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

Draft
Research-Based Best Practices for Curriculum, Teaching Practices,
and Technology
We have developed a set of potentially actionable “best practices” for promoting grit, tenacity,
and perseverance within learning environments through curriculum, teaching practices, and/or
technology (distilling our findings from theory in Chapter 2 and practice in Chapter 4).
First, students need to have the opportunity to take on long-term or high-order goals that,
to the student, are “worthy” of pursuit. There is a wide variety of types of goals students may
take on, differing in timescale and complexity, and, depending on students’ age, educational
needs, the content discipline in which the goals are situated, and so on. One principle is that
students find goals worthy of pursuit when they are “optimally challenging”—they require some
perseverance to attain, but not so much that they seem overwhelming or impossible. Another
principle is that students find goals worthy of pursuit when they are aligned with what students
value. To the extent possible, goals should be designed to promote intrinsic motivation through
connections to students’ interests, values, and personally relevant goals. In many cases,
particularly with unfamiliar material, educators need to engage students in activities that bridge
from their interests and familiar experiences to the learning objectives to help students attain
more complex learning goals. Providing students with choice and autonomy in selecting goals
and approaches also can foster intrinsic motivation.
Second, students need a rigorous and supportive environment to help them accomplish
these goals and develop critical psychological resources. As students engage in pursuing longterm
and higher-order goals, there is a wide range of different kinds of challenges they may
encounter, such as conceptual complexity or lack of tactical knowledge, more dominant
distractions, boredom, lack of resources, and other adverse circumstances. Students will be more
likely to persevere in the face of these challenges when the learning environment is designed to
help them deal with these challenges, develop the psychological resources within themselves to
deal with challenges more generally, or some combination of the two.
We identified three major categories of psychological resources that help students in their
perseverance—each of which educators should be attending to as they create the culture of a
learning environment that supports perseverance.
1. Academic mindsets. Mindsets are how students frame themselves as learners, their learning
environment, and their relationships to the learning environment. They include beliefs,
attitudes, dispositions, values, and ways of perceiving oneself. Productive mindsets to
support perseverance are as follows:
− I can succeed at this.
− My ability and competence grow with my effort.
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