Where did students’ grit go? How Colorado teachers are helping kids rebuild a core life skill.

CALHAN — In Megan Lightner’s classroom, where posters and presentations remind elementary school students to believe in themselves and remember how smart they are, struggling is often a good thing, something Lightner embraces.

Lightner, a reading interventionist at Calhan Elementary School, works with her young students to help them become more fluent readers, identifying vowels, breaking words into syllables and coaxing them to sound out those syllables until the word in front of them sticks.

Sometimes when they encounter a word that’s new to their vocabulary, her students will peer up at her, eyes wide. Stumped.

“The answer’s not on my forehead,” Lightner tells her fledgling readers.

Students’ urge to turn to someone else for the answer, to give up rather than stubbornly muscle through a challenge, has become a bigger battle in Colorado classrooms in recent years, teachers say. Many kids across K-12 grades, and even undergraduate and graduate students, have grown rusty with their ability to simply persevere.

Where did students’ grit go? Educators point to a complicated mix of factors, from pandemic disruptions that set students back in their learning to competition from smartphones and other devices that have become ubiquitous in schools. 

The deficit comes as schools are looking to reestablish standards that were relaxed during the pandemic. With schools resuming full days of in-person learning in recent years, teachers have heightened their expectations, jolting many students who aren’t sure how to clear higher hurdles in the classroom.

State standardized test results reflect students’ struggles to stay the course. Since the pandemic waned, many students have made encouraging progress in math, English language arts and science. Still, other children remain behind. High schoolers, for example, suffered notable deficits in their math scores on the 2024 PSAT and SAT exams. And fourth graders experienced the biggest decline of any grade in English language arts on the 2024 Colorado Measures of Academic Success test. State data shows that most fourth grade students are not reading on grade level — 42% of kids met or exceeded expectations in reading on CMAS exams.

Lightner, now in her third year coaching kids who need extra class time for literacy, attributes part of students’ diminishing sense of determination to well-meaning parents who might have swooped in during the pandemic to solve their child’s problems for them.

“As a parent, I tend to notice that I rescue my kids from having to struggle through certain things,” said Lightner, who has two daughters. “You see them struggling and your instinct as a person, as a nice person, is, ‘Let me do this for you. Let me just take care of this for you.’ And as a teacher I’m like, ‘No, they need to struggle. Productive struggle is a really positive thing.’”

What is productive struggle? When a student feels stuck in class, teachers nudge them to consider trying a different approach or remind them of a skill they already know that might lead them in the right direction. Lightner, for instance, uses hand motions to signal different vowel sounds to students when they’re stumbling through a word. Oftentimes, her cue is enough for them to piece the word together on their own.

Jen Crawford relies on a similar strategy to reroute her fifth graders at Independence Elementary School in Aurora when they come across a lesson they can’t quite grasp. It’s part of a collection of “Habits of Mind” that guide students and adults alike through problem-solving.

Another way Crawford prods her students to persist through challenges: striving for accuracy over perfection.

“So we’re kind of trying to take some of the pressure off of that perfection that sometimes kids are looking for and replace it then with accuracy and what it means to not get it right the first time and that’s OK,” said Crawford, a classroom veteran of 19 years. “And it might be hard, but we can learn a lot from our failures and kind of fail forward.”

Crawford said that it’s typical for 10- and 11-year-olds to need extra support with their classwork, but more of her students have needed a boost of motivation to learn new things and persevere coming out of COVID. When some of her students hit a roadblock in class, they put their head down, crumple up their paper or start doodling as a way to look busy.

Without productive struggle, Crawford noted, students can fall into a habit of giving up before fully trying and expecting “somebody else to come and save them.” It’s a kind of crutch educators call “learned helplessness.”

Learning any new skill at any age until mastering it is like transforming an empty field into a superhighway, Lightner says. The first time you attempt a skill, you’re walking over grass and beginning to see a faint path emerge. As you keep practicing that skill, walking again and again, that path becomes more worn, turning into a dirt road, then a paved road and finally a superhighway.

“If we are constantly rescuing kids from productive struggle,” Lightner said, “they never make that neurological connection in their brain and (a skill) never becomes a superhighway.”

“They’re not pushing themselves for understanding”

Shifting expectations have further weakened kids’ tolerance to withstand difficult or puzzling moments, according to Angela Narayan, a licensed psychologist and associate professor of clinical child psychology in the University of Denver’s Department of Psychology.

“During the pandemic, parents were so stressed and it was really, really hard for kids of all ages to be held to really high standards in school because people were just in survival mode,” Narayan said. “Teachers were trying to just function online and hold kids’ attention in an online classroom in elementary school and the same with high school and university settings. You want the kids to just show up and be present. The bar had to be lower because we were trying to just keep kids engaged. It wasn’t focused on helping them learn to the best of their ability or learn the most complex subjects the most efficiently.”

Now as students are advancing grades and matriculating into college and graduate school, she noted, it’s evident that they haven’t been in environments that have pushed them to meet high expectations.

“Learning happens the best when the expectation is a little bit higher than the child’s ability, but the child has the support they need to achieve it,” Narayan said. “We want kids to aim high and aim a little bit higher than they can do completely on their own but have enough support to get there.” 

Longtime educator Linda Slothower, instructional coach and interim principal of Calhan Elementary School, said she has seen a “dramatic” difference between students she taught earlier in her career and those she teaches now. She said other forces that predated the pandemic are playing a greater role in derailing students, especially technology and social media.

“There’s a lot of other things out there that take up a lot of their time … outside of school so when they come to school and we’re giving them a math paper, it’s not quite as attractive as a lot of the other activities that they’re doing outside of school,” Slothower said. “Those activities don’t require as much effort as doing a page of math problems.”

Slothower, who began teaching in 1981 and has since been a principal in multiple districts, recalls noticing student hiccups in 2010, her last year teaching, when fewer students consistently turned in homework and completed independent classwork.

“I think it’s less of an emphasis on you have to do your work,” she said. “It’s a requirement. It’s not just a suggestion. It is an absolute requirement that you do your work, and I think making sure students truly understand that is a challenge for us, to have that internal drive to make sure they get all their work done.”

Technology has also eroded students’ ability to plow through challenges because of the shortcut it has dangled in front of them in subjects like math.

Susan Diaz-Meshejian, a math teacher at Abraham Lincoln High School in Denver, said students are less inclined to learn fundamental and intermediate skills in math when they can turn to artificial intelligence tools to more instantly find answers.

“They’re not pushing themselves for understanding because they’re growing up in a world where technology is so strong, perhaps so inconceivably strong,” said Diaz-Meshejian, who has been teaching for six years.

Before the pandemic, students lagged in problem-solving skills, she noted, while they now impulsively turn to their computers and are quick to give up if their devices don’t spit out the exact answer. One of the ways she helps students understand the limits of technology and AI revolves around showing them examples of what specific tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Quick, Draw! are capable of, what they cannot do and how they might produce misleading information.

How to help students struggle — productively — and solidify their sense of grit

Helping kids develop a deep well of grit often means they must practice making mistakes and failing — in small ways that will begin to shape their understanding of their own capabilities.

In Crawford’s classroom, a handmade wooden sign reading “We can do hard things” greets students every day. Crawford teaches her kids that failure is not some kind of stopping point but rather a launching pad to try again.

Families can help their children get into a groove of trying again by playing multiple rounds of easy-to-learn card games like Uno, Narayan, the psychologist, said. That way, they can experience winning and losing. Parents can also introduce kids to activities in which they likely will need more than one attempt to excel — such as whacking a golf ball — and show them the fun in trying.

It’s equally important for parents to model grit with their own tasks and celebrate their children when they stay committed to seeing through their own classwork and responsibilities at home, Slothower, the Calhan educator, said.

Parents must also realize that struggling is just as much of a lesson for their kids as finding a solution.

“I think parents need to listen and need to be OK with not all problems being solved, which is really hard,” Crawford said.

Crawford and Lightner now incorporate positive affirmations into their school days so that students regularly hear that they are loved, valued, seen and full of potential. 

Placing her hands on her head and instructing students to mimic her, Lightner will tell them to acknowledge aloud how smart they are — and believe in their own ability.

“It is not enough for me to believe you can,” Lightner said she reinforces to her students. “You have to believe it, too. This has to come from you. I can want this for you all day long, and it’s still not going to get you there. You still have to do the work.”