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

Draft
Here we discuss three approaches. Note that our analysis is based on a limited dataset; the
analysis should not be considered an exhaustive categorization.
Character education models. These models began in the last 5 years with collaboration among
Principal Dominic Randolph of the New York City private school Riverdale Country School
(http://www.riverdale.edu/), David Levin of the KIPP Charter Network (http://www.kipp.org/),
and psychologists Martin Seligman, Chris Peterson, and Angela Duckworth (see callout box
below for more detail on KIPP). They began with the vision of using principles from Positive
Psychology—the science of positive human functioning—to develop a model of schooling that
would help students learn how to develop grit as a transferable competency and persist to get into
college and graduate. The models have evolved to target both the contextual supports and
psychological resources that facilitate grit, tenacity, and perseverance. As we learned in our
interview with journalist Paul Tough, who has written extensively about these schools, key
features of the model include explicit articulation of learning goals for targeted competencies,
clear and regular assessment and feedback of student progress on these competencies (i.e., using
the Character Report Card, shown in Exhibit 9 in Chapter 3), intensive professional development
to help teachers understand and work with these competencies, and discourse about these
competencies infused throughout the school culture and all disciplinary curricula. This model is
emerging in other schools as well, such as the Mastery Charter Network
(http://www.masterycharter.org/), and it has become a focus of teacher professional development
in the Relay Graduate School of Education (http://www.relay.edu/) in New York City.
At the college level, one university has been developing a model of character education—
California’s Azusa Pacific and its Noel Academy for Strengths-Based Leadership and Education
(http://www.apu.edu/strengthsacademy/). The Noel Academy acts as a student resource by
helping students determine their character strengths and how to conscientiously utilize them with
the assignments they take on in class. It also provides teacher professional development to help
instructors design learning sequences that take student strengths and interests into consideration,
along with ample opportunity to help students reflect on how they might apply their character
strengths to learning tasks.
While there is powerful anecdotal evidence for the impacts of character education models, there
is still a need for rigorous investigation of transferability of competencies, impacts on learning,
and implications for scaling to other settings.
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