在我27歲的時候，我辭去了一份非常有挑戰性的職業-企業管理諮詢，轉而投入了一份更加具有挑戰性的職業：教育。我來到紐約的一些公立學校教七年級學生數學，和別的老師一樣，我會給同學們做小測試和考試，我會給他們布置家庭作業。當這些試卷和作業收上來之後，我計算了他們的成績，讓我震驚的是，I.Q的高低並不是我最好的和最差的學生之間唯一的差別，一些在課業上表現很好的學生並不具有非常高的IQ分數，一些聰明的孩子反而在課業上表現的不那麼盡如人意，這引起了我的思考。當然，學生們在七年級需要學習的東西，是有難度的，像比率，小數，平行四邊形的面積計算，但是這些概念是完全可以掌握的，我堅信我的每一位學生都可以學會教材內容，只要他們肯花時間和精力的話。
When Iwas 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting, for a job that was even more demanding:teaching. I went to teach seventh grades math in the New York City public schools. And like anyteacher, I made quizzes and tests, i gave out homework assignments. When thework came back, I calculated grades. What struck me was that I.Q. was not theonly difference between my best and my worst students, some of my strongestperformers did not have stratospheric I.Q. Scores, some of my smartest kidsweren’t doing so well. And that got me thinking, the kinds of things you needto learn in seventh grade math, sure, they’re hard: ratios, decimals, the areaof a parallelogram, but these concepts are not impossible. And I was firmlyconvinced that every one of my students could learn material if they workedhard and long enough。
經過幾年教學之後，我得出一個結論，我們在教育方面需要做的是從學習動力的角度和心理學的角度對學生和學習行為，進行一次更為深刻的理解。在教育系統中，我們都知道評價優秀學生的標準就是IQ，但如果在學校和生活中的優秀表現遠不僅僅依賴於你輕鬆高效的學習能力呢？所以我離開了講臺，回到學校繼續心理學碩士學位。我開始研究，孩子和大人在各種具有挑戰性的情況下以及在各項研究中，我的問題是〝誰才是成功者，為什麼他們會成功？〞我和我的研究團隊前往西點軍校展開調研，我們試圖預測哪些學員能夠耐得住軍隊的訓練，哪些會被淘汰出局。我們前去觀摩全國拼字比賽，同時也試著預測哪些孩子會晉級到最後的比賽。我們研究，在惡劣的環境下工作的，剛入行的老師，詢問他們哪些老師會在學年結束後繼續留下來任教。以及他們之中誰能最快地提高學生的學習成績。我們與私企合作，向他們詢問哪些銷售人員可以保住工作，哪些賺錢更多？
Afterseveral more years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that what we need ineducation is a much better understanding of students and learning from amotivational perspective, from a psychological perspective. In education, theone thing we know how to measure best is I.Q., but what if doing well in schooland in life, depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly andeasily? So I left classroom, and I went to graduate school to become apsychologist. I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of superchallenging settings, and in every study my question was who is successful hereand why. My research team and I went to West Point Military Academy, we try topredict which cadets would stay in military training and which would drop out.We went to the National Spelling Bee, and tried to predict which children wouldadvance farthest in competition. We studied rookie teachers in really toughneighborhoods, asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching bythe end of the school year. And of those, who will be the most effective atimproving learning outcomes for their students. We partnered with privatecompanies, asking which of these salespeople is going to keep their jobs, andwho’s going to earn the most money?
在所有那些不同的環境下，一種性格特徵凸顯了出來，這種特徵很大程度上預示了成功，而且他並不是社交智力，不是漂亮的外表，強健的體魄，也不是很高的I.Q.，它是毅力。
毅力是對長遠目標的激情和堅持，毅力是擁有持久的恆勁，毅力是你對未來的堅持，日復一日，不是僅僅持續一個星期或者一個月，而是幾年甚至幾十年努力奮鬥著，讓自己的夢想變為現實。毅力把生活當成一場馬拉松而不是一場短跑。幾年前，在芝加哥的公立學校裡開始研究毅力，我對上千名初中生進行了關於毅力的問卷調查，然後等候了一年多來看最終哪些學生能畢業結果證明那些更具毅力的學生在畢業的概率上佔絕對優勢，即使是在同樣可以量化的外在因素下，像家庭收入，標準化成績測驗的分數，甚至是孩子們在學校能獲得多少安全感之類，仍是有毅力的學生更容易畢業，所有不僅僅是在西點軍校裡或者全國拼字比賽上才需要毅力，在學校亦是如此，尤其是對於那些徘徊在輟學邊緣的孩子們。對我來說，關於毅力最讓我震驚的事情莫過於對於毅力，我們知之甚少，在培養毅力上，科學對理解的認識又是何等貧乏。
In allthose very different contexts, one characteristic emerged, as a significantpredictor of success, and it wasn’t social intelligence, it wasn’t good looks,physical health, and it wasn’t I.Q., it was grit. Grit is passion andperseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina, grit is stickingwith your future, day in, day out. Not just for the week, not just for themonth, but for years and working really hard to make that future a reality.Grit is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint. A few years ago, Istarted studying grit in the Chicagopublic schools. I asked thousands of high school junior to take gritquestionnaires, and then waited around more than a year to see who wouldgraduate, turns out that grittier kids were significantly more likely tograduate, even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure,things like family incomes, standardized achievement test scores, even how safekids felt when they were at school. So it’s not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee that grit matters, it’s also inschool, especially for kids at risk for dropping out. To me, the most shockingthing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows about buildingit.
每天都有家長和老師來問我「我怎樣做才能培養孩子的毅力呢」該做些什麼才能教授給孩子們真正的職業道德，我又該怎樣調動他們長期的積極性呢？老實說，我不知道。我所知道的是，才華並不能使你堅韌不拔，我們的數據十分清楚的表明，有許多才華橫溢的人，他們都無法堅持兌現自己的承諾。事實上，根據我們的數據來看，毅力通常與其它因素無關，甚至與才華的衡量標準背道而馳。到目前為止，我所聽說過得在孩子身上培養堅忍品質最有效的方法，叫「成長型思維模式」。
史丹福大學卡洛杜威克提出過一個觀點，他相信人的學習能力是可變的，他隨著你的努力程度而變化。杜威克教授表示，當孩子們閱讀和學習有關大腦的知識，以及它在面對挑戰時所發生的變化和成長情況，他們失敗之後更容易堅持下去，因為他們不相信一直失敗下去，因此，成長性思維模式對培養毅力大有裨益。但是我們需要更多，我決定在次結束我的評論，因為我們正在經歷這一切，這是眼前所面臨的工作，我們要拿出最好的想法和最強的直覺。我們要對他們進行實踐，我們需要估量這一切是否成功，同時還要渴望面對失敗和錯誤，要從這些失敗中汲取教訓經驗重新再來，換句話說，我們只有自己變得更加有毅力才能讓我們的孩子變得更有毅力，謝謝大家。
Everyday, parents and teachers ask me 「how do i build grit in kids?」 What do I do toteach 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 makeyou gritty. Our data show very clearly that there are many talented individualswho simply do not follow through on their commitments. In fact, in our data,grit is usually unrelated, or even inversely related to measure of talent. Sofar, 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 CarolDweck, and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it canchange with your effort , Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learnabout 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, and that’s where I’m going to end my remarks, because that’s where we are, that’s the work that stands before us.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. Thank you!
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陳振平老師
臺灣太陽國際管理顧問股份有限公司
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