The Importance of Grit and Early Childhood Reading

PBS Nova recently ran a feature on the School of the Future (preview above). The documentary confirms everything I have learned from teaching at the college level (I'll summarize a few below) and provides a few other ideas I wish I had stumbled on myself, trying to develop a teaching approach the hard way.

Two other points about learning success outside the classroom struck a very personal chord for me. First, early childhood reading with a parent (before grade school) is extremely important. This a period of rapid brain development for children (specifically, Broca's area and Wernicke's area). Second, children need to develop grit, the ability to persist in learning regardless of failure. It's my personal observation that persistence is far more important than raw intelligence, at least at the college level with entrance exams that select student who are all quite intelligent enough. It is also my experience that many students have no passion for learning and no persistence when the going gets the least bit tough. It breaks my heart to have to say this because there is no time for me to teach this at the college level (even if I had any idea how to teach grit, which I don't).

The personal aspect of early childhood learning, for me, was that my mother taught me to read and write before I entered grade school. This was a mixed blessing. In the public schools I attended, students were not accelerated based on their current level of learning. Until well into high school and not until college, I was completely bored, had stopped paying attention and seldom studied. On the other hand, I was quickly able to catch up in college. I attribute that to my strong reading skills, love of books and to the last trait I somehow learned from my father: grit. At his funeral, my father was describe by the people who knew him longest as "a fighter, never a quitter". I had never really heard much about my father's childhood and he never talked about grit and persistence but somehow I absorbed it. He did tell me I was a quitter and maybe I have just been on a long journey to prove him wrong.

Parent's! Read to your children when they are young. Do whatever you can to improve, develop and encourage persistence, passion and grit. Read Angela Lee Duckworth's book Grit: the power of passion and persistence and/or listen to her TED talk (here).

Teachers! Lectures are dead, even at the college level. I have known a handful of great lecturers. I am not one of them!  But it doesn't matter. Students love learning-by-doing in groups and on teams. Teachers love teaching these classes because they are easier to teach and more effective. Give a 15 minute quick lecture on the topic of the day and then let students go at the material. I taught Computer Science and Statistics where it is easy to give exercises that can be started in class and finished later, outside the class room. The approach can be done on any topic. Never give homework! Students are overloaded and not getting enough sleep. Let them have a life outside of the classroom. Give them time to pursue their passions. At the end of the week, do a quick, ungraded mini-quiz on the week's topic.  It nails down the learning experience and improves retention.

If you don't believe any of this and even if you do, watch the full NOVA documentary Schools of the Future.