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Instead, the school is plastered with signs and handmade posters promoting a "growth mindset."

The focus is always more on putting out effort than on getting the right answers. Teachers have been trained to change the way they see students, and how they speak to them.

praise students for their focus and determination.

"If I was an outsider and I was hearing this conversation, I might think that this was some kind of hippie-dippy love fest," concedes the teacher, Nathan Cearley. "But what you see is actually a more rigorous and risky learning environment."

In three years, Cearley says, he's seen kids grow less afraid of making mistakes, and more willing to ask for help. Test scores at Lenox have jumped 10 to 15 points.

The number of schools using Brainology is expected to double this year, from 500 to 1,000.

A limited intervention, she says, if not consistently reinforced in and out of school, can only have limited results. "We don't know whether we've had any effect — the jury's out," says Duckworth. "It just seems to me extremely implausible that that's going to permanently and impressively change a child."

"Grit as a goal seems to be multiply flawed and very disturbing," says education writer Alfie Kohn. For starters, he says, "the benefits of failure are vastly overstated, and the assumption that kids will pick themselves up and try even harder next time, darn it — that's wishful thinking."

if there's a problem with how kids are learning, the onus should be on schools to get better at how they teach — not on kids to get better at enduring more of the same.

I don't think people can become truly gritty and great at things they don't love," Duckworth says. "So when we try to develop grit in kids, we also need to find and help them cultivate their passions. That's as much a part of the equation here as the hard work and the persistence."

But now, three years into the growth-mindset training at Lenox Academy, Blaze says, she believes "you can teach old dogs new tricks."

Does Teaching Kids To Get 'Gritty' Help Them Get Ahead?

After years of focusing on the theory known as "multiple intelligences" and trying to teach kids in their own style, Hoerr says he's now pulling kids out of their comfort zones intentionally.

Professional activity has become so knowledge-intensive and fluid in content that learning has become an integral and inseparable part of "adult" work activities.

require educational tools and environments whose primary aim is to help cultivate the desire to learn and create, and not to simply communicate subject matter divorced from meaningful and personalized activity.

current uses of technology in education: it is used as an add-on to existing practices rather than a catalyst for fundamentally rethinking what education should be about in the next century

information technologies have been used to mechanize old ways of doing business‹rather than fundamentally rethinking the underlying work processes and promoting new ways to create artifacts and knowledge.

Instructionist approaches are not changed by the fact that information is disseminated by an intelligent tutoring system.

ubstantial empirical evidence that the chief impediments to learning are not cognitive. It is not that students cannot learn; it is that they are not well motivated to learn.

Most of what any individual "knows" today is not in her or his head, but is out in the world (e.g., in other human heads or embedded in media).

challenge of whether we can create learning environments in which learners work hard, not because they have to, but because they want to. We need to alter the perception that serious learning has to be unpleasant rather than personally meaningful, empowering, engaging, and even fun.

making information relevant to the task at hand, providing challenges matched to current skills, creating communities (among peers, over the net), and providing access to real practitioners and experts.

What "basic skills" are required in a world in which occupational knowledge and skills become obsolete in years rather than decades?

Students submit their annotations via their smart phones or other digital devices, and then analyze each other’s notations collectively.  They could be looking for main ideas, thematic and literary elements, or big ideas from the work.   They could be looking for evidence of connections to other texts, their own experiences, or world issues. They could simply be searching for meaning to support them when reading complex texts.

annotexting will allow students to engage with other audiences in tasks with an expanded purpose

In order to get students to own this process, we have to relinquish some control. Let them think, let them make mistakes and respond. Let them draw conclusions even they are not the conclusions we would have drawn. We can be there to coach them through misconceptions.

2. Publishing for the World (and the Classroom Across the Hall) is Powerful

3. Establishing Your Classroom Brand

According to educators Joe Sanfelippo and Tony Sinanis, branding can be defined as “the marking practice of creating a name, symbol or design that identifies and differentiates a product from other products.” Within the past few years, this idea of branding our schools/classrooms has become extremely valuable, as it promotes transparency by painting an accurate, live picture of what is taking place. Yet, in reality, the majority of the time the educators are the ones telling these stories. While this certainly has its place, ultimately what matters most is how students feel about their experiences. Social media has allowed my students to share our classroom happenings through their eyes. It has allowed my students the opportunity to both establish and share the culture of our classroom and our school, and ultimately create our “brand”.