You know," the teacher said, coming up to me as I was turning off the projector, "we educators need to have grit, too. Our jobs aren't getting any easier."
She was right, of course. I had just finished making a presentation to my faculty about the need to foster grit in our students. A few months earlier, an article by Paul Tough in The New York Times Magazine had asserted that character traits like grit, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, and self-confidence are as important as cognitive talent in determining whether students succeed. I had decided to explore with my staff how we could promote these character traits in our students.
But as the teacher noted, grit is not just for students. Teachers and administrators need grit too—today more than ever. It's challenging to be an educator these days: many of our students live in poverty, most are distracted from academic learning by too much screen time, and we face numerous policy demands, including the specter of standardized test scores. These new difficulties come on top of the challenges that educators have always faced: That great lesson we spent hours planning that wasn't so great, after all. The groups of students who simply won't do the work and don't seem to care. The lack of planning time. The outdated curriculum materials provided by the district. And on and on.
And our challenges aren't limited to our work with students. Have you ever had a colleague who didn't follow through or who behaved irresponsibly? Have your school improvement efforts floundered because staff members didn't communicate or collaborate well? Have students' parents sometimes made it harder to teach because they weren't involved—or because they were too involved? In complex social organizations like schools, these situations are not unusual; sometimes they feel like the norm. Schools are families, and every family has an Uncle Ulysses or Cousin Cary who arrives late for dinner and disrupts the discussion.
We need grit to meet instructional challenges as well as to navigate the interactions and tasks that are part of every school day. Here are some suggestions to help school principals develop a schoolwide culture that fosters grit—not only in their students, but also in their colleagues and themselves.
Establish a Schoolwide Grit Mindset
It's important to start by being intentional and transparent in developing schoolwide recognition of the need for grit. When your school tackles improvement efforts, do it with the understanding that things will not always go smoothly. All of us will hit the wall sometimes. When we face failure and seemingly overwhelming obstacles, our success will stem from how we respond. That's as true for us as it is for our students.
The realization that we'll need to persist through setbacks is particularly important because sometimes experienced educators think they've mastered their role and should be beyond frustration or failure. They find it hard to accept that the job can still be difficult and exasperating for them at times. The reality is that each year brings new students, and the world continues to spin; no matter how good we are, new challenges—and, yes, new frustrations and failures—await us.
Why not focus a faculty meeting on educator perseverance? Give everyone a piece of paper and ask them to create two lists: the tasks or aspects of their role that have become easier over time in one column, and the tasks that are still difficult (or have become even harder) in the second column. After a few minutes of silent writing, move people into small groups to share, and then collect and display the information that was generated and ask what can be learned from it. Participants are certain to realize that, regardless of experience or skills, no one's "difficult" column is blank; we all have frustrations and problems that can't be solved quickly or easily. It can be oddly comforting to learn that others also have frustrations—even those colleagues who never seem to sweat.
You might then want to move the meeting agenda to problem solving by having the whole group categorize and combine the identified difficulties, and then creating work groups so that teachers from different disciplines or grades can come together periodically to work on a common challenge. The need for grit will be in the air because everyone has been reminded that these problems won't be easily solved.
Throughout the year, use faculty meetings to acknowledge and publicize the progress the groups are making in moving some of the tasks to the "easier" column. Check in with the groups to see what assistance they need, always reminding them that these challenges won't be solved overnight. Some, in fact, may never be solved; the goals are to make progress, to become aware of how we respond when we fail or are frustrated, and to develop strategies that help us persevere. This kind of reflection will also make teachers more effective when they engage their students in developing grit.
Make Grit a Habit
Grit can become a habit when we approach failure or frustration as an opportunity to learn. I sometimes asked my veteran teachers to set a grit goal that had about a 50/50 chance of success. "If you fail," I said, "I'll ask what you learned, not why you failed." Many of these teachers welcomed the chance to leave their comfort zone, to try something new and take a risk, knowing that I was a supportive partner in their learning. One teacher, for example, set a goal of reaching out more to her students' families. "I know I should do this," she said, "but it's not easy for me, and I tend to procrastinate."
Occasionally, I would tell a teacher before a classroom observation that I wanted to see a lesson that was different and out of his or her comfort zone. "Try something new and really hard," I said, "knowing that it might not work. If it doesn't, we can talk about what you'll do differently next time."
A key step in fostering grit is reflecting on how we already use it. When teaching students about grit, for example, we might ask them how they respond in different settings—both in school and out of school—when things become hard for them. A student who uses grit in caring for younger siblings, learning to play a musical instrument, or practicing gymnastics may not realize that the same attitude—acceptance of mistakes as opportunities to learn, willingness to engage in repeated experiences, and a refusal to quit—is relevant in learning to write or do math.
Educators, too, can benefit from reflecting on the use of grit in their lives. Principals can help teachers see how the perseverance and passion they use at home as they interact with their families or pursue an avocation can be applied to challenges at school, too. For example, a teacher who found it difficult to keep up with grading essays was a runner, so he and I talked about how he could tackle a pile of ungraded papers by calling on the same perseverance that enabled him to run regardless of how tired he felt.
It's important to note that using grit doesn't simply mean working harder. Teachers and principals already work hard. But regardless of how talented we are or how hard we work, some parts of our job will always require added determination. Despite the effort and progress we've made, we'll always face new challenges that will require us to try and try again while maintaining our focus and energy.
Be a Grit Partner
Finally, we can be grit partners for one another. An important part of fostering grit in students is sharing with them how we have used grit in our own lives. Just as we sometimes watch Olympic athletes and think how talented they are without considering the thousands of hours they've spent practicing, students may assume that the achievements of the adults around them came pretty easily. After all, the hours we spend and the effort we invest in our jobs aren't visible; students only see the finished product. Our journeys can be instructive to our students. Occasionally taking the time to share something we've learned—and perhaps talking about how long it took us to learn it—can be a powerful lesson.
The same thing applies to the way colleagues should support one another. It's easy to believe that the teacher down the hall, adored by students who clearly learn a lot, was born with that innate teaching talent. In fact, regardless of her genes, talent, or training, that successful teacher has likely overcome numerous obstacles and benefited from hard work and focused practice. All her effort is probably not visible to others, but it's surely there. We need to create a setting in which all of us—including that teacher—can share our struggles.
This sharing is even more relevant for new teachers, who are still learning what's required for success. Mentors and teammates need to pull back the curtain of expertise and candidly explain how they prepare and how they respond when things don't go well. One idea for a productive faculty meeting would be to ask teachers to come prepared to meet in small groups to share a time when a lesson worked as planned and a time when a lesson flopped. After everyone has shared their flop, each group can brainstorm and offer ideas about what might be done differently next time. We learn more from our failures than our successes.
As a principal, I regularly talked to my faculty (and to students and their parents) about the value of new mistakes. "Making the same old mistake isn't wise," I would say, "but making no mistakes may not be wise either." I explained that if you're not making any mistakes, it suggests that you're simply doing the same thing over and over; even if you're successful, you won't be prepared when conditions change. "Making new mistakes, on the other hand, means that you're trying new strategies and not repeating your errors, so you're learning." I often asked a teacher what new mistake he or she had made lately, and I routinely shared my frequent new mistakes with the faculty.
Grit for All
As we think about tackling change and making our schools better, it's essential to recognize that perseverance and passion are important qualities not just for students but also for educators. Principals and teachers need to work together to create a culture that nurtures grit as an integral part of the formula for student and teacher success. When we do, we send a powerful message of possibility to everyone in the school.
