Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance - U.S. Department of ...

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4. Programs and Models for Learning Environments
to Promote Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance
If classrooms can support positive academic mindsets and help student build effective
learning strategies, then classrooms could contribute significantly to increasing students’
perseverance in completing school assignments and hence to improving their academic
performance. Two potential classroom strategies for influencing academic perseverance
are either to “teach” perseverance directly (changing the student) or to influence
perseverance indirectly through other mechanisms (changing the context).
– Camille Farrington, Melissa Roderick, Elaine Allensworth, Jenny Nagaoka,
Tasha Keyes, David Johnson, and Nicole Beechum
(Farrington et al., 2012, p. 25)
How can learning environments be designed to promote grit, tenacity, and perseverance? As we
explored in the hypothesized model in Chapter 2, there are important contextual factors in the
learning environment and fundamental psychological resources within the student that can
promote these qualities. While the consensus across the literature review and interviews was that
there is still a need for empirical evidence that grit, tenacity, and perseverance can be taught as
transferable competencies, there is a wide range of programs and approaches that are already
showing promise and positive results in this area—not necessarily by teaching “grit” directly, but
through providing a supportive environment and/or opportunities to develop fundamental
psychological resources.
In this chapter, we examine a wide array of approximately 50 programs across the age span and
types of learning environments—formal, informal, and technology-based. Using the
hypothesized model in Chapter 2 as an organizing framework, we developed five broad clusters
of programs and approaches that promote grit, tenacity, and perseverance in particular ways.
Note that this is not intended as an exhaustive review of all programs available, but rather a
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