How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character
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Pessimists tend to use a strategy Oettingen calls dwelling, which involves thinking about all the things that will get in the way of their accomplishing their goals. If our prototypical middle-school student hoping for an A in math was a dweller, he might think about how he never finishes his homework, and there’s never anywhere quiet for him to study anyway, and besides, he always gets distracted in class. Unsurprisingly, dwelling doesn’t correlate well with achievement either.
The third method is called mental contrasting, and it combines elements of the other two methods. It means concentrating on a positive outcome and simultaneously concentrating on the obstacles in the way. Doing both at the same time, Duckworth and Oettingen wrote in a recent paper, “creates a strong association between future and reality that signals the need to overcome the obstacles in order to attain the desired future.” The next step to a successful outcome, according to Oettingen, is creating a series of “implementation intentions”—specific plans in the form of if/then statements that link the obstacles with ways to overcome them, such as “If I get distracted by TV after school, then I will wait to watch TV until after I finish my homework.” Oettingen has demonstrated the effectiveness of MCII in a variety of experiments: the strategy has helped dieters eat more fruits and vegetables, high-school juniors prepare more diligently for the practice SAT, and chronic-back-pain patients gain more mobility.
“Just fantasizing about doing your math homework every day next semester—that feels really good right then,” Duckworth explained to the KIPP teachers in her workshop. “But you don’t go out and do anything. When I go into a lot of schools, I see posters that say ‘Dream it and you can achieve it!’ But we need to get away from positive fantasizing about how we’re all going to grow up to be rich and famous, and start thinking about the obstacles that now stand in the way of getting to where we want to be.”
What MCII amounts to is a way to set rules for yourself. And as David Kessler, the former commissioner of the FDA, notes in his recent book The End of Overeating, there is a neurobiological reason why rules work, whether you’re using them to avoid fried foods (as Kessler was) or the lure of American Idol (as our imaginary KIPP math student might have been). When you’re making rules for yourself, Kessler writes, you’re enlisting the prefrontal cortex as your partner against the more reflexive, appetite-driven parts of your brain. Rules, Kessler points out, are not the same as willpower. They are a metacognitive substitute for willpower. By making yourself a rule (“I never eat fried dumplings”), you can sidestep the painful internal conflict between your desire for fried foods and your willful determination to resist them. Rules, Kessler explains, “provide structure, preparing us for encounters with tempting stimuli and redirecting our attention elsewhere.” Before long, the rules have become as automatic as the appetites they are deflecting.
When Duckworth talks about character, as she did that day at the KIPP workshop, she often cites William James, the American philosopher and psychologist, who wrote that the traits we call virtues are no more and no less than simple habits. “Habit and character are essentially the same thing,” Duckworth explained to the KIPP teachers. “It’s not like some kids are good and some kids are bad. Some kids have good habits and some kids have bad habits. Kids understand it when you put it that way, because they know that habits might be hard to change, but they’re not impossible to change. William James says our nervous systems are like a sheet of paper. You fold it over and over and over again, and pretty soon it has a crease. And I think that’s what you at KIPP are doing. When your students leave KIPP, you want to make sure they have the kind of creases that will lead them to success later on.”
According to Duckworth, conscientious people don’t go around consciously deciding to act virtuously all the time. They’ve just made it their default response to do the “good” thing, meaning the more socially acceptable or long-term-benefit-enhancing option. In any given situation, the most conscientious path is not always the smartest option. On Carmit Segal’s coding-speed test, for example, the students who scored highest worked really hard at a really boring task and got nothing in return. One word for that behavior is conscientious. Another is foolish. But in the long run, it serves most people well to have conscientiousness be their default option. Because when it does matter—when you have to study for a final exam or show up on time for a job interview or decide whether to yield to temptation and cheat on your wife—then you will probably make the right choice, and you won’t have to exert yourself and exhaust yourself in order to do so. Strategies like MCII, or the act of imagining a picture frame around a marshmallow—in the end, these are just tricks to make the virtuous path easier to follow.
15. Identity
When I visited KIPP Infinity in the winter of 2011, halfway through the inaugural year of the character report card, character language was everywhere. Kids wore sweatshirts with the slogan “Infinite Character” and all the character strengths listed on the back. One pro-self-control T-shirt even included a nod to Walter Mischel: “Don’t Eat the Marshmallow!” The walls were covered with signs that read got self-control? and i actively participate! (one of the indicators for zest). There was a bulletin board in the hallway topped with the words Character Counts; tacked on the board were Spotted! cards, notecards that students filled out whenever they noticed fellow students performing actions that demonstrated character. (Jasmine R. cited William N. for zest: William was in math class and he raised his hand for every problem.)
I asked David Levin about the message saturation. Didn’t he think it was a little much? Not at all, he replied. “In order to succeed,” he explained, “this has to permeate everything in the school, from the language people use to lesson plans to how people are rewarded and recognized to signs on the wall. If it’s not woven into the DNA of an institution, it will have minimal impact.”
Wall-to-wall messaging is nothing new at KIPP, of course; right from the start, Levin and Feinberg used posters and slogans and signs and T-shirts to create a powerful school culture at KIPP, to instill in students a sense that they were different, and that they belonged. Duckworth told me she thinks that KIPP’s approach to group identity is a central part of what makes the schools effective. “What KIPP does is create a social role shift, so that a child will suddenly switch into a totally different mindset,” she said. “They play on the in-group/out-group thing: ‘We know what SLANTing is and you don’t know what SLANTing is, because you don’t go to KIPP.’”
Psychologists have demonstrated that group identity can have a powerful effect on achievement—both a positive and a negative one. In the early 1990s, Claude Steele, a psychologist who is now the dean of the school of education at Stanford University, identified a phenomenon that he called stereotype threat. If you give a person a subtle psychological cue having to do with his group identity before a test of intellectual or physical ability, Steele showed, you can have a major effect on how well he performs. Researchers have since demonstrated this effect in countless different settings. When white students at Princeton were told before trying a ten-hole mini golf course that it was a test of natural ability in sports (which they feared they didn’t possess), they scored four strokes worse than a similar group of white students who were told it was a test of their ability to think strategically (which they were confident they did possess). For black students, the effect was the opposite: when they were told the mini golf course was a test of their strategic intelligence, their scores were four strokes worse. Steele’s theory is that when you are worried about confirming a stereotype about your group—that white people aren’t athletic; that black people aren’t smart—you get anxious, and as a result, you do worse.
Other researchers have found stereotype threat in pursuits much more serious than miniature golf. When people in their sixties and seventies and eighties were instructed to read an article about how memory fades with age before they took a memory test, they remembered 44 percent of the words in the test; members of a s
imilar group who weren’t told to read the article before the test remembered 58 percent of the words. Before a challenging math test, female college students need only be reminded that they are female for them to do worse on the test than female students who don’t receive that identity cue.
The good news about stereotype threat is that, just as it can be triggered by subtle cues, it can be defused by subtle interventions. One of the most effective techniques, which has now been tested in a variety of settings, is exposing students at risk of stereotype threat to a very specific message: that intelligence is malleable. If students internalize that idea, these studies show, they gain confidence, and their test scores and GPAs often rise too.
The most intriguing fact about these interventions is that the question of the malleability of intelligence is actually hotly debated by psychologists and neuroscientists. Although scores on achievement tests like the SAT can certainly be affected by training of different kinds, the purest kind of intelligence is not very malleable at all. But a psychologist at Stanford named Carol Dweck has discovered a remarkable thing: Regardless of the facts on the malleability of intelligence , students do much better academically if they believe intelligence is malleable. Dweck divides people into two types : those who have a fixed mindset, who believe that intelligence and other skills are essentially static and inborn, and those who have a growth mindset, who believe that intelligence can be improved. She has shown that students’ mindsets predict their academic trajectories : those who believe that people can improve their intelligence actually do improve their grades.
And whether or not intelligence is malleable, mindset certainly is. Dweck and others have shown that with the right kind of intervention, students can be switched from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, and their academic results tend to rise as a result. Joshua Aronson, a frequent collaborator with Claude Steele, and two colleagues conducted a study that compared the effectiveness of a few different mindset-changing interventions on a group of mostly low-income seventh-grade students in Texas. Over the school year, each student in the study worked with a mentor, a college student who met with him or her twice for ninety minutes each time and then communicated with him or her regularly by e-mail. Some students were randomly assigned to hear from their mentors a growth-mindset message such as “Intelligence is not a finite endowment, but rather an expandable capacity that increases with mental work.” Students in a control group heard a more standard message about the way that drug use could interfere with academic achievement.
At the end of the year, Aronson and his colleagues compared the two groups’ scores on Texas’s standardized achievement test, the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, and the students who had heard a growth-mindset message did significantly better than the students who had heard the anti-drug message. The most impressive effect was seen in the math scores of the female students. The effect of stereotype threat has been well demonstrated in the math scores of girls and women, who seem to be especially anxious in testing situations when they think they might confirm the stereotype that girls are bad in math. In the Texas experiment, girls who received the standard anti-drug message averaged 74 on the test, about eight points below the male students who had heard the same message. The girls who heard a growth-mindset message averaged about 84, closing the gap with the male students completely.
16. Report Cards
Dweck’s notion that students do better when they think they can improve their intelligence applies to character as well. At least, that is the idea behind the character report card—that presenting character to students not as a set of fixed traits but as a series of constantly developing attributes will inspire them to improve those traits. I talked about this idea one morning at KIPP Infinity with Mike Witter, a thirty-one-year-old eighth-grade English teacher who seemed hard-wired to believe in the growth mindset. “If you’re going to be a good teacher, you have to believe in malleable intelligence,” he told me. “And character is equally malleable. If you teach kids to pay attention to character, then their character will transform.”
Perhaps more than any other teacher at the school, Witter had made a concerted effort to get his students to pay attention to character. I visited Witter’s class one morning that winter to observe something that David Levin called dual-purpose instruction, teachers deliberately working explicit talk about character strengths into every lesson. Levin wanted math teachers to use the character strengths in word problems; he explained that history teachers could use them in classes about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. And when I arrived in Witter’s class, he was leading a discussion on Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart. Above Witter’s head, at the front of the class, the seven character strengths, from optimism to social intelligence, were stenciled in four-inch-high letters, white on blue. He asked his students to rank Okonkwo, the protagonist, on his various character strengths. There was a lot of back-and-forth, but in the end, most students agreed that Okonkwo rated highest on grit and lowest on self-control. Then a student named Yantzee raised his hand. “Can’t a trait backfire at you?” he asked.
“Sure, a trait can backfire,” Witter said. “Too much grit, like Okonkwo, you start to lose your ability to have empathy for other people. If you’re so gritty that you don’t understand why everyone’s complaining about how hard things are, because nothing’s hard for you, because you’re Mr. Grit, then you’re going to have a hard time being kind. Even love—being too loving might make you the kind of person who can get played.” There was a ripple of knowing laughter from the students. “So, yes, character is something you have to be careful about. Character strengths can become character weaknesses.”
When I spoke to Witter after the class, he told me that some teachers at KIPP Infinity still weren’t convinced of the essential premise behind the report card: that character can change. “That has been part of the process, teachers getting comfortable with this idea. In order to really buy into the character report card, you have to believe in malleable character, and I don’t know if every teacher is there yet. I mean, how many times have you heard a grownup say, ‘That’s just how I am! That’s me. Get used to it!’? But if you don’t believe that it applies to you, then how can you believe that it applies to children?”
I saw Witter again on report-card night, which at KIPP Infinity middle school fell on a chilly Thursday at the beginning of February. Report-card night is always a big deal at KIPP schools—parents are strongly urged to attend, and at Infinity, almost all of them do—but this particular evening carried an extra level of anxiety for both the administrators and the parents because students would be receiving their very first character report cards, and no one knew quite what to expect.
Logistically, the character report card had been a challenge to pull off for Brunzell and his colleagues. Teachers at three of the four KIPP middle schools in New York City had to grade every one of their students on each of the twenty-four character indicators, and more than a few of them found the process a little daunting. And now that report-card night had arrived, they had an even bigger challenge: explaining to parents just how those precise figures, rounded to the second decimal place, summed up their children’s characters. I sat with Witter for a while on a bench down the hall from the band room, listening as he talked through the character report card with Faith Flemister, an African American woman wearing dark red lipstick and a black knit cap, and her son, Juaquin Bennett, a tall, hefty eighth-grader in a gray hooded sweatshirt.
“For the past few years we’ve been working on a project to create a clearer picture for parents about the character of your child,” Witter explained to Flemister. “The categories that we ended up putting together represent qualities that have been studied and determined to be indicators of success. They mean you’re more likely to go to college. More likely to find a good job. Even surprising things, like they mean you’re more likely to get married, or more likely to have a family. So we think these are really important.”
“I can tell this is a real strength for you,” Witter said, turning to Juaquin. “This kind of self-control is something you’ve developed incredibly well. So that makes me think we need to start looking at, What’s something we can target? And the first thing that jumps out at me is this.” Witter pulled out a green felt-tip marker and circled one indicator on Juaquin’s report card. “‘Pays attention and resists distraction,’” Witter read aloud; this was an indicator for academic self-control. “That’s a little lower than some of the other numbers. Why do you think that is?”
“I talk too much in class,” Juaquin said a little sheepishly, looking down at his black sneakers. “I sometimes stare off into space and don’t pay attention.”
The three of them talked over a few strategies to help Juaquin focus more in class, and by the end of the fifteen-minute conversation, Flemister seemed convinced by the new approach. “The strong points are not a surprise,” she said to Witter as he got up to talk to another family. “That’s just the type of person Juaquin is. But it’s good how you pinpoint what he can do to make things easier on himself. Then maybe his grades will pick up.”