nbrickman's review against another edition
5.0
A concise overview of impactful research that is a great starting point for engaging us in ways we can change our behavior and thinking in order to help children succeed.
birdy1luv's review against another edition
3.0
Not a final product, as in these are the answers to how to develop grit in children. But a helpful update on where research is leading and what has been discovered so far.
lynnaeaowens's review against another edition
4.0
Premise: How do we help children overcome adversity? Paul Tough summarizes the research on how to best parent and educate these children to encourage the qualities that lead to success.
What I Liked:
- this book is clear, easy to digest, but also full of profound insights. Some of the "revelations" are quite intuitive, but it's important to explore the research even if it feels obvious.
- I liked the flow from issues of parenting to issues of education. It's a natural progression to follow how kids age and Tough smoothly covers a lot of ground!
- favorite thoughts: applying research on the importance of autonomy/relatedness/competence to the classroom; the importance of developing noncognitive skills in children who've faced adversity;
teaching with repetition vs. teaching allowing creative solutions.
What I Didn’t Like:
- the organization of this book works, but it's weird. It's sort of like an extended review article with less citations. The chapters just flow into each other in a way that makes them seem useless.
- the key points come up repeatedly but still seem to get lost. This probably comes down to organization again.
- there are big takeaways about overarching themes - the importance of encouraging belongingness, autonomy etc. in the classroom - which Tough argues are more important than the details of what that looks like practically. I agree, there are probably numerous paths to achieve these objectives, but that's not very helpful from a practical standpoint.
- Tough argues that we can't "teach" grit, it has to be fostered organically in the environment. Yeah, it's probably difficult to teach grit the same way as one would teach multiplication. But there is research suggesting directed activity CAN improve qualities such as gratitude, mindfulness, etc.
Verdict: 4/5. Really, really strong exploration but some questions remain unanswered.
What I Liked:
- this book is clear, easy to digest, but also full of profound insights. Some of the "revelations" are quite intuitive, but it's important to explore the research even if it feels obvious.
- I liked the flow from issues of parenting to issues of education. It's a natural progression to follow how kids age and Tough smoothly covers a lot of ground!
- favorite thoughts: applying research on the importance of autonomy/relatedness/competence to the classroom; the importance of developing noncognitive skills in children who've faced adversity;
teaching with repetition vs. teaching allowing creative solutions.
What I Didn’t Like:
- the organization of this book works, but it's weird. It's sort of like an extended review article with less citations. The chapters just flow into each other in a way that makes them seem useless.
- the key points come up repeatedly but still seem to get lost. This probably comes down to organization again.
- there are big takeaways about overarching themes - the importance of encouraging belongingness, autonomy etc. in the classroom - which Tough argues are more important than the details of what that looks like practically. I agree, there are probably numerous paths to achieve these objectives, but that's not very helpful from a practical standpoint.
- Tough argues that we can't "teach" grit, it has to be fostered organically in the environment. Yeah, it's probably difficult to teach grit the same way as one would teach multiplication. But there is research suggesting directed activity CAN improve qualities such as gratitude, mindfulness, etc.
Verdict: 4/5. Really, really strong exploration but some questions remain unanswered.
kwugirl's review against another edition
4.0
This is not a parenting book, but it was helpful to read as a practical-minded person for what recent research on plausible interventions to help children growing up in poverty or otherwise disadvantaged homes. I'm probably biased in favor of looking at the suggestions positively because it seemed to me that the tl;dr is that Dr. Montessori was right: kids are natural scientists and learners, observe the kid, set up the right environment to promote their independence, then mostly get out of their way. It did seem like there was something for everyone in here though:
* agreement that the American public education system is not very good at education (example of math instruction in Japan where students are presented with an unfamiliar problem and try to struggle to solve it for awhile before getting guidance from the teacher, vs. American teacher demonstrating the steps to take and students practicing the steps over and over)
* school suspensions have disparate impact and are ineffective even at improving the learning environment for unsuspended students
* importance of diversity and representation amongst teachers ("[students] feel a sense of relatedness when they perceive that theire teachers like and value and respect them")
* caring about the costs of certain intervention programs
* placing importance on good parenting, etc.
I appreciated the analysis of what promising programs have in common. Also, just makes intuitive sense that "grit" is not a skill to be successfully acquired via a classroom lecture, but instead something that has to be learned over time by seeing the results of effort. There's further support to my personal unifying theory that learning healthy emotion management needs to come before everything else.
Other things I liked learning about:
* parenting "interventions" could be successful by having observers focused on noting all the positive types of interactions to do more of, instead of a picture I'd had of shaming parents. This approach makes the parents "feel better about their relationship with their infants and more secure in their identity as parents." "The message to parents is: You don't need to learn something new. We just want to show you what you're already doing, because if you do more of that, it's going to be transformative for your baby."
* clever ways of measuring a particular teacher's long-term impact outside of standardized test scores (work by Kirabo Jackson, who developed proxy measure for a students' non-cognitive ability using existing administrative data--attendance, suspensions, on-time grade progression, and overall GPA, for whether the student showed up, whether the student misbehaved, and how hard the student worked in classes. Even as a rough measure, this was a better predictor than a student's test scores for whether the student would go to college, their adult wages, and future arrests. Then used this to calculate a value-added assessment of teachers. Some teachers can reliably raise students' standardized test scores--these teachers are already recognized and rewarded. Some other teachers could reliably raise the measure for noncognitive ability and grades went up even in classes with other teachers.)
Quotes:
chronic early stress--what many researchers now call toxic stress--can make it difficult for children to moderate their responses to disappointments and provocations. Small setbacks feel like crushing defeats; tiny slight turn into serious confrontations.
when parents behave harshly or unpredictably--especially at moments when their children are upset--the children are less likely over time to develop the ability to manage strong emotions and more likely to respond ineffectively to stressful situations
When a child's caregivers respond to her jangled emotions in a sensitive and measured way, she is more likely to learn that she herself has the capacity to manage and cope with her feelings, even intense and unpleasant ones. That understanding, which is not primarily an intellectual understanding but instead is etched deep into the child's psyche, will prove immensely valuable when the next stressful situation comes along--or even in f the face of a crisis years in the future.
when their immediate environment is in constant flux--when the adults in their orbit behave erratically or don't interact with them much--the child's brain and the stress-response systems linked to it are triggered to prepare for a life of instability by being on constant alert, ready for anything
the educational value of pre-K for children who aren't poor is still in dispute; studies have found little or no positive effect (or even a negative effect) of universal pre-K programs on the skills of well-off children. That said, pre-K does see mto reliably help *disadvantaged* four-year-olds develop the skills they need for kindergarten, as long as the program they are enrolled in are considered high quality.
the ability to focus on a single activity for an extended period, the ability to understand and follow directions, the ability to cope with disappointment and frustration, the ability to interact capably with other students
Yet schools that educate large numbers of children in poverty are generally run, even more than others, on principles of behaviorism rather than self-determination. These are often the schools where administrators feel the most pressure to show positive results on high-stakes standardized tests and where teachers feel the least confident in their (often unruly and underperforming) students' ability to deal responsibly with more autonomy. And so in these schools, where students are most in need of help internalizing extrinsic motivations, classroom environments often psh them in the opposite direction: toward more external control, fewer feelings of competence, and less positive connection with teachers.
[in contrast to the skill-development paradigm where teachers teach new noncognitive skills; students learn new noncognitive skills; those new skills lead to different behaviors] in effective classrooms, teachers create a certain climate, student behave differently in response to that climate, and those new behaviors lead to success.
Moments of failures are the time when students are most susceptible to messages, both positive and negative, about their potential.
academic perseverance: the tendency to maintain productive academic behaviors over time. What distinguishes students with academic perseverance is their resilient attitude toward failure (Farrington)
if you were a teacher, you might never be able to get your students to *be* gritty, in the sense of dveloping some essential character trait called grit. But you could probably make them *act* gritty--to behave in gritty ways. [Farrington argues] that that is eactly what mattered.
1. I belong in this academic community.
2. My ability and competence grow with my effort.
3. I can succeed at this.
4. This work has value for me.
The first toolbox has to do with relationships: how you treat students, how you talk to them, how you reward and discipline them. The second has to do with pedagogy: what you teach, how you teach i, and how you asses whether your students have learned it.
[different successful programs target different toolboxes]
Is my teacher criticizing my work because he's trying to help me improve or because he doesn't respect me?
The guiding principle for American teachers seemed to be that practice should be relatively error-free, with high levels of success at each point. Confusion and frustration, in this traditional American iew, should be minimized. Japan: 41% basic practice, 44% to inventing new procedures or adapting familiar procedures to unfamiliar material. America: 96% on repetitive practice, <1% on new approaches.
* agreement that the American public education system is not very good at education (example of math instruction in Japan where students are presented with an unfamiliar problem and try to struggle to solve it for awhile before getting guidance from the teacher, vs. American teacher demonstrating the steps to take and students practicing the steps over and over)
* school suspensions have disparate impact and are ineffective even at improving the learning environment for unsuspended students
* importance of diversity and representation amongst teachers ("[students] feel a sense of relatedness when they perceive that theire teachers like and value and respect them")
* caring about the costs of certain intervention programs
* placing importance on good parenting, etc.
I appreciated the analysis of what promising programs have in common. Also, just makes intuitive sense that "grit" is not a skill to be successfully acquired via a classroom lecture, but instead something that has to be learned over time by seeing the results of effort. There's further support to my personal unifying theory that learning healthy emotion management needs to come before everything else.
Other things I liked learning about:
* parenting "interventions" could be successful by having observers focused on noting all the positive types of interactions to do more of, instead of a picture I'd had of shaming parents. This approach makes the parents "feel better about their relationship with their infants and more secure in their identity as parents." "The message to parents is: You don't need to learn something new. We just want to show you what you're already doing, because if you do more of that, it's going to be transformative for your baby."
* clever ways of measuring a particular teacher's long-term impact outside of standardized test scores (work by Kirabo Jackson, who developed proxy measure for a students' non-cognitive ability using existing administrative data--attendance, suspensions, on-time grade progression, and overall GPA, for whether the student showed up, whether the student misbehaved, and how hard the student worked in classes. Even as a rough measure, this was a better predictor than a student's test scores for whether the student would go to college, their adult wages, and future arrests. Then used this to calculate a value-added assessment of teachers. Some teachers can reliably raise students' standardized test scores--these teachers are already recognized and rewarded. Some other teachers could reliably raise the measure for noncognitive ability and grades went up even in classes with other teachers.)
Quotes:
chronic early stress--what many researchers now call toxic stress--can make it difficult for children to moderate their responses to disappointments and provocations. Small setbacks feel like crushing defeats; tiny slight turn into serious confrontations.
when parents behave harshly or unpredictably--especially at moments when their children are upset--the children are less likely over time to develop the ability to manage strong emotions and more likely to respond ineffectively to stressful situations
When a child's caregivers respond to her jangled emotions in a sensitive and measured way, she is more likely to learn that she herself has the capacity to manage and cope with her feelings, even intense and unpleasant ones. That understanding, which is not primarily an intellectual understanding but instead is etched deep into the child's psyche, will prove immensely valuable when the next stressful situation comes along--or even in f the face of a crisis years in the future.
when their immediate environment is in constant flux--when the adults in their orbit behave erratically or don't interact with them much--the child's brain and the stress-response systems linked to it are triggered to prepare for a life of instability by being on constant alert, ready for anything
the educational value of pre-K for children who aren't poor is still in dispute; studies have found little or no positive effect (or even a negative effect) of universal pre-K programs on the skills of well-off children. That said, pre-K does see mto reliably help *disadvantaged* four-year-olds develop the skills they need for kindergarten, as long as the program they are enrolled in are considered high quality.
the ability to focus on a single activity for an extended period, the ability to understand and follow directions, the ability to cope with disappointment and frustration, the ability to interact capably with other students
Yet schools that educate large numbers of children in poverty are generally run, even more than others, on principles of behaviorism rather than self-determination. These are often the schools where administrators feel the most pressure to show positive results on high-stakes standardized tests and where teachers feel the least confident in their (often unruly and underperforming) students' ability to deal responsibly with more autonomy. And so in these schools, where students are most in need of help internalizing extrinsic motivations, classroom environments often psh them in the opposite direction: toward more external control, fewer feelings of competence, and less positive connection with teachers.
[in contrast to the skill-development paradigm where teachers teach new noncognitive skills; students learn new noncognitive skills; those new skills lead to different behaviors] in effective classrooms, teachers create a certain climate, student behave differently in response to that climate, and those new behaviors lead to success.
Moments of failures are the time when students are most susceptible to messages, both positive and negative, about their potential.
academic perseverance: the tendency to maintain productive academic behaviors over time. What distinguishes students with academic perseverance is their resilient attitude toward failure (Farrington)
if you were a teacher, you might never be able to get your students to *be* gritty, in the sense of dveloping some essential character trait called grit. But you could probably make them *act* gritty--to behave in gritty ways. [Farrington argues] that that is eactly what mattered.
1. I belong in this academic community.
2. My ability and competence grow with my effort.
3. I can succeed at this.
4. This work has value for me.
The first toolbox has to do with relationships: how you treat students, how you talk to them, how you reward and discipline them. The second has to do with pedagogy: what you teach, how you teach i, and how you asses whether your students have learned it.
[different successful programs target different toolboxes]
Is my teacher criticizing my work because he's trying to help me improve or because he doesn't respect me?
The guiding principle for American teachers seemed to be that practice should be relatively error-free, with high levels of success at each point. Confusion and frustration, in this traditional American iew, should be minimized. Japan: 41% basic practice, 44% to inventing new procedures or adapting familiar procedures to unfamiliar material. America: 96% on repetitive practice, <1% on new approaches.
emiged's review against another edition
3.0
"If we want to improve a child's grit or resilience or self-control, it turns out that the place to begin is not with the child himself. What we need to change first, it seems, is his environment." (13)
***********
"When we hear the word environment, we often think first of a child's physical environment. And adverse physical surroundings do play a role in children's development, especially when they are literally toxic, as when children are exposed to lead in their drinking water or carbon monoxide in the are they breathe. But one of the most important findings of this new cohort of researchers is that for most children, the environmental factors that matter most have less to do with the buildings they live in than with the relationships they experience - they way the adults in their lives interact with them, especially in times of stress.
"The first and most essential environment where children develop their emotional and psychological and cognitive capacities is the home - and, more specifically, the family. Beginning in infancy, children rely on responses from their parents to make sense of the world. Researchers at the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University have labeled these 'serve and return' interactions. Infants make a sound or look at an object - that's the serve - and parents return the serve by sharing the child's attention and responding to his babbles and cries with gestures, facial expressions, and speech: 'Yes, that's your doggy!' 'Do you see the fan?' 'Oh dear, are you sad?' These rudimentary interactions between parents and babies, which can often feel to parents nonsensical and repetitive, are for the infants full of valuable information about what the world is going to be like. More than any other experiences infants have, they trigger the development and strengthening of neural connections in the brain between the regions that control emotion, cognition, language, and memory." (17)
**********
"A second crucial role parents play early on is as external regulators of their children's stress, in both good ways and bad. Research has shown that when parents behave harshly or unpredictably - especially at moments when their children are upset - the children are less likely over time to develop the ability to manage strong emotions and more likely to respond ineffectively to stressful situations. By contrast, parents who are able to help their children handle stressful moments and calm themselves down after a tantrum or a scare often have a profoundly positive effect on the children's long-term ability to manage stress. Infancy and early childhood are naturally full of crying jags and meltdowns, and each one is, for the child, a learning opportunity (even if that's hard to believe, in the moment, for the child's parents). When a child's caregivers respond to her jangled emotions in a sensitive and measured way, she is more likely to learn that she herself has the capacity to manage and cope with her feelings, even intense and unpleasant ones. That understanding, which is not primarily an intellectual understanding but instead is etched deep into the child's psyche, will prove immensely valuable when the next stressful situation comes along - or even in the face of a crisis years in the future." (18)
**********
"Moments of failure, Farrington believed, are the time when students are most susceptible to messages, both positive and negative, about their potential. If they hear the message that a failure is a final verdict on their ability, they may well give up and pull back from school. But if instead they get the message that a failure is a temporary stumble, or even a valuable opportunity to learn and improve, then that setback is more likely to propel them to invest more of themselves in their education. Farrington believed that these narratives about failure were especially resonant among students from low-income families, who were more likely to be anxious or insecure about the possibility of failing in an academic context." (75)
**********
"The experience of persisting through an intellectual challenge and succeeding despite the struggle is a profound one for schoolchildren - as profound, it seems, as serve-and-return is for the infant brain. It produces feelings of both competence and autonomy - two of Deci and Ryan's three big intrinsic motivations. And yet most of our schools, especially schools educating poor kids, operate in ways that steer children away from those experiences.
"In 2007, Robert Pianta of the University of Virginia published in the results of a large-scale survey of American public schools that he and a team of researchers had undertaken, observing regular instruction over the course of an entire school day in 737 typical fifth-grade classrooms across the United States, as well as hundreds of additional first- and third-grade classrooms. Pianta's researchers found that in almost every school they observed, the instruction students received was repetitive and undemanding, limited mostly to the endless practice of basic skills. cooperative learning and small-group instruction - the central pedagogical strategies of groups like Turnaround and schools like Polaris and WHEELS - were rare, taking up less than 5 percent of classroom time, and so were opportunities for students to practice or develop analytic skills like critical thinking, deep reading, or complex problem-solving. Instead, students spent most of their time hearing lectures on basic skills from teachers or practicing those basic skills on worksheets. The average fifth-grade student received five times as much instruction in basic skills as instruction focused on problem-solving or reasoning, Pianta and his coauthors reported; in first and third grades, the ratio was ten to one.
"And while the Science authors found instruction to be basic and repetitive even in American schools with a mostly middle-class or upper-middle-class student population, they found that the situation was considerably worse in schools that enrolled a lot of low-income children. Students in schools populated mostly by middle-class-and-above children were about equally likely to find themselves in a classroom with engaged and interesting instruction (47 percent of students) as in one with basic, repetitive instruction (53 percent of students). But students in schools serving mostly low-income children were almost all (91 percent) in classrooms marked by basic, uninteresting teaching.
"It's important to note that this approach to education, so widespread in the United States, is not inevitable. In other countries, classroom teaching can look quite different. In the 1990s, a researcher named James Stigler coordinated a vast international project that involved videotaping the classrooms of hundreds of randomly selected eighth-grade math teachers in the United States, Germany, and Japan. Stigler, who summarized his research in a 1999 book that he coauthored with James Hiebert titled The Teaching Gap, found that math classes in Japan almost always followed a very different script from math classes in the United States.
"In Japan, teachers would introduce a new mathematical method -let's say, adding fractions with different denominators, like 3/5 + 1/2 - by presenting the students with a problem they'd never seen before and instructing them to figure it out on their own. Students would stare at the problem for a while, scratch their heads, sometimes wince in pain, and then come up with an answer that was usually wrong.
"Next would come a series of discussions, in small groups and in the class as a whole, in which students compared and contrasted their solutions, arguing and lobbying for different approaches. The teacher would guide the discussion in a way that led, eventually, to a new element of math understanding (in this case, the principle of finding the lowest common denominator). Often the correct solution would be proposed not by the teacher but by one of the students. The whole process was sometimes bewildering and occasionally frustrating for students, but that was kind of the point. By the end of class, confusion and frustration gave way to the satisfaction of a new depth of comprehension, not delivered in whole cloth by an omniscient adult, but constructed from the group up, in part through a dialogue among the students.
"In American classrooms, by contrast, Stigler found that a unit on adding fractions with unlike denominators would usually begin with the teacher writing on an overhead projector a reliable formula to solve the problem, which students would be expected to copy down, memorize, and use for each subsequent problem. The teacher would then complete, on the overhead projector, a couple of sample problems while the students watcher, listened, and copied the problems down in their workbooks. The teacher would then give the students series of exercises to complete on their own that looked very similar to the sample problems the teacher had just demonstrated. Students would absorb these new procedures, Stiger and Hiebert wrote in The Teaching Gap, by 'practicing them many times, with later exercises being slightly more difficult than earlier ones.' The guiding principle for American teachers seemed to be that 'practice should be relatively error-free, with high levels of success at each point. Confusion and frustration, in this tradition American view, should be minimized.'
"Stigler's researchers logged hundreds of hours of videotape, which allowed them to assign some hard numbers to these cultural tendencies. In Japan, 41 percent of students' time in math class was still spent on basic practice - churning through one problem after another - but 44 percent was devoted to more creative stuff: inventing new procedures or adapting familiar procedures to unfamiliar material. In the American classrooms, by contrast, 96 percent of students' time was spent on repetitive practice, and less than 1 percent was spent puzzling through new approaches.
"This dominant American instructional strategy may save students from those uncomfortable feelings of confusion and struggle that Japanese students must endure - but it also denies them the character-building opportunities..." (100-103)
**********
"Now that we know this, what do we do?
"Let me propose three answers."
"First, we need to change our policies. Consistently creating what Pamela Cantor has called 'fortified environments' for poor children will mean fundamentally rethinking and remaking many of our entrenched institutions and practice: how we provide aid to low-income parents; how we create, fund, and manage systems of early-childhood care and education; how we train our teachers; how we discipline our students and assess their learning; and how we run our schools. These are essentially questions of public policy, and if real solutions are going to be found to the problems of disadvantaged children, these questions will need to be addressed, in a creative and committed way, by public officials at all levels - by school superintendents, school-board members, mayors, governors, and cabinet secretaries - as well as by individual citizens, community groups, and philanthropists across the country...
"Second, we need to change our practices. The project of creating better environments for children growing up in adversity is, at bottom, the work on individuals. Which means that the teachers, mentors, social workers, coaches, and parents who spend their days working with low-income children don't need to wait for large-scale policy changes to be enacted in order to take actions today and tomorrow and the next day that will help those children succeed...the trajectory that children's lives follow can sometimes be redirected by things that might at first seem, to the adults in their lives, to be small and insignificant. The tone of a parent's voice. The words a teacher writes on a Post-it note. The way a math class is organized. The extra time that a mentor or a coach takes to listen to a child facing a challenge. Those personal actions can create powerful changes, and those individual changes can resonate on a national scale.
"Finally, we need to change our way of thinking. When you spend time reading through the kind of intervention studies that I've written about here, it's easy to get caught up in the specifics of the date: sample sizes, standard deviations, regression analyses. And that data certainly matters. But i also find it useful, every once in a while, to think about the individual people who conducted these studies: the doctors or psychologists or social workers who went in to an orphanage in Russia or an impoverished neighborhood in Jamaica or a high school in Chicago or a living room in Queens and said, in essence, I want to help. I think we can do better.
"As much as we draw on the data that those researchers have produced, I think we can also draw on their example. The premise underlying their work is that if there are children suffering in your community - or your nation - there is something you can do to help We all still have a lot to learn about how best to deliver that help, which means that we need to continue and indeed expand upon the work those researchers are doing. But at the same time, we don't need to know exactly what to do in order to know that we need to do something." (112-114)
***********
"When we hear the word environment, we often think first of a child's physical environment. And adverse physical surroundings do play a role in children's development, especially when they are literally toxic, as when children are exposed to lead in their drinking water or carbon monoxide in the are they breathe. But one of the most important findings of this new cohort of researchers is that for most children, the environmental factors that matter most have less to do with the buildings they live in than with the relationships they experience - they way the adults in their lives interact with them, especially in times of stress.
"The first and most essential environment where children develop their emotional and psychological and cognitive capacities is the home - and, more specifically, the family. Beginning in infancy, children rely on responses from their parents to make sense of the world. Researchers at the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University have labeled these 'serve and return' interactions. Infants make a sound or look at an object - that's the serve - and parents return the serve by sharing the child's attention and responding to his babbles and cries with gestures, facial expressions, and speech: 'Yes, that's your doggy!' 'Do you see the fan?' 'Oh dear, are you sad?' These rudimentary interactions between parents and babies, which can often feel to parents nonsensical and repetitive, are for the infants full of valuable information about what the world is going to be like. More than any other experiences infants have, they trigger the development and strengthening of neural connections in the brain between the regions that control emotion, cognition, language, and memory." (17)
**********
"A second crucial role parents play early on is as external regulators of their children's stress, in both good ways and bad. Research has shown that when parents behave harshly or unpredictably - especially at moments when their children are upset - the children are less likely over time to develop the ability to manage strong emotions and more likely to respond ineffectively to stressful situations. By contrast, parents who are able to help their children handle stressful moments and calm themselves down after a tantrum or a scare often have a profoundly positive effect on the children's long-term ability to manage stress. Infancy and early childhood are naturally full of crying jags and meltdowns, and each one is, for the child, a learning opportunity (even if that's hard to believe, in the moment, for the child's parents). When a child's caregivers respond to her jangled emotions in a sensitive and measured way, she is more likely to learn that she herself has the capacity to manage and cope with her feelings, even intense and unpleasant ones. That understanding, which is not primarily an intellectual understanding but instead is etched deep into the child's psyche, will prove immensely valuable when the next stressful situation comes along - or even in the face of a crisis years in the future." (18)
**********
"Moments of failure, Farrington believed, are the time when students are most susceptible to messages, both positive and negative, about their potential. If they hear the message that a failure is a final verdict on their ability, they may well give up and pull back from school. But if instead they get the message that a failure is a temporary stumble, or even a valuable opportunity to learn and improve, then that setback is more likely to propel them to invest more of themselves in their education. Farrington believed that these narratives about failure were especially resonant among students from low-income families, who were more likely to be anxious or insecure about the possibility of failing in an academic context." (75)
**********
"The experience of persisting through an intellectual challenge and succeeding despite the struggle is a profound one for schoolchildren - as profound, it seems, as serve-and-return is for the infant brain. It produces feelings of both competence and autonomy - two of Deci and Ryan's three big intrinsic motivations. And yet most of our schools, especially schools educating poor kids, operate in ways that steer children away from those experiences.
"In 2007, Robert Pianta of the University of Virginia published in the results of a large-scale survey of American public schools that he and a team of researchers had undertaken, observing regular instruction over the course of an entire school day in 737 typical fifth-grade classrooms across the United States, as well as hundreds of additional first- and third-grade classrooms. Pianta's researchers found that in almost every school they observed, the instruction students received was repetitive and undemanding, limited mostly to the endless practice of basic skills. cooperative learning and small-group instruction - the central pedagogical strategies of groups like Turnaround and schools like Polaris and WHEELS - were rare, taking up less than 5 percent of classroom time, and so were opportunities for students to practice or develop analytic skills like critical thinking, deep reading, or complex problem-solving. Instead, students spent most of their time hearing lectures on basic skills from teachers or practicing those basic skills on worksheets. The average fifth-grade student received five times as much instruction in basic skills as instruction focused on problem-solving or reasoning, Pianta and his coauthors reported; in first and third grades, the ratio was ten to one.
"And while the Science authors found instruction to be basic and repetitive even in American schools with a mostly middle-class or upper-middle-class student population, they found that the situation was considerably worse in schools that enrolled a lot of low-income children. Students in schools populated mostly by middle-class-and-above children were about equally likely to find themselves in a classroom with engaged and interesting instruction (47 percent of students) as in one with basic, repetitive instruction (53 percent of students). But students in schools serving mostly low-income children were almost all (91 percent) in classrooms marked by basic, uninteresting teaching.
"It's important to note that this approach to education, so widespread in the United States, is not inevitable. In other countries, classroom teaching can look quite different. In the 1990s, a researcher named James Stigler coordinated a vast international project that involved videotaping the classrooms of hundreds of randomly selected eighth-grade math teachers in the United States, Germany, and Japan. Stigler, who summarized his research in a 1999 book that he coauthored with James Hiebert titled The Teaching Gap, found that math classes in Japan almost always followed a very different script from math classes in the United States.
"In Japan, teachers would introduce a new mathematical method -let's say, adding fractions with different denominators, like 3/5 + 1/2 - by presenting the students with a problem they'd never seen before and instructing them to figure it out on their own. Students would stare at the problem for a while, scratch their heads, sometimes wince in pain, and then come up with an answer that was usually wrong.
"Next would come a series of discussions, in small groups and in the class as a whole, in which students compared and contrasted their solutions, arguing and lobbying for different approaches. The teacher would guide the discussion in a way that led, eventually, to a new element of math understanding (in this case, the principle of finding the lowest common denominator). Often the correct solution would be proposed not by the teacher but by one of the students. The whole process was sometimes bewildering and occasionally frustrating for students, but that was kind of the point. By the end of class, confusion and frustration gave way to the satisfaction of a new depth of comprehension, not delivered in whole cloth by an omniscient adult, but constructed from the group up, in part through a dialogue among the students.
"In American classrooms, by contrast, Stigler found that a unit on adding fractions with unlike denominators would usually begin with the teacher writing on an overhead projector a reliable formula to solve the problem, which students would be expected to copy down, memorize, and use for each subsequent problem. The teacher would then complete, on the overhead projector, a couple of sample problems while the students watcher, listened, and copied the problems down in their workbooks. The teacher would then give the students series of exercises to complete on their own that looked very similar to the sample problems the teacher had just demonstrated. Students would absorb these new procedures, Stiger and Hiebert wrote in The Teaching Gap, by 'practicing them many times, with later exercises being slightly more difficult than earlier ones.' The guiding principle for American teachers seemed to be that 'practice should be relatively error-free, with high levels of success at each point. Confusion and frustration, in this tradition American view, should be minimized.'
"Stigler's researchers logged hundreds of hours of videotape, which allowed them to assign some hard numbers to these cultural tendencies. In Japan, 41 percent of students' time in math class was still spent on basic practice - churning through one problem after another - but 44 percent was devoted to more creative stuff: inventing new procedures or adapting familiar procedures to unfamiliar material. In the American classrooms, by contrast, 96 percent of students' time was spent on repetitive practice, and less than 1 percent was spent puzzling through new approaches.
"This dominant American instructional strategy may save students from those uncomfortable feelings of confusion and struggle that Japanese students must endure - but it also denies them the character-building opportunities..." (100-103)
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"Now that we know this, what do we do?
"Let me propose three answers."
"First, we need to change our policies. Consistently creating what Pamela Cantor has called 'fortified environments' for poor children will mean fundamentally rethinking and remaking many of our entrenched institutions and practice: how we provide aid to low-income parents; how we create, fund, and manage systems of early-childhood care and education; how we train our teachers; how we discipline our students and assess their learning; and how we run our schools. These are essentially questions of public policy, and if real solutions are going to be found to the problems of disadvantaged children, these questions will need to be addressed, in a creative and committed way, by public officials at all levels - by school superintendents, school-board members, mayors, governors, and cabinet secretaries - as well as by individual citizens, community groups, and philanthropists across the country...
"Second, we need to change our practices. The project of creating better environments for children growing up in adversity is, at bottom, the work on individuals. Which means that the teachers, mentors, social workers, coaches, and parents who spend their days working with low-income children don't need to wait for large-scale policy changes to be enacted in order to take actions today and tomorrow and the next day that will help those children succeed...the trajectory that children's lives follow can sometimes be redirected by things that might at first seem, to the adults in their lives, to be small and insignificant. The tone of a parent's voice. The words a teacher writes on a Post-it note. The way a math class is organized. The extra time that a mentor or a coach takes to listen to a child facing a challenge. Those personal actions can create powerful changes, and those individual changes can resonate on a national scale.
"Finally, we need to change our way of thinking. When you spend time reading through the kind of intervention studies that I've written about here, it's easy to get caught up in the specifics of the date: sample sizes, standard deviations, regression analyses. And that data certainly matters. But i also find it useful, every once in a while, to think about the individual people who conducted these studies: the doctors or psychologists or social workers who went in to an orphanage in Russia or an impoverished neighborhood in Jamaica or a high school in Chicago or a living room in Queens and said, in essence, I want to help. I think we can do better.
"As much as we draw on the data that those researchers have produced, I think we can also draw on their example. The premise underlying their work is that if there are children suffering in your community - or your nation - there is something you can do to help We all still have a lot to learn about how best to deliver that help, which means that we need to continue and indeed expand upon the work those researchers are doing. But at the same time, we don't need to know exactly what to do in order to know that we need to do something." (112-114)
astumpf's review against another edition
4.0
I got this book in the mail from a Goodreads giveaway (yes, those are real! Enter!) I think this book does a great job filling in holes from his previous book. Reading about the ways childhood environment has a profound impact on neurological development was enlightening & reaffirming. He clearly shows how people develop motivation and a sense of agency as a reaction to their environments. I also so much appreciate that he has pedaled back from his endorsement of zero-tolerance policies & seemingly blind allegiance to Geoffrey Canada.
I was craving a bit more classroom research to show how school environments can change kids' mindsets about schools. Overall though, a great short read.
I was craving a bit more classroom research to show how school environments can change kids' mindsets about schools. Overall though, a great short read.
ginabelle's review against another edition
3.0
This book was interesting with regards to the science of adversity and how it affects us, but I didn't find it super helpful in actually providing many solutions (for teachers or others). In the last chapter Tough even says we may not know what to do but we have to do something.
I agreed with some of the policies he suggested such as revising punishments for students and with focusing on student-centered learning. It was also very relevant to what's happening in our public schools in this country and dove into how we teach kids (more often than not) in a way that is not conducive to the 21st-century workforce.
It got a bit pretentious at points (not everyone has read your other books) but the information was intriguing at times. Although it's a short book, it stated certain valuable points. Not my favorite book on the subject of education, but a good read if you ever need to be very factual about adversity and support why you do what you do for struggling youth.
I agreed with some of the policies he suggested such as revising punishments for students and with focusing on student-centered learning. It was also very relevant to what's happening in our public schools in this country and dove into how we teach kids (more often than not) in a way that is not conducive to the 21st-century workforce.
It got a bit pretentious at points (not everyone has read your other books) but the information was intriguing at times. Although it's a short book, it stated certain valuable points. Not my favorite book on the subject of education, but a good read if you ever need to be very factual about adversity and support why you do what you do for struggling youth.
sb1999's review against another edition
4.0
Some good practical tips. A lot of focus on non-cognitive capacities and how they support learning.
tmalone's review against another edition
4.0
Another great one by Paul Tough this was a quick read, I read it in a few hours. What I take away from this is that early intervention is so important in the first few years of a child's life, playing and enganging with children will go a long way into helping them succeed in school.