“Grit,” the latest educational buzzword, has been popping all over the place recently. This morning an NPR segment about the learning of grit talked about different schools/institutions that are incorporating grit, by way of determination at the face of defeat, into their curriculum. From charter schools to reports from the DOE, grit is making a presence. It’s often seen as the skills that surround formal education and how these skills help more students (and young adults, for our purposes) succeed as they leave primary and secondary education.

For our purposes, grit can find its way into the workforce at many different angles. Call up the histories of recent innovators and you’ll see people whose early careers were met with major setbacks, but who didn’t allow defeat and continued on to high levels of success—think of Steve Jobs who was ousted from the very company he created. Grit appears as job-seekers continue to search despite months of rejection, not accepting negative self-talk, and developing new systems to stay appealing to potential employers. I’m curious to see how concepts of grit will officially make their way into formal education and how this teaching will play out in the long run.

A few weeks ago, we posted a TED Talk about “Grit”—the stuff that keeps pushing us to do the stuff we want to do. Last week I read an article from The Brilliant Report (a great source for discussions on learning) titled When to let learners struggle which talks about a study published in the Journal of Learning Sciences regarding the importance of failure throughout the learning process. Adults will encounter countless “failures” throughout their professional careers. By teaching young adults how to critically look at difficult situations and guiding them towards developing successful solutions, they’ll be better able to handle uncomfortable situations as they make their way through later academic and professional careers.

Please share your thoughts and experiences with failures. Can you remember your first professional “blip”? Something that, at the time, made made you want to crawl under a rock and never come out? How did you recover and did that process help you in later situations?