Even Grittier

Not to "toot my own horn" or anything, but...


Pam Pleviak and I have spent this past year presenting on how educators and librarians can help our students develop Grit as we support them on research projects. Today, our blog post, "How to Encourage Grit in 21st-Century Students," was published on EDSITEment NEH, in their Closer Readings blog about the Common Core.

Read the entire post HERE. And yes, I'll come back and update the link once the move is complete.

True Grit

True Grit, the original movie

Pam and I have been discussing the articles and studies we have been reading over the past year about the need for resilience, to survive life's inevitable "slings and arrows". Again and again, research shows that the strongest, the smartest, the most talented do not necessarily succeed in life. 

Instead, the athlete (not necessarily the strongest) who keeps getting back up and trying eventually wins; the student (not necessarily the smartest) who continues to study hard despite less than an "A" average becomes a wealthy CEO; the musician (not necessarily the most talented) who practices day and night reaches enduring fame.

True Grit, the book

How many authors have you heard of who were rejected time and again, but finally got published and became best-sellers? How many actors worked odd jobs for years and even decades, but kept auditioning and taking small roles until that breakout role that made them a star? How many entrepreneurs started company after company, or patented product after product, and one day made it big? What do they all have in common? They all have an elusive quality - Angela Duckworth calls it grit - the resilience to take failure and learn from it... to take hardship and rise above it... to endure pain and even ridicule until finally triumphing.

So, if this is the stuff of success, then we desperately need to instill it in each of our students. How can we do that? Stay tuned for our ideas as we develop them.

Things Change

Will Richardson thinks about what will happen as our students develop their own personal learning networks - instead of attending fixed classes, in Personal Learning Networks (An Excerpt). Could we be obsolete as teachers?

Summer is . . .

...balmy nights at Ravinia. I just heard Lang Lang and Herbie Hancock dueling it out on dual pianos: Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, what an experience!

Of course, that was my reward for spending the entire day attending Prairie Area Library System workshops. In the morning: how school librarians can implement I-SAIL - Illinois Standards Aligned Instruction for Libraries - was presented by Angie Green (Alliance Library System) and Becky Robinson (Media Specialist at Galesburg High School) in their usual high-energy crowd-motivating style. Remember them as AASL "cheerleaders" at the ALA conference?

College-level Research Readiness was presented in the afternoon by Charlet Key (Library Director at Black Hawk College). Charlet gave us amazing insight on what our High School students don't know, and what they will need to know in order to be prepared for college-level research.

And yes, I am reading Loving Frank. . . more later.