By Marcelle Soviero and Randi Olin
My sixteen-year-old-daughter Emily texts me a series of snowflakes, hearts, and winking smiley-face emojis. It’s another snow day here in the Northeast, another school closure amidst an extreme season of winter storm warnings and excessive accumulations.
It’s 7:35 a.m. and she’s still in bed. A high school junior deep in the throes of driving lessons, ACT prep, and the rigor of her academic class load, it’s a rare moment of blissful calm. Now, more than ever, I can’t seem to keep up with her busy schedule—swim practices and hours and hours of homework. It feels like she’s under a microscope this year, with a lens so magnified—focused on the finish line of where she will go to college—that sometimes I wonder if there’s more to all of this. There has to be something more.
We all want our teens to be happy and successful, and for many parents that means good grades and high SAT scores. But how can we be sure our teens will leave high school poised for happy, fulfilling, and meaningful independent lives? How can we help them develop character traits that will contribute to their lifelong success?
“In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is IQ, but what if doing well depends on more than that?” says Angela Duckworth, a research psychologist at University of Pennsylvania. “I would say character is at least as important as academics if not more so.”
Today the concept of teaching character is a growing area of study among educators and researchers spanning disciplines from psychology to neuroscience.
The idea that character is a key predictor of an individual’s success has been made more popular in Paul Tough’s 2012 bestseller, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. The book has sparked debate over the impact of both intelligence and character across all socio economic strata. A solid read, Tough’s book left me thinking of what emphasizing character (at school and more so at home) could mean for my children.
Character Counts
“What is character?” I asked my seventeen-year-old son, Luke, when he got home from school, throwing his backpack on the couch. My tall, brown-haired boy laughed, “It’s wearing an alligator costume in 100-degree heat on a beach.” He was quoting from the opening line of his college essay about what experiences have contributed to his character. Luke had volunteered at the summer camp at the local Y for the past three years, and due to his size (a perfect build for an alligator costume) and his being a favorite among his tiny constituency of second-grade campers, he dressed up as the camp mascot on numerous occasions. It wasn’t his favorite thing to do, but he did it. Character indeed.
Later that day, I asked my 16-year-old daughter, Sophia, what she thought character was, and she quoted from the motivational posters that cover the walls of her school. “It’s what you do when no one is looking.” That’s the thing about character; ask anyone what it is and you’ll get a different answer. In addition to being an elusive term, conversations about character are often laden with language about morals and values. And if simply defining character is difficult, it makes sense that building character in our kids might also be challenging.
The key to defining character may be to turn character traits such as grit, zest, and curiosity into actionable behaviors verses elusive values. Behaviors can be taught and are not fixed at birth, like fingerprints. Rather, says Duckworth, “They are malleable and can change throughout the course of our children’s lives.” According to Duckworth, the fundamental times to foster character are between the ages of one and four and then again in adolescence.
A groundbreaking attempt to define character traits and behaviors came in the 2004 book Character Strengths and Virtues by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman. The CSV, as it’s referred to, is an exhaustive, 800-page handbook that addresses the science of character and identified twenty-four character traits that contribute to, and help predict, success.
Seligman and Peterson’s list of twenty-four character traits seemed to some educators in the field a bit unwieldy in practice. So Peterson worked to narrow down the list with Duckworth, David Levin, founder of Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools, and Dominic Randolph, headmaster at New York City’s Riverdale Country School. In the end, they identified seven traits likely to predict life satisfaction and high achievement. The “Super Seven,” as we call them, are grit, self-control, zest, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism, and curiosity.
Over time, Duckworth worked with Levin and Randolph to identify behaviors associated with each of these seven character traits (for example: if self-control is the trait, not interrupting when someone is speaking is the behavior). The result became a two-page assessment tool. A “report card” of sorts.
Now in use by KIPP, the assessments have led to something of a character point average (CPA), which can be looked at alongside a grade point average (GPA). At KIPP Academy in the South Bronx, a quarterly character growth card is attached to each student’s academic report card, and is handed out to parents on “report card nights.”
The results of discussing these character cards with parents were eye-opening to the teachers as well as the parents—over time, kids who believed they could improve their skills were more likely to treat failure as an opportunity. In a sense, knowing that these skills could be learned, changed and improved kept kids from feeling that failure was permanent. “Kids who think that their intelligence and character are a global entity and not static, learn through suggestions and feedback—they see failure as an opportunity to grow, as opposed to a setback.” Mitchell Brenner, KIPP Academy Middle School’s Assistant Principal and eighth grade and high school history teacher told me.
Managing Mindsets
After decades of research on achievement and success, Carol Dweck, a world-renowned Stanford University psychologist found that a key factor in developing strong character beliefs, such as grit and curiosity, is the way we think—and the way we teach our children to think. In her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Dweck contends that people’s thinking falls into two categories: a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. It is a growth mindset that helps to build character.
In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence and talent, are fixed traits, and that talent alone, without effort, creates success. In contrast, people with a growth mindset believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work. Growth-minded people have the ability to stick with a task for the long term, even when it’s not easy. These people thrive during challenging times in their lives. They forge ahead. This view can lead to a love of learning and a resilience that is essential to succeed (grit). It makes sense, really, if a teen thinks something won’t work or that they aren’t smart enough, then why try?
To see the growth mindset in action, consider the teen who has failed an exam. A teen with a growth mindset will take an optimistic approach, thinking “I will study harder for the next test,” versus the teen with a fixed mindset who might simply think, “I am a failure, I am not smart enough.”
Parents can nourish a growth mindset by finding projects for their teens to work on that have a specific goal that is important to their teens (and actionable steps to complete it). Working toward a desired goal promotes a love of learning and resilience in the face of obstacles—both character behaviors that are predictive of success. In addition, parents can praise the learning process rather than “smartness” (in other words, praise effort, not results) and provide timely and specific feedback on progress and performance.
Receiving such feedback creates opportunities for our teens to recognize when they’ve made mistakes and figure out what to do to fix them. It also helps them to take proactive steps, know when to try a different approach, and under- stand when to seek help from others.
Got Grit?
Of the seven indicators of success, Duckworth focuses her research specifically on grit and self-control.
Duckworth defines grit as passion and perseverance for long-term goals. “It’s the tendency to sustain interest in, and effort toward, a task. It means having stamina to stick with your future, and work very hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint,” says Duckworth, who is generally credited with defining and popularizing the term.
Through years of research, Duckworth has developed an assessment to measure grit. The “Grit Scale” asks people to rate themselves on a series of eight to twelve items, including things like “New ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones;” and “I finish whatever I begin.”
In her research, Duckworth has used the Grit Scale to predict which West Point cadets would make it through base camp, or which rookie teachers would make it through their first year teaching. “The strongest performers were not those with stratospheric IQ scores, but those who had grit and self-control,” says Duckworth. In other words, cadets and teachers who were grittier finished their training program or first year more often that those who scored lower on the Grit Scale.
In Duckworth’s 2012 study of spelling bee contestants (Deliberate Practice Spells Success: Why Grittier Competitors Triumph at the National Spelling Bee published in Social Psychological and Personality Science), the contestants (an average age of twelve) were given grit scores and were studied on how well they could do “deliberate practice,” a mode of practice that is repeated consistently and entails focused, deliberate steps designed to improve some aspect of performance.
The results of the spelling bee study proved Duckworth’s point—those kids who stuck with deliberate practice (for example quizzing themselves using flashcards) were more successful than those who had others quiz them or learned how to spell words via leisure reading. But why are some kids more able to stick with deliberate practice? It comes down to grit. Indeed, the more successful kids had higher grit scores.
The Character Lab
Founded in 2012 by Duckworth, Levin, and Randolph, the Character Lab, located in NYC, funds programs all over the country, investing in research projects providing lessons in character.
“We work with privileged kids, underprivileged kids, and everyone in between,” explains Brittany Butler, Executive Director. “Teens want to do well, but they don’t like being told what to do,” Butler continues. “The term ‘zest’ (exciting others, lighting up a room) can be intangible. Telling a teen she needs more zest isn’t always easily translatable. So character programs are key,” Butler says.
One such program is “Grit Intervention.” Here, researchers are working with hundreds of middle school students all over the country using a thirty-minute Web-based program that uses text, pictures, videos, and interactive lessons to teach students deliberate practice over long periods of time—even years—to further develop their skills.
Another research initiative at Character Lab is “Plan-Do-Review” where, at the end of each day’s math class, students first review whether they successfully implemented their “homework plan” from the previous evening, and they con- sider how it might have been improved. They then develop a plan for that evening’s homework. This intervention is designed to help students use their academic time outside of school more productively by cultivating meta-cognitive planning skills (learning about learning). Six classroom minutes per class are required for the intervention, which targets middle school students. Results from both of these programs are due out later this year.
“Just getting kids to talk about character is an intervention,” says Butler. These programs turn the talk into practice. The idea is to teach adolescents chemistry and calculus, but also show them how to ask questions and how to stay committed to long-term goals.
Character-Based Education
KIPP schools (a network of free, not-for-profit public charter schools in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Harlem, and Washington Heights) and Riverdale Country School, one of NYC’s most prestigious private schools, may be the most enthusiastic implementers of character-based research. Both schools, whose student populations could not be more opposite, have already built a meaningful way to develop character, focusing on character strengths and their associated learned behaviors.
At KIPP, character-based language is part of the school culture, as vocabulary in English class and history. “The kids are taught to use the language and they do,” Brenner explained. “Instead of defining character strengths, such as ‘what is grit?’ they learn to identify and under- stand the character strengths, and what the strengths look like in everyday settings and experiences, certainly in the classroom but also in public places, in athletics, and in life.”
Rich kids and poor kids both face difficulties in persevering and overcoming everyday setbacks. Yet affluent kids have a safety net—the advantage of family, and monetary resources—to help them in more material ways, like going to SAT prep classes and graduating from college. “The intention is to assess character and character strengths as a human question, not as a question for a particular socio-economic background,” Brenner told me. Students, for example, understand they aren’t going to get through Advanced Placement United States History (APUSH) without grit and optimism, so the kids begin to identify what’s working for them, and how they can do better.
At an optional weekend prep class, twenty-one out of Brenner’s twenty-eight APUSH students, (or seventy-five percent of the class), showed up for an extra review, for the two-day test he was giving that Monday and Tuesday. “They came because they wanted to do better, because they weren’t happy with where they were. This exemplifies grit in action.”
How Character Education Translates
On a recent Friday afternoon, I spoke with twenty-year-old KIPP alum George Ramirez, who Brenner describes as “the grittiest kid I know.”
“KIPP taught me the skills necessary to succeed in life,” George told me. “Be Nice. Work Hard. That was the school slogan, with character coming first.”
Born in Ecuador, George’s family moved to the Bronx when he was five. He began school at KIPP in the fifth grade, where a character-based education taught him about hard work, empathy, and the importance of being a good friend. Weekly leadership classes in middle school focused on character values including “grit,” “gratitude,” and “self-control.” “Instead of ‘George, you’re the line leader today,’ it was ‘George can you display leadership and take your class in a line?’” By labeling the behavior and naming the character strengths in context, these leadership classes taught him how to be a nice person, he says—and how to succeed in life.
“My teachers didn’t say ‘George, please be quiet; it was ‘George, show more self-control,’” he says. The focus was more on constructive advice, things he could work on rather than criticizing the behavior and commanding him to act a certain way.
Now a junior at Yale University majoring in Physics, from time to time George still goes back to KIPP to talk to students and chaperone school trips. “Being in college, I recognize more than ever KIPP’s approach to character as something every student should know about. I tell the students there’s much more to being a successful person than being smart and academically successful.”
Towards the end of our interview, I asked George if he had anything fun planned for that evening, a Friday night. Enthusiastically, he told me he did. He was to attend a leadership conference that evening and throughout the weekend.
As we wrapped up our conversation, we talked about the future, what he thought he might do after college. “I want to be a teacher. I will be a teacher,” he said emphatically. “I’ve been blessed by the support of my educators. They’ve taught me how to become a better per- son. It’s my responsibility to serve my community. To help others to have a similar opportunity. I hope I can impact the life of a student, even half of how my teachers have impacted mine.”
What Parents Can Do
Armed with my newfound understanding of character, I am horrified to think back on the many times I thought I was helping my kids, only to realize I was more likely sabotaging their chance to build up some grit. I have spoiled—in some way—all five of my children. I’ve called teachers, intervened with homework assignments and worse horrors. In those moments, I did not realize my interference may have helped in the short run but perhaps at the expense of character.
So, as parents, how can we take the behaviors associated with character and help our teens build upon them? How do we help our kids adopt the behaviors, apply them not just to the “now” but to the “later”—in the real world?
Certainly we can encourage deliberate practice and a growth mindset and offer specific steps toward long-term goals such as developing a homework plan to encourage the “come to class prepared” behavior for developing self-control. And of course, we can model these character strengths. For example, showing our enthusiasm and passion for projects, which is a behavior that develops zest.
But building character is not a science and it is not a quick experiment. “It’s a lifelong process. Character skills can’t be taught in an afternoon by telling your kids about what these traits mean or why they’re important,” Jessica Smock, a former researcher who earned her doctorate in educational policy, told me.? In addition, parents might also encourage their teens to volunteer. Volunteer projects often have built-in, long-term goals kids care about, such as feeding a family or building a bridge. Working hard toward these goals develops grit.
A recent survey, by Scholastic Media and the HandsOn Network, polled over 1000 parents, teachers, and young children and teens on the importance of character building for success. It found that the more kids and teens are exposed to character building, the greater their interest in volunteering. Conversely, volunteering was seen as an excellent way to build character. Forty-eight percent of teens who had exposure to character-building skills showed an interest in volunteering versus twenty-four percent who had less exposure. In addition, eighty-four percent of parents and sixty-four percent of teens age twelve–seventeen say character-building skills are among the most important skills to develop along with academic skills in order to be successful in life. Ninety-three percent of teachers believe that volunteering provides opportunities for children to build character. Founded in 2012, DoSomething.org is a not-for-profit designed for thirteen to twenty-five year-olds to make an impact. The organization spearheads national campaigns for causes such as bullying, animal cruelty, and discrimination, among others. Not having enough time is often an issue for teens when it comes to volunteering, so DoSomething.org creates campaigns to meet young people where they are, for ex- ample donating jeans at the local mall. “Doing good shouldn’t have to compete with a teen’s day-to-day life, it should be integrated within it,” says Naomi Hirabayashi, DoSomething.org’s Chief Marketing Officer. According to DoSomething.org’s National Survey (the first national survey of its kind where 4,300 young people across the country were polled), kids want to volunteer. The survey led to some interesting ideas for encouraging teens to volunteer, such as presenting a simple call to action (short five minute activities that allow for different levels of engagement versus half a day); making volunteer work part of their routine (the number-one reason teens don’t volunteer is due to lack of time) and inviting friends to participate (over seventy percent of young people with friends who regularly volunteer also volunteer). Another volunteer organization—one my daughter, Emily, has been involved with—is Builders Beyond Borders (B3). Based in Connecticut, B3 aims to “build character, responsibility, and leadership in high school students.” Each year, B3’s teens volunteer over 20,000 hours of local and global community service, culminating with a week-long labor-intensive experience, working alongside a developing country’s community, while immersing themselves in the country’s culture and local flavor.
“This is a generation of kids with compassion. They are asking ‘how can I help?’, ‘how can I be a part in a bigger way?’” B3 Executive Director Amy Schroeder-Riggio told me.
“In the last five years, I’m hearing a lot more about these kids who have been involved with a program like B3. When looking at college options they are seeking a school that offers community service program opportunities, to have the ability to continue giving back.”
Last year Emily’s B3 team helped build a road in Guyana, connecting the village to the medical center a mile away, previously accessible only by boat or a treacherous, narrow footbridge. This April, B3 is travelling to the Dominican Republic. Emily’s team is building a pipeline to a safe water source, and latrines for an entire community.
Why did Emily initially become involved in this organization? Because a year prior, her best friend volunteered with B3, which supports DoSomething.org’s survey results that state the number one factor influencing a teen to “take action” is the influence of peers.
What’s In Store?
On the way to baseball practice last night, I asked my 13-year-old son Daniel if he’s ever heard the term “grit” before. “That’s Mrs. Hare’s word,” he said, referring to his 8th grade English teacher. He adjusted his baseball cap, and added, “grit is perseverance, hard work. Not just what you’re doing when no one’s looking but what you’re doing when someone’s looking.” I thought about that last part and smiled. A teen for almost a year, his adolescent perspective showed promise and optimism.
Emily and Luke will be off to college in a few short months, and we will parent Sophia and Daniel through adolescence. No doubt there will be new and different issues, but our goal remains the same. Yes we want our kids to be happy and successful, but what contributes most to their success is not quite certain. It does seem possible however that evaluating success based on GPAs and standardized test scores without identifying and fostering individual character behaviors will perhaps become a thing of the past.
Marcelle Soviero is Brain, Child Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief. Randi Olin is the Senior Editor at Brain, Child.
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