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

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and supports school staff to establish a culture and climate with a strength-based approach
that encourages open communication, voice and ownership for all members of the
community, flexible accommodations for diverse learners and vulnerable students,
compassionate and effective discipline strategies, and strategies for continuous quality
improvement.
4. Informal Learning Programs
Learning in its broadest sense takes place in every activity of life, inside and outside of school.
According to Lemke, Lecusay, Cole, & Michalchik (2012):
[Informal learning refers specifically to participation in] organized activities in
face-to-face or online settings (or both) other than formal instruction, in which a
number of the following features are especially relevant or salient: voluntary
participation, relatively equitable power relations in negotiating goals and means,
enjoyment of the learning activity for its own sake, intense engagement with
tasks, flexibility of goals and in re-purposing resources, unpredictability of some
significant learning outcomes, improvisation and innovation within and
concerning the activity, commitment over time in the face of obstacles. (p. 13)
Informal learning that happens in out-of-school settings is usually a group context, where
students go on cultural field trips, meet in institutional environments during off-hours, or mingle
with working professionals. They can often have rich technology components. Programs focus
on students from elementary school through college, but most focus on the older students.
Indeed, there is great potential for informal learning environments to provide essential contextual
factors to promote grit, tenacity, and perseverance. While there are many different types of
informal learning programs, here we explore two categories of programs intended to promote grit
in different ways. We provide well-regarded examples of each.
• Out-of-school support systems to help students persist through high school, get into
college, and enter the professional workforce. Many programs focus on promoting
ambitions to go to college and obtain a job, and provide a social network of peers and/or
mentors who guide the students through the transitions to high school, college, and career.
Program providers often emphasize that their services address a gap in the students’ home
settings, where students may be among the first in their families to go to college. Some
examples are as follows.
− The Breakthrough Collaborative (http://www.breakthroughcollaborative.org/). This
program begins working with students in a 6-week program in the summer of their
seventh-grade year to introduce them to long-term planning for attending college. They
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