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Angela Duckworth Perseverance

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The TEDTalk that Angela Lee Duckworth gave on grit and perseverance was thought-provoking, but lacking in substance. Her assertion that grit is the best predictor of success is hardly groundbreaking, and she provided mostly anecdotal evidence to support her claim.
Ms. Duckworth begins her talk with a story about having a teaching position in which she instructed seventh graders in mathematics. She determined that her brightest kids were not the ones who did the best in her classes, and that some of her strongest performers did not have the highest IQ scores. This revelation seemed to spur her to move on to graduate school to pursue the question, “Who is successful and why?”
To answer that question, she observed and polled a variety of different people in varying contexts and came to the conclusion that the one characteristic that is a significant indicator of success is grit. On …show more content…

There are innumerable quotes dating back to Confucius about the importance of perseverance in reaching goals. Why, then, after dedicating a significant portion of her academic career to studying it, does Ms. Duckworth have so little to share with us about perseverance? She readily admits during the course of the TEDTalk that she does not know how to foster grit in children. Toward the end of the talk, she does offer one concrete piece of information, which is that metacognition may be helpful when it comes to grit. Ms. Duckworth refers to the “growth mindset,” which is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed. She continues on to say that when kids learn how the brain changes and grows in response to challenges, that the students are more likely to persevere and not view one failure as a permanent failure. If this is true, where is the evidence, and why aren’t we teaching students more about how the brain functions in order to foster

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