Host Annette Stevenson talks with best-selling author, psychologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania Angela Duckworth. Duckworth unpacks her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance and provides further insight into her research of the characteristics of high achieving individuals.

This episode is sponsored by Siemens & Edgenuity.

Skip to: 01:46 Explanation of Research/Defining Grit
Skip to: 03:23 In the public education system, how do you think teachers and parents can help children discover their interests while also meeting the parameters of an established curriculum?

I think it’s so important that throughout their K-12 experience, we’ve planted the seeds so that they can find a career that is intrinsically enjoyable much of the day, if not all of the day.

Skip to: 05:46 What advice would you give to young adults who feel they don’t have direction at this stage of life?

Interests are like foods, you don’t really know if you’ll like it or not until you experience it.

Skip to: 08:00 What is Deliberate Practice?

The psychology of attention is that you cannot divide it without real compromise to your learning.

Skip to: 11:21 How important do you think a growth mindset is to overcoming adversity?

Every time a child fails is an opportunity to strengthen their growth mindset by modeling for them and being very clear that failure is sometimes even a good sign. Because it means you tried to do something you can’t yet do which means that you were challenging yourself.

Even successful people don’t easily learn from mistakes. There’s an anxiety about mistake making that crowds out learning sometimes.

Skip to: 17:28 How do you think a culture of Grit can be developed or incorporated into the school environment?

Annette:
Today we have the privilege of speaking with Angela Duckworth about her bestselling book and research. Welcome, Angela. Thank you so much for being with us.

Angela:
Thank you for having me.

Annette:
So to start with, can you provide a brief explanation of your research and then also how do you define grit?

Angela:
I am someone who came to her research from classroom teaching. I was a middle school and high school math teacher for several years in public schools and I was frustrated that I wasn’t at all able to motivate my students to put in the effort that I knew was required to learn the material and to get better at math. And I think the research that I do today is very much motivated by the question, “What is the psychology of effort? Why do some kids keep trying when they’re frustrated or they get a problem wrong and why do other kids give up?” And relatedly, “Why do kids, sometimes, get all their homework done and then sometimes end up spending the whole night on social media?” So effort in the face of obstacles, effort in the face of tempting distractions. I would call these the psychology of grit and self control. But really I’m trying to unpack effort so that we can do better than I did as a teacher, which is I would just tell my kids, “Oh, you should work harder.” And honestly that was not the most insightful thing to say and it didn’t help very much.

Annette:
So in your book you talk about the importance of interest discovery and you go on to explain that children have a greater likelihood of thriving in their interests with a strong support system of parents, teachers, coaches, peers. So regarding the interest discovery process, you give advice that play comes before hard work. In the public education system, how do you think teachers and parents can help children discover their interests while also meeting the parameters of established curriculum?

Angela:
I’ll begin by saying that I think interest is essential to the human motivation. I mean, any of us who understand what it’s like to be bored, sitting in a lecture or having to do something you really, really, really don’t want to do. And we all know what it’s like to not be at our best because we’re not engaged. I don’t mean to imply that kids should be having fun all the time. I mean, it would be naive for me to say that kids will always be intrinsically motivated at all times of day and that nothing will ever require a little bit of self control or work ethic. But in terms of what kids grow up to be, in terms of their careers, in terms of their college majors, I think it’s so important that throughout their K-12 experience, we’ve planted the seeds so that they can find a career that is intrinsically enjoyable, much of the day, if not all of the day.

Angela:
And my own perspective on this is that, as some kids will be very fortunate in that they will discover those interests in French class, in algebra, in English language arts and things that are part of the traditional academic curriculum. But I think one of the most common ways to develop your interest is outside of the academic classes, so extracurricular activities. Many people discover and develop an interest in leadership and team building through sports or maybe your interest in writing is actually something which is peaked more by working on the school newspaper and the assignments that you’re doing for language arts class. So I think in general, the American school system and most other school systems, frankly, we have a long way to go before we can say, “Hey, we’re optimally set up to help all students discover and develop their interests.”

Annette:
So in this country at least, we expect students to think about and sort of decide upon a potential career path around the age of 17 or 18, as they are graduating from high school. This is obviously a young age and also a time of uncertainty. So what advice would you give to young adults who feel they don’t have direction at this stage of life? They don’t know what they want to pursue or how to reach even the end goal.

Angela:
This is such a great question. In fact, it’s the question that’s occupying me centrally as a scientist today. What advice do we have based on science for how to navigate those waters? And I spent, I guess a good decade between graduating from college to figuring out I wanted to become a psychologist. And if you add the four years that I was in college also not knowing what I would eventually end up doing. Well, that’s 14 years of not knowing.

Annette:
Yeah. Absolutely.

Angela:
And I think my first message would be empathy. I mean, I really, really feel for the young people who are already hard workers and they’re resilient but they don’t necessarily know what they’re working for. And I personally found it kind of a torturous, angst-ridden, uncomfortable stage of life. I cried a lot, I got very pessimistic at times that I would ever find my way. In terms of ways that you can shorten that period of wandering from hopefully not 14 years to something a little shorter, I think the thing that students need to do is try stuff out. I sometimes tell my own students, I tell them that interests are like foods, you don’t really know if you’ll like it or not until you actually experience it. I mean, I can tell you what the durian fruit tastes like, but unless you taste it, you won’t know.

Angela:
And that means that you have to get out of your head and get out of the classroom and really try things. I mean, if you think you might want to be a veterinarian, figure out a way to spend an afternoon shadowing a veterinarian. I mean, you’ll know much more at the end of that afternoon than you did before, and I think likewise, in having conversations with people who are doing things that are related to what you think you might want to do, the closer you can get to actual experience, I think the better. And if I had spent more time experimenting, trying out different careers when I was in high school and during my college years, I think I might’ve come to the same decision, but I think I would’ve come to it sooner and that really honestly would have been better for me.

Annette:
Yeah. The concept of deliberate practice is prevalent in your book. Can you tell us what that is? Talk to us about deliberate practice and then also about learning from mistakes and kind of encouraging learning from mistakes and how that can help students discover their passion.

Angela:
There is a literature in science on experts, so Olympic athletes and virtuoso musicians, and Nobel prize winning scientists. And the question that’s asked in this scientific research is, “What makes these experts different from the rest of us?” One very important difference is the way they practice, and the way they practice is often called deliberate practice. And it has a few features that as I rattle them off, you can think of how students often spend their time doing homework or studying, and you can see the contrast.

Angela:
So one feature of deliberate practice is that there’s a very specific learning goal in mind at the beginning of practice. And you might say, “Well, students get assigned homework and that’s the learning goal.” But as a math teacher, if I assign, “Do the problems on page 372, the evens.” That is not a learning goal. That’s just, “Oh, I have to do that.” But maybe the learning goal is to really master converting fractions to decimals, right? That’s the learning goal. So I think that when we assign homework or we ask students to do projects in school, we should make sure that they can say back to us, “What’s the learning goal? What’s the point of this thing I’m about to do?” And if you do that, you’re practicing a little bit more like an expert.

Angela:
The second thing that experts do is they practice with full concentration, so they’re not multitasking. And I have two daughters at home, they are proud students of the Philadelphia Public School. They’re learning better and better, I think, how to study without distractions. When I would come home when they were in younger grades, and they’re junior or senior now, but earlier in their academic careers, I’d come home, there’d be music playing and they’re texting and they’re Snapchatting but also somehow doing their homework. That’s the opposite of the way experts practice.

Angela:
So the second recommendation is to help students understand that the psychology of attention is that you cannot divide it without real compromise to your learning. And the final element I’ll just say it’s so important, I think we could do a better job of as educators, and I include myself here, is that as educators, teachers, we can do a better job providing feedback. So deliberate practice has the feature of usually immediate feedback that’s very clear so that the learner can immediately implement changes and get at it again. And when I think of how long it took me to give back quizzes and tests, or to grade homework or you can think of other subjects, how long does it take for a student to get their writing back? If they’re getting feedback, the longer the cycle time and the less specific that feedback, the less we are approximating deliberate practice, the practice of world class experts.

Annette:
Well that’s interesting because I have heard even my own daughter say, “Oh, this teacher returns feedback very quickly, or this one I have to wait a little bit for.” So that’s interesting but that makes a ton of sense. In chapter nine, ‘Hope’, you stress the importance of a growth mindset and especially for students who are coming from a disadvantaged background. How important do you think a growth mindset is to overcoming adversity?

Angela:
A growth mindset is a belief that abilities can change, and it has been studied mostly with the idea that your intelligence can change. I’m sure students can tell you that intelligence isn’t the only ability they care about. They might care about their athletic ability or their musical ability or their leadership ability. But I do think that when you are a student and you’re 7, 8, 9, you’re 15, you’re 16, a lot of your time you’re wondering how smart you are. And so this research from Carol Dweck at Stanford showing that the belief that intelligence can change, that it’s not fixed is so important. I think it’s important for kids, I think it’s important for adults. I think many of us walk around and have a fixed mindset about how smart we are and that discourages us from trying new things that are going to require failure. And that is because we don’t want to look dumb, right?

Annette:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Angela:
If intelligence can’t be changed, God forbid we don’t have enough of it. So I think of it as something that’s required in life no matter how old you are. And also honestly, no matter what your socio-economic background is as well. Though we might say one group of kids we especially worry about or another group, we should emphasize this more, but it’s a universal. And in my research with Carol, we have found, in data that we collect on adolescents, that students who have more of a growth mindset are the ones who are more resilient and harder working. And we follow students over time, this is actually new data that I’ve collected recently, and you can see this virtuous cycle where students who have a growth mindset, and then you come back then you see like, “What are they doing?” Well, those are the students who are working hard, but if you come back a third time, it’s the students who are working hard to increase in their growth mindset and so on and so forth. So I think it’s a virtuous cycle to begin, hopefully as early as possible, in schooling.

Annette:
Are there some specific ways that parents and teachers can help students develop this mindset?

Angela:
One very surprising finding in terms of this growth mindset, a literature came from a student who was a postdoctoral fellow with me, her name is Kyla Haimovitz. She did her PhD with Carol at Stanford, and her hypothesis was really straight forward, which is that if you have a teacher or a parent who has a growth mindset, then you’ll automatically have a student or a kid who has a growth mindset as well. And that made all the sense in the world, where else would their beliefs come from? They must come directly from their parents’ and their teachers’ beliefs. But she found that in many of her datasets, there was no relationship. And after many more years digging and collecting more data, what she discovered is that the teachers’ mindsets matter and the parents’ mindsets matter, but it’s a little more directly about how the parents and the teachers behave around failure.

Angela:
It’s all well and good and we should hope that teachers and parents believe that all these can change, but maybe even more relevant to how students grow up and what they think of themselves is how you respond when a student gets a problem wrong or you’re doing a class discussion, a problem on the board maybe, and the student can’t produce the right answer, they get a bad grade, right?

Annette:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Angela:
The semester didn’t go well. What is the body language that we use? What are the words that come out of our mouths? How do we signal to students that failure is part of learning and not diagnostic, that they’re unable to do something in the future. And I think that this message is very clear then for teachers and parents and that is that every time a child fails is an opportunity to strengthen their growth mindset by modeling for them and being very clear that failure is, sometimes, even a good sign, right? Because it means you tried to do something that you can’t yet do, which means that you are challenging yourself and that there is information there that we can all use so that the next opportunity maybe we could do a little better.

Annette:
I think what you said is just such a strong message and it goes back to even what we were talking about with learning from mistakes and how that is a necessary part of growth.

Angela:
Exactly. And it’s something that in news research, I mean new, it’s being published in 2020, even 2019, the psychology of mistake making is so interesting because even successful, they don’t easily learn from mistakes. I mean there’s a kind of fear response, an anxiety about mistake making that kind of crowds out learning sometimes. I think it’s an ongoing battle for all of us to have a healthy attitude towards failure and mistake making. And one developmental psychologist I know recommends that… This is somebody who specializes in three and four year olds, but I think it’s good advice for even high school teachers, which is that you should maybe deliberately make mistakes and then smile. Plan them, plan to make a mistake, smile. Say something like, “Well, there I go. I made a mistake.” And then model the kind of, “It’s okay” response.

Angela:
I have a great fondness for an AP economics teacher and he’s in Baltimore, and he has a little thing on the chalkboard on the top right. His last name is Bressler, his name is Phil Bressler, and it’s called Bressler’s blunders. And he gets a point to the class every time he makes a mistake. And then when they get to a certain number of points, they have a pizza party and it’s just a way of having fun with this idea of mistake making. So I think there are all kinds of creative ways that we can make it clear to students that it’s part of life.

Annette:
Yeah, that’s great. That’s a great anecdotal story. So students, especially K-12, that stage of life, spend so much of their time and their lives at school. And towards the end of your book, you talk about how culture shapes who we are and we know that certainly in the workplace that we talk a lot about corporate culture. For students, their district is a culture that they are a big part of, for those of our audience and also the broader public audience who are involved in their community and in their district leadership. How do you think a culture of grit can be developed or incorporated into the school environment?

Angela:
In one study that I did with a now professor, she was a postdoctoral fellow with me for a couple of years. Her name is Annie Park. In one study we looked at school culture and we looked to see what would determine increases in students’ grit, and then what effects those increases or decreases in grit would have on objectively measured student achievement like grades. And we found that there were certain school cultures that were more conducive to increases in grit and then in turn objective measures of academic achievement. And primarily, what we found would have been predicted by Carol Dweck in her work on growth mindset, which is that cultures that are about change and growth and learning, were more conducive to grit building than cultures that were about rank ordering students from best to worst, really kind of sending the signal that what you’re here at school to do is to sort of show off how smart you are not to develop.

Angela:
And I am sorry to say that I have seen classrooms that are like this, where there’s a lot of energy about the academic awards that only a handful of students get. I’ve been in classrooms or school auditoriums where, “Stand up if you’re in this honor society, stand up if you’re in that.” And then the students who were still sitting down, I always thought, what goes through their heads when they are sitting there? It’s shameful. Why spend that energy trying to rank order kids? Why not emphasize that what you’re here in school to do is to compare yourself, not to other peers, but to compare yourself to what you were yesterday, and to what you would hope to be tomorrow.

Angela:
And that’s the shift in the perspective that I think this culture work suggests is that we need a culture that in so many ways, and every principal and teacher knows, that schools are cultural entities. Just like a country is a cultural unit, a classroom in a school, you wear certain colors, say certain things or certain rituals or values, and they can be reinforced formally and informally. But I think being intentional about that, what kind of culture are we building? Are we showing kids that learning is the name of the game, or are we inadvertently sending a different message? I think that’s a great question.

Annette:
So can you tell us a little bit about where your research has led you and specifically about the work that you’re doing with the Character Lab?

Angela:
About seven years ago, I started a nonprofit called Character Lab with two educators and named Dave and Dominic. Dave Levin was working with the almost 100% economically disadvantaged students in New York. And then Dominic was the headmaster of one of the most elite private schools in New York. So in some ways they were working on different ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. And what they both realized, and I did as well, the scientists is that really kids are more alike than they are different. And the common thing that all kids need to learn is character. And I’ll hasten to just explain what I mean by character because I think it’s a word that’s used differently by different people. I use it very broadly, the same way I think Martin Luther King and Aristotle and use the word character, also Maria Montessori. And that is, everything that a child needs to learn and master in order to lead a life that is good for other people and good for themselves.

Angela:
So yes, honesty and kindness but also curiosity and creativity and also grit and self control and growth mindset. And also the list goes on, sense of humor, an appreciation for beauty, productivity, forgiveness, judgment. So character is a lot. And I think some educators would prefer the term social emotional learning. And that’s fine with me, I don’t need everyone to use the word character, but the nonprofit that we started advances scientific insights that build character and help kids thrive. So we run research studies for people like Carol Dweck in school, some district schools, some charter schools, some independent and parochial schools. We run the studies for these scientists, but we also translate those scientific discoveries into plain English on characterlab.org and then finally really hope that we can benefit parents and teachers by really giving them practical advice. So here’s what the discovery is, here it is without all the jargon. In plain English they can understand it, but here’s some really practical recommendations about how you can use that insight to help your own children, your own students thrive.

Annette:
Great. This was all such fantastic information and I know just scratching the surface. And so where can our listeners, whether it be school leadership or parents or educators, where can they find more about your research and the work in this area, and what you’ve covered in the book?

Angela:
If you go to characterlab.org, you can sign up for an email newsletter that I send out. It’s something like 60 seconds of scientific advice turned into actionable recommendations for parents and teachers. I call it the tip of the week, but you can sign up at characterlab.org. And we also have playbooks written by leading scientists on things like growth mindset or curiosity for parents or teachers who say, “I want to know more about this but I want something written specifically for me, and I want it to be authoritative. I want to make sure that what I’m reading, and I don’t have a lot of time, is coming to me really directly from the world class experts in the domain.” And so we have all of that there, it’s completely free. We have no advertising. We are 100% supported by philanthropy from foundations like the Gates Foundation and also very generous individuals.

Annette:
Wow. That is awesome that that’s available at no cost. Thank you so much for being with us. This was informative and interesting. Really, thank you for joining us on this podcast episode.

Angela:
Thank you. And I would just want to say I love that you have this podcast. It’s a wonderful thing and I really enjoyed our conversation.

Annette:
Great. Thank you.

Angela Duckworth, author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Founder/CEO of Character Lab, Psychologist, TED talk presenter

Angela Duckworth is the Founder and CEO of Character Lab, a nonprofit that provides actionable advice to parents and teachers, based on science. She is also the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, faculty co-director of the Penn-Wharton Behavior Change For Good Initiative, and faculty co-director of Wharton People Analytics.

Previously, Angela founded a summer school for low-income children that was profiled as a Harvard Kennedy School case study and, in 2018, celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. She has also been a McKinsey management consultant and a public school math and science teacher.
Angela completed her undergraduate degree in Advanced Studies Neurobiology at Harvard, an MSc in Neuroscience from Oxford University, and a PhD in Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, is a #1 New York Times best seller.
You can receive her Thought of the Week email newsletter by signing up at https://www.characterlab.org/thought-of-the-week.