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The story we usually tell about childhood and success is the one about intelligence: Success comes to those who score highest on tests, from preschool admissions to SATs. But in How Children Succeed, Paul Tough argues for a very different understanding of what makes a successful child. Drawing on groundbreaking research in neuroscience, economics, and psychology, Tough shows that the qualities that matter most have less to do with IQ and more to do with character: skills like grit, curiosity, conscientiousness, and optimism.
How Children Succeed by Paul Tough is a journalistic review of the most recent research connecting success in adulthood with character development in childhood and the programs that use character to motivate and teach low-performing children to become high achievers.
Ken Robinson is one of the world's most influential voices in education, and his 2006 TED Talk on the subject is the most viewed in the organization's history. Now, the internationally recognized leader on creativity and human potential focuses on one of the most critical issues of our time: how to transform the nation's troubled educational system.
In this must-listen book for anyone striving to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows parents, educators, students, and businesspeople - both seasoned and new - that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a focused persistence called "grit". Why do some people succeed and others fail? Sharing new insights from her landmark research on grit, MacArthur "genius" Angela Duckworth explains why talent is hardly a guarantor of success.
Finland shocked the world when its 15-year-olds scored highest on the first Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a set of tests touted for evaluating critical-thinking skills in math, science, and reading. That was in 2001; but even today, this tiny Nordic nation continues to amaze. How does Finnish education - with short school days, light homework loads, and little standardized testing - produce students who match the PISA scores of high-powered, stressed-out kids in Asia?
Hacking Education is the audiobook that every teacher, principal, parent, and education stakeholder has been waiting for - the one that actually solves problems. Listen to it today - fix it tomorrow! In Hacking Education, Mark Barnes and Jennifer Gonzalez employ decades of teaching experience and hundreds of discussions with education thought leaders, to show you how to find and hone the quick fixes that every school and classroom need.
The story we usually tell about childhood and success is the one about intelligence: Success comes to those who score highest on tests, from preschool admissions to SATs. But in How Children Succeed, Paul Tough argues for a very different understanding of what makes a successful child. Drawing on groundbreaking research in neuroscience, economics, and psychology, Tough shows that the qualities that matter most have less to do with IQ and more to do with character: skills like grit, curiosity, conscientiousness, and optimism.
How Children Succeed by Paul Tough is a journalistic review of the most recent research connecting success in adulthood with character development in childhood and the programs that use character to motivate and teach low-performing children to become high achievers.
Ken Robinson is one of the world's most influential voices in education, and his 2006 TED Talk on the subject is the most viewed in the organization's history. Now, the internationally recognized leader on creativity and human potential focuses on one of the most critical issues of our time: how to transform the nation's troubled educational system.
In this must-listen book for anyone striving to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows parents, educators, students, and businesspeople - both seasoned and new - that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a focused persistence called "grit". Why do some people succeed and others fail? Sharing new insights from her landmark research on grit, MacArthur "genius" Angela Duckworth explains why talent is hardly a guarantor of success.
Finland shocked the world when its 15-year-olds scored highest on the first Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a set of tests touted for evaluating critical-thinking skills in math, science, and reading. That was in 2001; but even today, this tiny Nordic nation continues to amaze. How does Finnish education - with short school days, light homework loads, and little standardized testing - produce students who match the PISA scores of high-powered, stressed-out kids in Asia?
Hacking Education is the audiobook that every teacher, principal, parent, and education stakeholder has been waiting for - the one that actually solves problems. Listen to it today - fix it tomorrow! In Hacking Education, Mark Barnes and Jennifer Gonzalez employ decades of teaching experience and hundreds of discussions with education thought leaders, to show you how to find and hone the quick fixes that every school and classroom need.
From two leading experts in education and entrepreneurship, an urgent call for the radical reimagining of American education so that we better equip students for the realities of the 21st-century economy.
Drawing on his own experience of feeling undervalued and invisible in classrooms as a young man of color, and merging his experiences with more than a decade of teaching and researching in urban America, award-winning educator Christopher Emdin offers a new lens on an approach to teaching and learning in urban schools. He begins by taking to task the perception of urban youth of color as unteachable, and he challenges educators to embrace and respect each student's culture.
Have you ever wanted to learn a language or pick up an instrument, only to become too daunted by the task at hand? Expert performance guru Anders Ericsson has made a career of studying chess champions, violin virtuosos, star athletes, and memory mavens. Peak condenses three decades of original research to introduce an incredibly powerful approach to learning that is fundamentally different from the way people traditionally think about acquiring a skill.
What would it take?That was the question that Geoffrey Canada found himself asking. What would it take to change the lives of poor children, not one by one, through heroic interventions and occasional miracles, but in big numbers, and in a way that could be replicated nationwide? The question led him to create the Harlem Children's Zone, a 97-block laboratory in central Harlem where he is testing new and sometimes controversial ideas about poverty in America.
In this groundbreaking book, education expert Tony Wagner provides a powerful rationale for developing an innovation-driven economy. He explores what parents, teachers, and employers must do to develop the capacities of young people to become innovators.
School discipline is broken. Too often, the kids who need our help the most are viewed as disrespectful, out of control, and beyond help, and are often the recipients of our most ineffective, most punitive interventions. These students - and their parents, teachers, and administrators - are frustrated and desperate for answers. Dr. Ross W. Greene, author of the acclaimed book The Explosive Child, offers educators and parents a different framework for understanding challenging behavior.
The positive discipline method has proved to be an invaluable resource for teachers who want to foster creative problem-solving within their students, giving them the behavioral skills they need to understand and process what they learn. Each tool is tailored specifically for the modern teacher, with examples and solutions to each and every roadblock that stands in the way of cooperative and student-centered learning.
Kids walk into schools full of wonder and questions. How you, as an educator, respond to students' natural curiosity can help further their own exploration and shape the way they learn today and in the future. The traditional system of education requires students to hold their questions and compliantly stick to the scheduled curriculum. But our job as educators is to provide new and better opportunities for our students. It's time to recognize that compliance doesn't foster innovation, encourage critical thinking, or inspire creativity.
In The Optimistic Child, Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman offers parents, teachers, and coaches a well-validated program to prevent depression in children. In a 30-year study, Seligman and his colleagues discovered the link between pessimism-dwelling on the most catastrophic cause of any setback-and depression. Seligman shows adults how to teach children the skills of optimism that can help them combat depression, achieve more on the playing field and at school, and improve their physical health.
Kids are naturally curious, but when it comes to school it seems like their minds are turned off. Why is it that they can remember the smallest details from their favorite television programs, yet miss the most obvious questions on their history test? Cognitive scientist Dan Willingham has focused his acclaimed research on the biological and cognitive basis of learning and has a deep understanding of the daily challenges faced by classroom teachers.
It's the American dream: get a good education, work hard, buy a house, and achieve prosperity and success. This is the America we believe in - a nation of opportunity, constrained only by ability and effort. But during the last 25 years we have seen a disturbing "opportunity gap" emerge. Americans have always believed in equality of opportunity, the idea that all kids, regardless of their family background, should have a decent chance to improve their lot in life.
In just a few years, today's children and teens will forge careers that look nothing like those that were available to their parents or grandparents. While the US economy becomes ever more information-driven, our system of education seems stuck on the idea that "content is king", neglecting other skills that 21st century citizens sorely need.
In How Children Succeed, Paul Tough introduced us to research showing that personal qualities like perseverance, self-control, and conscientiousness play a critical role in children's success.
Now, in Helping Children Succeed, Tough takes on a new set of pressing questions: What does growing up in poverty do to children's mental and physical development? How does adversity at home affect their success in the classroom, from preschool to high school? And what practical steps can the adults who are responsible for them - from parents and teachers to policy makers and philanthropists - take to improve their chances for a positive future?
Tough once again encourages us to think in a brand new way about the challenges of childhood. Rather than trying to "teach" skills like grit and self-control, he argues, we should focus instead on creating the kinds of environments, both at home and at school, in which those qualities are most likely to flourish.
Mining the latest research in psychology and neuroscience, Tough provides us with insights and strategies for a new approach to childhood adversity - one designed to help many more children succeed.
My paying job is to manage data for an after school program that works in low income areas and targets low performing students at low performing school. I am always interested in the latest theories and practices that seem to be successful. But I have been working at this job for nearly 15 years. And my wife has been a teacher for even longer. I have seen trends come and go. Solutions are never fast or simple because the problems have been long in coming and are infinitely complex.
Paul Tough is a journalist, a writer for the New York Times and a contributor to This American Life. This is his second book on this theme (the first was How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character). This is a very short book, 145 pages, less than 4 hours of audio. And in that short number of pages there are still 23 chapters. Tough opens by charting out why children from difficult backgrounds have difficulty in school and life. Adversity, stress, trauma, neglect, low attachment and other adversities all impact development. Some of these can literally change DNA, but all impact development of young children, which has a very long term impact on future development.
Helping Children Succeed is more than diagnosing the problem, Tough also attempts to chart out some of the failed solutions and some of the potential viable solutions. There is no pretense that solving problems of education is easy. But because of differences of demographics, population trends and birth rates, the majority of children in schools are now poor, minority or from other difficult to educate subgroups.
Where I think Tough is right is that character issues, internal motivation and 'grit' is more important in the long term than base intelligence. The question is how to develop the internal, and often precognitive, skills that allow kids to do the hard work that is necessary to overcome their educational difficulties.
Tough is not particularly easy on the education system. The culture of control and zero tolerance of students, especially of minority students does not help students develop internal motivation. Traditional behaviorist motivations (rewards for good behavior) often undercut internal motivation. Assessment, which Tough agrees is important, is difficult. So we often measure what is easy to count, not what is important.
There are a variety of examples, but one study that Tough cites took a very large dataset of students and teachers. Traditionally teachers are rewarded for improving test scores. Those teachers are fairly easy to identify. But one study was able to track students that seemed to have changes in motivation and then correlated them to teachers. Teachers that were able to help students learn internal motivation were almost never the same teachers that showed significant improvements in test scores. But students that had teachers that helped them improve in their motivation improved over the long term, not just in that one class.
The larger message of the book is that we can help student succeed. But what is most effective isn't the particular method of teaching grit to the one student. But creating institutions and systems where success is more likely to occur. Early intervention (and he details a number of early intervention programs that do not help), school environments (especially relationships with teachers and other students) and pedagogical systems that are focused deep learning, student focused problems solving and challenge seem to be effective. But changing systems and institutions is long term and difficult compared to rolling out another short term program.
This was a broadly helpful book. It has real research and science behind it. Because I am fairly widely read in the area, there was not a lot that was completely new. But as a short introductory primer, this is a very good place to start a discussion. I can see this being a great book for small group discussions among educators or parent groups. In many ways though, this is also a discouraging book because the problems of scale, time and culture are all working against long term change.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful
Paul Tough has written another insightful book that highlights the education crisis in the US. This time he expands in the ideas of his last book, to offer proven strategies from educational, cognitive and developmental research. He has a great way of making the research digestible and succinct--allowing it t guide best practices, not his own personal narrative. A great read/listen for people of all backgrounds.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
Helping Children Succeed is not really a book; it should have been published as an educational journal paper. The text of this book can be easily read in less than two hours. The basic premise is that US public school systems fail to recognize and understand the importance of non-cognitive skills necessary on which to build cognitive learning. The need is especially important to those who have been under stress at home. Defining terms used in the book:
Non-cognitive shills include such factors such as ability to control ones disruptive behavior (self control), ability to delay gratification, grit, perseverance, and internal motivation.
Cognitive skills are simply those necessary to master the traditional subjects taught in school.
Stress as used in this book can be generalized to those factors in the home environment that are often associated with the poor. Examples in the book are violence, parents/others fighting verbally or physically, and general lack of stimulation of the children's verbal and visual learning.
This book (actually it's a paper or a report rather than a true book) is intended to identify and address non-cognitive skills of mostly the students born into poor families. The basic premise is that the lack of adequate non-cognitive shills results in not only poor learning of cognitive skills but also to disruptive disciplinary issues which are especially bad in today's public education environment where zero tolerance for certain behaviors is the norm.
This book lays out the problem it seeks to eliminate or improve very well. But it starts poorly by noting that free school lunches are now provided to 51% of US public school students which is an increase from 1/3 of such students in 1989 But then it claims that this indicates that the number of students coming from homes in poverty has increased to 51%. In making the claim the author fails to point out that the free lunch program applied to students in poverty in 1989 and today it applies not only to students from poor families to all students in communities where the general poverty rate is high. The actual issue the author is addressing is important enough at 33%; factually exaggerating the rate is unnecessary.
The title, Helping Children Succeed, seems to me to imply the author proposes a workable solution. Here the book fails completely. What he does is go through a long list of proposed solutions commenting on the relative effectiveness of each. Some have been ineffective, some have been effective, partially or completely, in a limited number of instances. To quickly summarize, the most effective solutions have dealt with the home environment by teaching the mother positive ways to interact with her infants and small children with emphasis being more interaction is better and positive interaction is critically important. The book appropriately suggests that zero tolerance policies be eliminated. It also notes that preK-3 teachers need to have the ability to focus on positive interaction rather than discipline. Finally, teachers of early grades need learn to teach in a way that interests children and excites their imaginations (do not make the subject a dry memory exercise).
My own time volunteering in schools dealing with grades K-2 suggests there is a special issue the author does not touch upon directly at all: most of the girls even from poor homes generally have more of the non-cognitive skills, especially self control, than their brothers. Or at least their lack of self control leads to less disruptive behavior that is chastised rather than punished. The vast majority of actual punishments are for the disruptive behavior of boys. Girls are more often mildly chastised to talking to each other during class. Based on my observation in K-2 normal behavior by boys is increasingly becoming less tolerated. It is certainly not true of all teachers, but it is true too often. I have personally observed a boy being transferred from a class where the teacher considered him to be her most disruptive student to a classroom where his next teacher considered him a star pupil who never disrupted the class. His behavior was not very different at all, but his second teacher was able to channel his behavior to get very positive results.
6 of 10 people found this review helpful
This book is thought provoking, engaging and insightful! It was an easy read I would definitely recommend.
Great book for review of current literature in education and application of experiential learning programs.
With our current situation in American education, Paul Tough does a very nice job of outlining a few alternative educational methods. H
As a Social Worker and School Counselor this was a greatly beneficial read on grit
A great portion of our society is inheriting limitations and struggle. We must help change.