TED演讲精选—Angela Lee Duckworth: The key to success? Grit
2013-10-20 17:23阅读：
Angela Lee Duckworth: The key to success?
Grit
When I was 27 years old, I left a very
demanding
job（高要求工作） in management consulting for a job that was
even more demanding: teaching. I went to teach seventh graders math
in the New York City public schools. And like any teacher, I made
quizzes and tests. I gave out homework assignments. When the work
came back, I calculated grades.
What struck me was that I.Q. was not the only difference between my
best and my worst students. Some of m
y strongest performers did not have stratospheric I.Q. scores. Some
of my smartest kids weren't doing so well.
And that got me thinking. The kinds of things you need to learn in
seventh grade math, sure, they're hard: ratios, decimals, the area
of a parallelogram. But these concepts are not impossible, and I
was firmly convinced that every one of my students could learn the
material if they worked hard and long enough.
After several more years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that
what we need in education is a much better understanding of
students and learning from a motivational perspective, from a
psychological perspective. In education, the one thing we know how
to measure best is I.Q., but what if doing well in school and in
life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and
easily?
So I left the classroom, and I went to graduate school to become a
psychologist. I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of
super challenging settings, and in every study my question was, who
is successful here and why? My research team and I went to
West Point Military Academy（西点军校）. We tried
to predict which cadets would stay in military training and which
would drop out. We went to
the National Spelling
Bee（拼写比赛） and tried to predict which children would
advance farthest in competition. We studied
rookie（菜鸟） teachers working in really tough
neighborhoods, asking which teachers are still going to be here in
teaching by the end of the school year, and of those, who will be
the most effective at improving learning outcomes for their
students? We
partnered with（合作） private
companies, asking, which of these salespeople is going to keep
their jobs? And who's going to earn the most money?
In all
those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a
significant predictor of success.（好句） And it wasn't social
intelligence. It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't
I.Q. It was
grit.
Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.
Grit is having stamina（毅力）. Grit is sticking with your
future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the
month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a
reality. Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a
sprint（短跑）.
A few years ago, I started studying grit in the Chicago public
schools. I asked thousands of high school juniors to take grit
questionnaires, and then waited around more than a year to see who
would graduate. Turns out that grittier kids were significantly
more likely to graduate, even when I matched them on every
characteristic I could measure, things like family income,
standardized achievement test 这是啥？scores, even how
safe kids felt when they were at school. So it's not just at West
Point or the National Spelling Bee that grit matters. It's also in
school, especially for kids at risk for dropping out. To me, the
most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little
science knows, about building it. Every day, parents and teachers
ask me, 'How do I build grit in kids? What do I do to teach kids a
solid work ethic? How do I keep them motivated for the long run?'
The honest answer is, I don't know. (Laughter) What I do know is
that talent doesn't make you gritty. Our data show very clearly
that there are many talented individuals who simply do not follow
through on their commitments. In fact, in our data, grit is usually
unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent.
So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is
something called 'growth mindset.' This is an idea developed at
Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and it is the belief that the
ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort.
Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain
and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they're much
more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don't believe
that failure is a permanent condition.
So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit. But we need
more. And that's where I'm going to end my remarks, because that's
where we are. That's the work that stands before us. We need to
take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions, and we need to test
them. We need to measure whether we've been successful, and we have
to be willing to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with
lessons learned.
In other words, we need to be gritty about getting our kids
grittier.
Thank you.
(Applause)
视频地址：
http://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_the_key_to_success_grit.html
