Helping Children Succeed

Author: Paul Tough

Educators eager to foster noncognitive traits in their students—traits like grit, curiosity, self-control, optimism, and conscientiousness, which are often described, with some accuracy, as "skills"—tend to automatically treat them like the skills we already know how to teach: reading, math, analysis, and so on. As the value of noncognitive skills has become increasingly recognized, there has been a growing demand for a curriculum, a textbook, or a teaching strategy to guide us in helping students develop these skills. If we all agree on the most effective way to teach the Pythagorean theorem, can't we agree on the best way to teach grit? It's not so easy in practice. Some schools have developed comprehensive approaches to teaching character strengths—in classrooms across the country, teachers are talking to their students about traits like grit and perseverance more than ever before. But I observed a strange paradox in the research I conducted for my book, How Children Succeed: many of the educators I encountered who seemed most effective at cultivating noncognitive abilities in their students never talked about those skills in the classroom.