School Name: WEGraham Community School
School District: SD#8 Kootenay Lake
Inquiry Team Members: Roxanne MacKay: roxanne.mackay@sd8.bc.ca, Mike Hurley: mike.hurley@sd8.bc.ca, Signy Fredrickson: signy.fredrickson@sd8.bc.ca, Ben Porteous: benjamin.porteous@sd8.bc.ca, Sean Marechal: sean.marechal@sd8.bc.ca, Kathryn Rexin: kathryn.rexin@sd8.bc.ca
Inquiry Team Contact Email: mike.hurley@sd8.bc.ca
Type of Inquiry: NOIIE
Focus Addressed: “True Grit!” Our school has noticed that our students tend to quit when things get hard. We quit when there is a hard question in the classroom.We quit when we have a difficult social situation. At first, our staff felt that it was all about resiliency, but as we looked into things, we learned that it was more about Grit. Our focus was on teaching our students about how to have “Grit.”
Inquiry Story: Project Overview: As part of our school goal, we noticed that our students tended to give up easily when pushed. They would give up academically, during sports, and socially. We started by thinking it would be a goal around “resiliency”, but after our preliminary research we realized that “Grit” was a better fit — which fits under the umbrella of Resiliency (including: Regulation, Attention, Self Esteem, MindSet, Cognition). So, we are studying the effect of direct teaching of strategies for children to increase their Grit.
Team: All WEG Staff: Kathryn Rexin, Tanya Wright, Erin Johnson, Alice Paradis, Ben Porteous, Signy Fredrickson, Mike Hurley, Sean Mareschal, Roxanne MacKay.
Timeline: we’ve been working on this since August.
1) Researched Grit and teaching strategies
i. One strategy is “No Teacher Help” — It sounds terrible, but we found that we were rushing to help students so that they wouldn’t struggle… This only taught them to give up.
ii. Meta-Cognition on what children think about “sticking with it”
iii. Reading/Writing about examples of Grit
iv. Watching the John Wayne movie (I wrote this here just to see if you are reading this application)
2) Recording of Baseline: We are working with Judy and Linda this year, and they suggested that we create a baseline that is not education-related. So, we had the kids do some puzzles and watched how long they stuck with it. We recorded the time and observations of their puzzle-making.
3) Teaching strategies:
i. Implementing “No Help,” or more kindly, “independent time.”
ii. Reading/writing
iii. SEL programs – School Wide “Superflex” all the way to Grade 10!
4) Followup Assessment: Another test using puzzles. And then compare results.
