Walking the Talk with Grit and Resilience – The steps our Junior School took to create a Growth Mindset Character Education Program

As I have mentioned previously, my original Action Plan was to increase Grit, Resilience and Perseverance with Grade 2 Math students, but I expanded my plan to incorporate supporting teachers with this outcome for all students.  Before I get into writing about how my action plan is going, (slowly in case you are wondering) I wanted to give you a little background knowledge on where we are as a Jr. School community on this topic.  I have spoken to many of you about the work we have done at Hillfield Strathallan College on Mindset, Grit, and Resilience.  I think we have learned a great deal and come a long way, and I would like to share the following blog written together with a colleague of mine, Kathleen Collins, and our Principal, Shailau Spivak, who both led our amazing team of educators on this journey.  

In late 2014, the Junior School Staff undertook an evaluation of our existing report card format. We launched a book study of Paul Tough’s How Children Succeed, as the beginning of what turned out to be a two year study of what we valued in terms of what makes students successful long term.  Tough’s book forced us to articulate exactly what we valued as a College and also what we intuitively knew was more important than an ‘A’ in Science.  Grit and resilience rang true on all accounts. As a follow-up to Tough’s book, we read the Marshmallow Test to further our research into resilience and goal setting.  We knew at that point that we needed to do some further work.  We worked with The Character Lab and the University of Pennsylvania, and made a few conference calls with Dominic Randolph, Head of Riverdale Country Day School, in New York City.  After our initial research phase, we started a committee to examine our report cards to ensure that they were aligned with the Character Lab and our partnership with the University of Pennsylvania.

We held a series of meetings and formed a Committee to examine proposed changes, including the key character traits or success skills we wanted to comment on via the “front page” of our report cards. The process of narrowing down and defining our list of traits was long and at times heated, but eventually we came to a consensus. We also reached the determination that if we wanted to provide valuable and credible feedback on success skills like perseverance and passion, we needed to teach students about these traits explicitly.

A colleague and member of this committee, Kathleen Collins, completed a series of online courses in the Summer/Fall of 2015 and obtained a Diploma in Character Education Development from the University of San Diego. During that time she reviewed and evaluated many existing character programs as tools to teach our established list of success skills. It quickly became clear that while each program had strengths, none of them was an exact fit for our needs. To fill the gap, Kathleen combined multiple course requirements to create one larger project – a new character framework for our school. The program included a poster campaign, resource lists, including picture books and games related to each of our traits, and a compilation of lesson plan ideas borrowed from existing resource books, websites, researchers, and of course, Pinterest and Teachers Pay Teachers.

In the Spring of 2016 the framework was presented to our administration and staff. Feedback was incorporated, and the REACH for the Stars program was adopted. It was launched in September 2016 and was quickly incorporated into our Junior School shared discourse. We hung posters in each classroom and sent home postcards for parents to display on their fridges. We implemented a “Character Board” to display character messages and student work. We planned assemblies related to our REACH traits, and our Principal visited classrooms throughout the year to teach about particular traits by reading picture books or showing videos and completing follow-up lessons and activities. This year, we have expanded our character bin program to include more classroom resources for each of our REACH traits, often capitalizing on cross-curricular ties. For example, Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughter is an engaging picture book that teaches Grade 4s about honesty while also complementing their year-long study of Africa.

The traits that the Junior School chose to focus on were Respect, Effort, Attitude, Control of Self and Honesty.  Each term these traits are assessed using a 4 point scale and commented on anecdotally, on the front cover of our report cards.  Additionally, we include a cover which students complete highlighting their accomplishments and goals where they provide examples of how they have demonstrated some of our REACH character traits.  Currently our reports cards do not have subject grades for the first term, but rather an anecdotal comment alone.  During second and third term, subject skills are indicated by a four point scale.  The 4 point scale used throughout the whole report card is as follows; 1 – needs more time to develop this skill, 2 – demonstrates skill some of the time,  3 – demonstrates skill most of the time, and  4 – demonstrates skill consistently. This year we will evaluate whether or not we will replace our current report card vocabulary with language that further represents a learning journey rather than a fixed evaluation.  

Some great resources for us on our journey have been;

Canadian Positive Psychology Association

Shawn Achor – GoodThink Inc., The Happiness Advantage

Dominic Randolph at Riverdale Country Day School – New York City

Marshmallow Test – Walter Mischel

How Children Succeed – Paul Tough

Character Lab

Angela Duckworth

KIPP Schools

University of San Diego Continuing Education Department

Mary Cay Ricci “Mindsets in the Classroom – Everything Educators Need for School Success”

There is much research being done on Grit and Resilience and we have seen the benefits of incorporating this very important area of education into our classrooms.  We still have lots of work to do, but are definitely  all working together to ‘REACH’ our potential.