when you remind yourself that learning can actually be fun! But the science of fun and enjoyment will have to be saved for a future blog.
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