2015.05.24

 

 

以意志力邁向成功

  我 21 歲的時候，我開始當老師，我在台灣台中的一所公立小學教五年級的孩子，我和其他老師一樣，出考題、測驗，給回家作業，然後批改計分。

  我發現，最好和最差的學生之間的差異並不僅僅是智商。有些非常優秀的學生 智商並非特別得高有些非常聰明的學生，也沒表現得很好。這引發了我的思考。五年級要學的東西確實挺難。但這些概念並不是不能理解，我也堅信我的每一位學生 都能學會這些知識，只要他們足夠認真、堅持用功。

  教了10年以後，我得到的結論是：教育需要的是對學生、對學習更好的理解： 從動機與心理的角度去理解。在教育領域，我們最擅長測試的指標是智商，但如果說在學校和生活中的表現好壞 還取決於是否能又好又快地學習！

  於是，我成為主任。我開始研究兒童處於各種艱巨挑戰中的表現。我關注的是：誰會成功？爲什麽會成功？當然還有，哪些教師教出的學生成績的提高最為顯著？在不同的背景下，我發現有一個特質能夠預測成功。它不是社交能力，不是美麗的外貌，不是健康的身體，也不是智商-而是意志力。

  意志力是面對長遠目標時的熱情和毅力。意志力是毅力的表現。意志力是將生活看作是一場馬拉松，不是短跑。意志力是日復一日，不只是這週、不只是這個月，而是年復一年用心、努力工作，對未來堅信不已。

   關於意志力，最令我吃驚的事情是我們以及科學界對於如何鍛煉意志力知之甚少。家長和老師都會問，"如何鍛煉孩子們的意志力？怎麼教會孩子堅實的職業道德？怎樣才能讓他們有長遠的動力？我不知道。我所知道的是，有才華不意味著就有意志力。有很多才華橫溢的人並不能堅持到底，實現承諾。 事實上，研究發現，意志力通常與才華無關，有時甚至成反比。

關於鍛煉孩子們的意志，我聽過的方法叫做“成長型思維模式”理論。 這是史丹福大學的 Carol Dweck 的研究的成果。 這個理論相信學習的能力不是一成不變的，它會由於你的努力發生變化。研究已證明，當孩子們 閱讀和學習大腦的相關知識以及大腦在面對挑戰時會怎樣變化，他們更有可能在失敗時繼續堅持，因為他們不相信 他們永遠會失敗。

所以，成長型思維模式是一種鍛煉意志力的好方法。但我們還需要更多這樣的理念。我們需要拿出最好的想法、最強的直覺進行檢驗。我們需要衡量我們是否取得了成功，我們必須願意失敗、願意犯錯、願意吸取教訓並從頭開始。換句話說，在加強孩子意志力這件事上，我們自己也要有不懈的意志。

Grit- The key to success

  When I was 21 years old, I began a teacher, I went to teach fifth graders in the Taiwan Taichung City public Elementary schools. And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests. I gave out homework assignments. And when the work came back, I calculated grades.

  What struck me was that IQ was not the only difference between best and worst students. Some of strongest performers did not have high IQ scores. Some of smartest kids weren't doing so well. And that got me thinking.

And that got me thinking. The kinds of things you need to learn in fifth grade they're hard: ratios, decimals, the area of a parallelogram. But learning concepts are not impossible, and I was firmly convinced that every one of my students could learn the material if they worked hard and long enough.

   After 10 years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that what we need in education is a much better understanding of students and learning from a motivational perspective, from a psychological perspective. In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is IQ. But what if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily!

    So I left the classroom, and I become a director. I started studying kids in all kinds of super challenging settings, and my question was, who is successful here and why? and of those, who will be the most effective at improving learning outcomes for their students? In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn't social intelligence. It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't IQ. It was grit.

  Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality.

  To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it. Every day, parents and teachers ask, "How do I build grit in kids? What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do I keep them motivated for the long run?" The honest answer is, I don't know. What I do know is that talent doesn't make you gritty. There are many talented individuals who simply do not follow through on their commitments. In fact, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent.

So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something called "growth mindset." This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort. Study has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they're much more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition.

So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit. But we need more. We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions, and we need to test them. We need to measure whether we've been successful, and we have to be willing to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned. In other words, we need to be gritty about getting our kids grittier.