Welcome to Season 2, episode 7 of Angela Watson's Truth for Teachers.

I'm your host Angela Watson, and I'm here to speak life, encouragement, and truth into the minds and hearts of educators and get you energized

for the weekend.

Today I'm going to share some thoughts on how to be thoughtful and responsible and the way that we teach kids to show grit and

perseverance and resilience.

Visit truth for teachers.com to get the transcript, links to recommended resources, and to share your thoughts on the show.

So grit is a huge buzzword right now that's used to refer to perseverance and resilience. And many schools are rushing to adopt grit

curriculums and character education programs so that they can teach their

students about how to put in the effort and determination that's needed in order to be successful.

But here's the thing about grit.

I've done a lot of research on this topic, and I've seen grit get a lot of pushback lately because

it's starting to be really misused and misinterpreted.

And while I personally believe in the value of teaching grit to students,

I think that we as educators have a responsibility to be really well informed

about what being gritty means, and also what it doesn't mean. So let me first

define what grit is not. Grit is not an excuse for giving boring inauthentic assignments.

We can't photocopy a stack of multiple choice worksheets and call that our lesson

and then accuse students of not showing enough grit when they're

disengaged. We can't fill the school day with busy work and wrote learning and

then blame kids lack of growth on the fact that they didn't try hard enough.

Grit isn't supposed to be a guilt trip that places a burden on someone else to

complete meaningless tasks that we give them.

...