True Grit, Sans Coen Brothers

The world of education loves a buzzword - there've been plenty over the years, some better and some worse. A buzzword in many ways is a bit like Easter. You are likely familiar at this point that the word Easter likely draws inspiration from the Assyrian goddess, Ishtar (who bequeathed her name to a gate in Babylon), a goddess of fertility, but it certainly draws on ancient fertility holidays associated with Spring. Later, Easter was determined by Orthodox Christians of the time to be the time when their savior rose from the dead. Today, in most cultures, Easter serves as an opportunity to paint eggs, eat candy, and wear fancy clothes. How, you might be asking, does this relate to educational buzzwords? Quite simply put, educational buzzwords almost always start out as one thing, slowly transform into another, and come out at the end of the process as something completely unrecognizable. How can we avoid this fate for future great ideas in education? I most certainly don't have an answer, but that doesn't mean I won't write about it!

Two of the most recent buzzwords or ideas spreading through education like wildfire are "grit" and "growth mindset". Both concepts on their own are like a cup of coffee on a rainy morning, truly espectacular. However, like anything the educational status quo gets it's hands on they have taken on a life of their own, but let's take this step by step.

Lets first talk about Growth Mindset, since I feel like it's been around for a bit longer and you can't seem to go to an educational conference in English without having Carol Dweck name dropped before the first coffee break. I'll write this as if you already know the basic idea behind Growth Mindset, but if you don't please feel free to YouTube Dweck's TedTalk. I think you need to address Growth Mindset from two perspectives. First, the traditional model of education (in the U.S. at least) has labelled students as "smart", "normal", or "dumb" since its inception. This is obviously problematic as we know Psychologically that what we're told we are is generally what we believe we are. Growth Mindset attempts to flip that on its head and suggests that students shouldn't be categorized by academic capacity, instead they should be encouraged to focus on the "process" instead of the "result". This is the second perspective from which we should look at Growth Mindset; recent schooling models have focused heavily on evaluation and the "end product". This can be very problematic for certain students and in reality for society as a whole. Emphasizing the process of learning as opposed to the end result helps students to later abstract their methodology into the real world, as opposed to simply acquiring content knowledge. Ideally all of this leads to metacognition, where students are self-reflective of their own learning and can use the tools acquired later in life. All of this is quite beautiful and necessary stuff, but the unfortunate truth is that Growth Mindset is used in some circles to obfuscate the painful reality that the universe is a bit of a cruel master. We grow through improving the "process", but ultimately life is a results oriented business. Growth Mindset's process over product mentality is desperately needed in education, but not at the cost of helping our students to remain grounded and guiding them in a direction that best suits their abilities.

This leads us to grit, which quite simply put is repeated resilience. I think the main problem with grit isn't that it's being used poorly in some circumstances, like with Growth Mindset, but instead that teachers are blind to the grit that many students already have and how to connect that to education. Grit goes by many names in the world of young people; many sports teams refer to themselves as "mentality monsters", in video games people attempt to maintain "PMA", and the list goes on. Most of our students have seen grit in one form or another. Some have even had to exhibit grit that we could never imagine due to various circumstances in their life. I remember students in Oklahoma coming from less than nothing who woke themselves up each morning, fed and dressed their siblings, walked through dangerous neighborhoods in the dark, all to get access to an education. Our issue as educators isn't a lack of grit (though there are certainly students who don't have it), our issue is a lack of desire. We have yet to provide a reason for our students to show grit and we haven't shown them how the grit they have exhibited in other areas of life can apply to education. Why is it that they should be repeatedly resilient in a 9th grade Biology class? You better provide a damn good reason or that 15 year old will laugh you right out of the building. In the end, it isn't about the Biology, it's about building the endurance and the fight to make something of yourself, even when the adult world gets tough. For me, this again comes back to our heavy focus on content, which is undoubtedly important, but has blinded us. We've forgotten that education also serves to, as author John Green says, "build a society without a bunch of idiots in it."

I don't want this to feel like a blog where I put Growth Mindset and grit into a trash can and rolled said trash can down a hill. I think both concepts are incredibly necessary aspects of creating well rounded human beings that construct a better society. The problem is that the educational world wants to force these two concepts into their own academic context - a context that they cannot comfortably fit into alone, they are much more vast than that. It's a bit like when C.S. Lewis wrote that Aslan (a creature that up until now had been seen as a loveable talking beast) "...[wasn't] safe, but he [was] good." Similarly, Growth Mindset and grit cannot be sterilized into something "safe" and uniform for the educational masses. For them to reach their full potential we need to let them be applicable in their entirety, even when it comes into conflict with the beloved educational status quo.