Got Grit?

In the first four weeks of student teaching, I am now sitting in my room during what is now my FIFTH snow day. You know you’ve had too many snow days when you’re wishing you were in school and starting to think that five day weeks are a conspiracy. So as I take shelter from the dangerous wind chill, I bring you a new blog post.

Over the past week and a half, my cooperating teacher and I have been waging a war against laziness. On Wednesday, we had multiple conversations with our class about how laziness would no longer be tolerated since we know that they are more than capable of completing “top quality work.” However, I was not satisfied with leaving things on a negative note, which led to the commencement of operation grit.

In brainstorming lesson ideas, I remembered one of my TED talk videos and pulled it up for inspiration. (Watch it below for an extra boost of motivation!)

After that, idea after idea started to pop into my head. I decided that for morning work, students would respond to the following prompt in their Reading Response Journals:

What qualities are needed to become a successful person?
How do successful people reach success?

Explain your answers.

As students finished, I invited them each to come up to write one of the qualities they wrote about on the board around the prompt. It was actually quite inspiring to read 32 different qualities of successful people on the board. We had everything from pride and try, to athletic and courage, and to innovative and organized.

Then we watched the TED talk above and discussed what grit is and why it is important to be gritty. Finally, after I knew that they understood the meaning of grit, we brainstormed about what grit looks like in the classroom. As they offered their responses, I recorded them on the board. Many of them astounded me with their willingness to continue to offer response after response and actively participate in the conversation. They were then each given a piece of computer paper, and I instructed them to make an acrostic poem using the word grit. Below are a few of my favorite examples.

                                              

I’m hoping to make a bulletin board of all of their acrostic poems, and I will definitely share a picture once it’s up!

I am very excited that my teacher gave me the opportunity to teach this lesson because while we weren’t spending time mastering Common Core Standards or preparing for the state’s standardized test, the students were learning valuable life lessons. After discussing grit, they know that they are all capable of achieving great things both in school and in life with hard work and effort. If this lesson made just a few of them believe in themselves a little bit more, I think it was a success.