True Grit

This article by Rick Wormeli is about finding and encouraging perseverance in our students. A teacher has organized a little lunch chat of this article and I thought it was worth passing along. As I was reading, I came across this quote:

Okay, the article is not called True Grit, but how could I resist?

"Today’s students demonstrate amazing tenacity: If the story is good, they read 700-page books. They play online games, working their way through 12 levels of difficulty for six hours or more. They stay well into the evening hours to practice for theater productions and sports tournaments, and they work diligently for weeks on video projects to support favored causes."

I find this to be an interesting perspective. I consider fostering engagement as one of the primary actions of a teacher, but I had not considered what the students engage with regularly and without much thought. I doubt many students sitting down for the 12th hour of Call of Duty think, "Wow! I am showing a lot of perseverance here!" (Though, upon further reflection, there probably are some who do think that, while some adults don't consider that perseverance). And yet there they are, running the same action again and again, trying to get it right; learning from their mistakes; failing and not being worried about it; considering the objective important; putting it down and coming back to it later; applying what they've learned: how awesome would it be to get that kind of "grit" in the classroom?

Much of what this article covers has been discussed in seminars or brought up by other reading, but I thought this was a concise and helpful re-framing of prior knowledge. And it has a link to a great TED talk from Angela Lee Duckworth: 


Did you find anything in the article worth a re-consider? How do we get grit into our students? Do you prefer the John Wayne True Grit to the Coen Brothers' remake?