I am confident that each has heard the saying, when the going gets tough, the tough get going? Recently, I overheard this advice being shared by a student to her classmate. It got me thinking… how has this emerging adult come to understand that there is a value in sticking with something, to seeing a project through to completion?
Researchers such as Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth suggest that a student’s mindset can have a significant effect on the academic opportunities and challenges she might embrace. Resiliency or “grit” (as it is being described) is needed as adolescents and adults face the challenges inherent in our evolving world and marketplace. This “the tough get going” attitude should and can be encouraged, nurtured, and developed.
Identified by Dweck as a growth mindset, she suggests that each of us begins with a certain set of skills, talents, and competencies, but that these are not fixed points. Our efforts, our focus—our stretching—help us to develop, grow, and change what we are capable of doing and how we view ourselves. This mindset (that we are able to move beyond our present-day capacity), consistently reinforced by parents and the learning community, eventually helps students, in the words of Carol Dweck, develop “a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment."
In his “last lecture” at Carnegie Mellon University, the late Randy Pausch, Ph.D., stated, “experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.” Life is full of experience-producing moments! Ruth Bader Ginsburg certainly had a few, as did Vera Wang, Arianna Huffington, Oprah Winfrey, and J.K. Rowling, to name a few. Each of the women struggled before they experienced great success. No one likes to experience disappointment, falling short, or rejection, but these are some of the moments that later prove to be our growth plates. And just as the growth plate in a bone determines the future shape and length of a bone, these experiential growth plates help shape and direct our living and learning journey.
If you want to build anything, it takes some heavy lifting…this includes resilience. That “tough get going” attitude must be shared and lived together by students, teachers, and parents as partners. And when we are successful, together we will have helped nurture and educate a new generation of problem solvers, innovators, inventors, and visionaries. In the depth of winter, when the road to May still seems so very long, let us support each other’s quest to find that grit that provides the traction we need to remain on the road to success.
United in Mission,
Dr. Susan Dempf
Head of School