A few years after I’d gotten
a toehold in grit research, Wendy Kopp, the founder and then CEO of
Teach For America, came to visit Marty.
Then still his graduate student, I was eager to join their meeting for two reasons. First, Teach For
America was sending hundreds of recent college graduates into disadvantaged school districts across
the country. From personal experience, I knew teaching to be a grit-demanding profession, nowhere
more so than in the urban and rural classrooms where TFA teachers are assigned. Second, Wendy was
herself a paragon of grit. Famously, she’d conceived of TFA during her senior year at Princeton and,
unlike so many idealists who eventually give up on their dream, she’d stuck with it, starting from
nothing and creating one of the largest and most influential educational nonprofits in the country.
“Relentless pursuit” was both a core value of TFA and the phrase
often used by friends and
coworkers to describe Wendy’s leadership style.
At that meeting, the three of us developed a hypothesis: Teachers who have an optimistic way of
interpreting adversity have more grit than their more pessimistic counterparts, and grit, in turn,
predicts better teaching. For instance, an optimistic teacher might keep looking for ways to help an
uncooperative student, whereas a pessimist might assume there was nothing more to be done. To test
whether that was true, we decided to measure optimism and grit before
teachers set foot in the
classroom and, a year later, see how effectively teachers had advanced the academic progress of their
students.
That August, four hundred TFA teachers completed the Grit Scale and, in addition, Marty’s
questionnaire assessing their optimism. To the extent they thought of temporary and specific causes for
bad events, and permanent and pervasive causes of good events, we coded their responses as
optimistic. To the extent they did the reverse, we coded their responses as pessimistic.
In the same survey, we measured one more thing: happiness. Why?
For one thing, there was a
small but growing body of scientific evidence that happiness wasn’t just the
consequence
of
performing well at work, it might also be an important
cause
. Also, we were curious about how
happy the grittiest teachers were. Did single-minded passion and perseverance come at a cost? Or
could you be gritty and happy at the same time?
One year later, when Teach For America had tabulated effectiveness ratings for each teacher based
on the academic
gains of their students, we analyzed our data. Just as we’d expected, optimistic
teachers were grittier and happier, and grit and happiness in turn explained why optimistic teachers
got their students to achieve more during the school year.
After staring at these results for a while, I began reminiscing about my own experience of
classroom teaching. I remembered the many afternoons I’d gone home exasperated and exhausted. I
remembered battling catastrophic self-talk about my own capabilities—
Oh god, I really am an idiot!
—and those of my young charges—
She got it wrong again? She’ll never learn this!
And I
remembered the mornings I’d gotten up and decided, after all, that there was one more tactic worth
trying:
Maybe if I bring in a Hershey bar and cut it into pieces, they’ll get the idea of fractions.
Maybe if I have everyone clean out their lockers on Mondays, they’ll get in the habit of keeping
their lockers clean.
The data from this study of young teachers, along with Wendy Kopp’s intuitions, interviews with
grit paragons, and a half century of psychological
research all point to the same, commonsense
conclusion: When you keep searching for ways to change your situation for the better, you stand a
chance of finding them. When you stop searching, assuming they can’t be found,
you guarantee they
won’t.
Or as Henry Ford is often quoted as saying, “Whether you think you can, or think you can’t—
you’re right.”
Around the time Marty Seligman and Steve Maier were linking hopelessness to a lack of perceived
control, a young psychology major named Carol Dweck was making her way through college. Carol
had always been intrigued that some people persevere while others in identical circumstances give
up. Right after graduation, she enrolled in a doctoral program in psychology and pursued this
question.
Marty and Steve’s work had a profound influence on young Carol. She believed their findings but
was unsatisfied. Sure, attributing your misery to causes beyond
your control was debilitating, but
where did these attributions come from in the first place? Why, she asked, did one person grow up to
be an optimist and another a pessimist?
In one of Carol’s first studies, she worked with middle schools to identify boys and girls who, by
consensus of their teachers, the school principal, and the school psychologist, were especially
“helpless” when confronted by failure. Her hunch was that these children believed that a lack of
intellectual ability led to mistakes, rather than a lack of effort. In other words, she suspected it wasn’t
just
a long string of failures that made these children pessimistic, but rather their core beliefs about
success and learning.
To test her idea, Carol divided the children into two groups. Half the children were assigned to a
success only
program. For several weeks, they solved math problems and, at the end of each session,
no matter how many they’d
completed, they received praise for doing well. The other half of the
children in Carol’s study were assigned to an
attribution retraining
program. These children also
solved math problems, but were occasionally told that they hadn’t solved enough problems during that
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