Character is your capacity to prioritize your values
over your instincts.
If personality is how you respond on a typical day,
character is how you show up on a hard day.
—Adam Grant
This past month, an interesting statistical analysis came across my digital desk. In it, Harvard economist and MacArthur genius grant recipient, Raj Chetty, studied 11,000 students in 79 schools in Tennessee in the late 20th century and discovered that he could predict the degree of economic success that these students achieved as adults entirely by looking at how experienced their respective kindergarten teachers were when these teachers taught them. The more experienced the teacher, the higher the adult salary, and “by age 25, students who happened to have had more experienced kindergarten teachers were earning significantly more money than their peers”—on average $2,000 more annually in 1990s dollars—and over the course of a lifetime, these now-former students would go on to earn an additional $320,000 more than peers who had had less experienced teachers at this same age (Grant, p. 8).
Yet, as organizational psychologist Adam Grant of the Wharton School points out—whose work brought this study to my attention—“most adults hardly even remember being five years old. Why did kindergarten teachers end up casting such a long shadow?” (p. 9).
The answer, it turns out, is character development. More specifically, it is four character skills that Grant in his own work has elaborated as:
- Proactive: frequently initiates questions, volunteers answers, and actively self-engages in learning outside of the classroom;
- Prosocial: the classic “works and plays well with others;”
- Disciplined: pays attention and resists disruptive impulses; and
- Determined: consistently takes on more than assigned, seeking challenging problems and persisting in the face of setbacks
Moreover, Grant identified these four skills explicitly because Chetty’s data from follow-up studies showed that “the capacities to be proactive, prosocial, disciplined, and determined stayed with students longer—and ultimately proved more powerful—than early math and reading skills” (p. 9). In fact, 2.4 times as much when it came to predicting adult income!
Now the idea that an individual’s character plays a major role in their success as a learner is nothing new. Journalists such as Paul Tough and researchers such as Angela Duckworth have been reporting on the power of character in the learning process for decades, and the concept of “grit” features regularly now in teacher training and professional development (almost to the saturation point of risking being cliché). But what the latest examination of character is bringing to the forefront is the role one’s environment plays in its development. Or as Grant states it: “people who make major strides are rarely freaks of nature. They’re usually freaks of nurture” (p. 6).
Which is where the character of schools comes into play. It turns out that individual “grit” is not quite enough; the nature of the learning environment itself (what Grant calls “scaffolding”) is also critical. This is especially true when it comes to evoking the power of growth mindset in students. I have written before about Carol Dweck’s pioneering research in this area, but recently, she has:
demonstrated that a growth mindset alone does little good without scaffolding to support it. Rigorous experiments with over 15,000 students reveal that nurturing a growth mindset among high schools boosts their grades only when their teachers recognize their potential and their schools have cultures of embracing challenges (Grant, p. 132).
In other words, to optimize student learning, simply promoting growth mindsets in your students is not enough. You also have to have school environments where the underlying assumption is that all students have significant cognitive capability waiting to be nurtured and where the driving value is that all students deserve weighty intellectual challenges to foster this ability.
However (and it is worth quoting Grant extensively here), too often in this country our school environments are:
built around a culture of winner take all. We assume that potential is rooted primarily in innate ability that shines through early. As a result, we value demonstrated excellence—which leads us to adopt practices geared toward identifying and investing in students who show obvious signs of brilliance. If you win the [cognitive speed] lottery, you’re rewarded with special attention in gifted-and-talented programs. If you’re branded as slow, you might be forced to repeat a grade and endure a lasting blow to your self-esteem. And if you win the wealth lottery, it’s easier for you to attend the best schools with the best teachers; your peers from poorer families face an uphill battle (p.159).
Yet this prevalent reality in America’s schools brings me back to an important feature of Chetty’s original research. The students in it had already been randomly assigned by the State of Tennessee’s Department of Education to the 79 schools he studied and, further, randomly assigned to which teacher they had in those schools. Thus, the kindergarten teacher effect Chetty observed was just as true in the low-income schools as it was in the high-income ones.
Therefore, what I would like to suggest is that the character of the teacher was ultimately what was playing a role in the character development of those students who were studied by Chetty. Moreover, my reason for this suggestion is because by year 15 in this profession, the majority of us in our careers have realized two things: what we teach is what it means to be fully human (the discipline or subjects are just the vehicle) and every child can learn to do that. Of course, the key word here is “majority” because the sad reality is that anything over 50% is, by definition, a majority, leaving some individual schools—and even some school districts—with significant populations of even experienced teachers still embodying the “winner-take-all” approach (or worse).
Yet, that brings me to another feature of school environments so critical to nurturing the four character-skills Grant describes: the quality of relations between the teachers. Research has shown that the amount of relational trust among the adults in a school community determines how well students learn, and since “trust is influenced by the conclusions we draw about our colleagues’ intentions” (Aguilar, p. 102), schools where the adults believe everyone has bought into a culture of high expectations and high support (what Zaretta Hammond calls “warm demanders”), the students thrive. Where such by-in and its consequent trust are missing, “students are being negatively impacted” (Aguilar, p. 101).
What, though, determines the quality of the adult relationships in a school? If the child’s character skills depend on the experience of the teacher and their classroom environment and this environment’s and that teacher’s character depend on the school’s adult culture, then at the apex of this developmental hierarchy, I would argue, is the character of the leadership chaperoning this entire process. Good leaders, of course, listen to the collective voices of all stakeholders (from children and parents to faculty and custodial staff), anticipate the community’s wants and needs (as well as potential pitfalls and opportunities), and guide all of their charges in the completion of the school’s mission. They oversee the character of the school itself and, thus, the nature of the characters that develop under its roof. Indeed, the very best leaders help generate that character, informing it and continually reforming it through the voices of the community.
However, as Adam Grant points out, leadership exists along a continuum, with “weak leaders [silencing] voice and [shooting] the messenger; strong leaders [welcoming] voice and [thanking] the messenger; [and] great leaders [building] systems to amplify voice and [elevating] the messenger” (p. 196). I would add a fourth leadership descriptor somewhere between “weak” and “strong”—call it “stable”—where voice is simply heard and its messengers merely acknowledged, and I would add it because I think the majority of leadership in most institutions is this stable kind where adequate is normally enough.
But we live in a world right now—especially in education—where “adequate” isn’t and where, simultaneously, the research of Chetty and Grant remind us why the need for strong, exceptional leadership in schools is so important for the futures of our children. I wish I had a clear solution to offer, but that is a work-in-progress for me. Thus, for now, I simply have to keep reminding myself of the wisdom of education coach, Elena Aguilar’s words: “you can’t get mad at people for their areas for growth” (p. 198).
References
Aguilar, E. (2018) Onward: Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Educators. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Grant, A. (2023) Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things. New York: Penguin Books.
Hammond, Z. (2015) Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Kaser, J., et al. (2013) Leading Every Day: Actions for Effective Leadership, 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Tough, P. (2012) How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. New York: Mariner Books.
Light a Candle 