Gritty Kids

First Presenter's Institution

Mountain Empire School District

First Presenter's Brief Biography

Christi Martelli has been working in education for over 20 years. She was an instructional aide, a teacher, and now principal. She is also a mother of 2 daughters. Children have been her life and passion. Gritty Kids was born out of a desire for all children to be able to achieve at high levels. For them to be able to get past all their excuses and roadblocks to learning and be able to persevere through difficult tasks and have the resiliency to keep trying even if they fail. This is the environment she wanted to create for students with her Gritty Kids Program. Christi's blog posts at grittykids.org are about the journey through her school's implementation of year 1 of the Gritty Kids program at a TK-5 elementary school in San Diego, CA. This year, 2021-22, she created a 10-day Gritty Kids bootcamp out of the program and implemented it at a K-6 Dual Language school. The amount of joy it brought her watching students embrace the learning and not only retain and apply it but be so excited about it that they wanted to share it with everyone they could talk to. She hopes you see the benefits of this learning as much as she has!

Document Type

Event

Primary Strand

Social-Emotional Learning

Relevance to Primary Strand

Gritty Kids program teaches elementary students the skills needed to persevere through difficult tasks and have the resiliency to keep trying even if they fail. The program teaches students about themselves as learners and how to be an effective learner. One of the exciting outcomes that came from the program was students developed tolerance for one another after learning each of us learns in different ways.

Brief Program Description

In this session, you will learn how to teach elementary students to have grit! This is a 5-unit program which includes: brain research, growth mindset, mistakes, the learning pit, and learner qualities. The Gritty Kids website will be shared, as well as, how we turned the program into a 10-day Bootcamp to start the school year!

Summary

Research shows students who have grit are more successful in school and in life. I will share with you my journey researching, creating, and implementing the Gritty Kids lesson plans. This is a 5-unit program which includes: brain research, growth mindset, mistakes, the learning pit, and learner qualities. The Gritty Kids website will be shared as a resource for quick access to all lesson plans and resources as well as how we turned the program into a 10-day Bootcamp to start the school year. Not only did this program make our students grittier, it gave them a better understanding of self/others differences…tolerance!

Evidence

There is no current curriculum or way to teach grit, so we created our own plan based on a lot of research. (“Visible Learning for Teachers” by John Hattie, Stonefields School in New Zealand, “The Learning Challenge” by James Nottingham, “Lifting Student Learning” training by SDCOE, Visible Learning Conference in San Francisco 2017)

During the 2 year field test and this year's Bootcamp field test, teachers reported students were more self-aware and more aware and understanding of others needs as well. They were more supportive of each other when mistakes were made in class. Students tried harder to work through challenging problems or assignments and knew how to use their classroom resources to help them.

Learning Objective 1

Participants will be able to understand the benefits of teaching students how to have grit.

Learning Objective 2

Participants will be able to access resources to implement a program at their school.

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Gritty Kids

Research shows students who have grit are more successful in school and in life. I will share with you my journey researching, creating, and implementing the Gritty Kids lesson plans. This is a 5-unit program which includes: brain research, growth mindset, mistakes, the learning pit, and learner qualities. The Gritty Kids website will be shared as a resource for quick access to all lesson plans and resources as well as how we turned the program into a 10-day Bootcamp to start the school year. Not only did this program make our students grittier, it gave them a better understanding of self/others differences…tolerance!