Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“Developing Grit”

In this activity, students will use the concepts in Grit to develop a skill they are passionate about.

A. Identify a habit or skill you can work on developing over the course of a month. Use the tips found in the book and the steps below to decide on and develop your habit. Create a record or log of your attempts to make progress.

• Make a list of passions and dislikes.
• Select a goal from your list of passions.
• Develop a way to deliberately practice your skill each day.
• Cultivate and record a sense of purpose to refer to during practice.
• Continuously set stretch goals.
• Keep a daily journal of obstacles and perseverance.
• Record video or data to present growth.
• Seek out feedback and support.

B. Reflect on your growth and achievements throughout the month and share progress with peers.

• How have your goals changed?
• What tools from the book might you use to continue to improve?
• Describe the obstacles you attempted to overcome.
• Explain your purpose.
• Present a comparison of your skill before and after a month of applying grit.

Teaching Suggestion: Students may benefit from discussing likes and dislikes in small groups to generate ideas for their intended goal at the outset of the project. To establish good practices for collecting and recording data, encourage students to discuss how they will collect data on their progress for comparison and topics or details they plan to include in their daily journal entries. To encourage progress with recordkeeping, consider having students meet regularly throughout the month to compare data and discuss progress.

Paired Text Extension:

Use the West Point Grit Scale to compare results from before reading Angela Duckworth’s Grit.

• Do you think developing grit is an achievable goal?
• How did your original survey results compare with your post-survey results?
• How might you continue to develop new skills and create new goals?

Teaching Suggestion: Encourage students to share their results and comparisons with small groups or the larger class.

Differentiation Suggestion: Consider having higher-level students create a presentation that displays their results before and after reading the book. While observing their peers’ results and presentations, students can analyze the data to identify similarities between the results and/or trends in regard to the students’ results and experience with the “Developing Grit” activity.