A review by lynnaeaowens
Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why by Paul Tough
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.