Helping Children Succeed

What Works and Why

By: Paul Tough

Narrated by: Paul Tough

In How Children Succeed, Paul Tough introduced us to research showing that personal qualities like perseverance, self-control, and conscientiousness play a critical role in children's success.

Now, in Helping Children Succeed, Tough takes on a new set of pressing questions: What does growing up in poverty do to children's mental and physical development? How does adversity at home affect their success in the classroom, from preschool to high school? And what practical steps can the adults who are responsible for them - from parents and teachers to policy makers and philanthropists - take to improve their chances for a positive future?

Tough once again encourages us to think in a brand new way about the challenges of childhood. Rather than trying to "teach" skills like grit and self-control, he argues, we should focus instead on creating the kinds of environments, both at home and at school, in which those qualities are most likely to flourish.

Mining the latest research in psychology and neuroscience, Tough provides us with insights and strategies for a new approach to childhood adversity - one designed to help many more children succeed.

©2016 Paul Tough (P)2016 Tantor

Very Helpful read for school counslors

As a Social Worker and School Counselor this was a greatly beneficial read on grit

The environment matters

My paying job is to manage data for an after school program that works in low income areas and targets low performing students at low performing school. I am always interested in the latest theories and practices that seem to be successful. But I have been working at this job for nearly 15 years. And my wife has been a teacher for even longer. I have seen trends come and go. Solutions are never fast or simple because the problems have been long in coming and are infinitely complex.

Paul Tough is a journalist, a writer for the New York Times and a contributor to This American Life. This is his second book on this theme (the first was How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character). This is a very short book, 145 pages, less than 4 hours of audio. And in that short number of pages there are still 23 chapters. Tough opens by charting out why children from difficult backgrounds have difficulty in school and life. Adversity, stress, trauma, neglect, low attachment and other adversities all impact development. Some of these can literally change DNA, but all impact development of young children, which has a very long term impact on future development.

Helping Children Succeed is more than diagnosing the problem, Tough also attempts to chart out some of the failed solutions and some of the potential viable solutions. There is no pretense that solving problems of education is easy. But because of differences of demographics, population trends and birth rates, the majority of children in schools are now poor, minority or from other difficult to educate subgroups.

Where I think Tough is right is that character issues, internal motivation and 'grit' is more important in the long term than base intelligence. The question is how to develop the internal, and often precognitive, skills that allow kids to do the hard work that is necessary to overcome their educational difficulties.

Tough is not particularly easy on the education system. The culture of control and zero tolerance of students, especially of minority students does not help students develop internal motivation. Traditional behaviorist motivations (rewards for good behavior) often undercut internal motivation. Assessment, which Tough agrees is important, is difficult. So we often measure what is easy to count, not what is important.

There are a variety of examples, but one study that Tough cites took a very large dataset of students and teachers. Traditionally teachers are rewarded for improving test scores. Those teachers are fairly easy to identify. But one study was able to track students that seemed to have changes in motivation and then correlated them to teachers. Teachers that were able to help students learn internal motivation were almost never the same teachers that showed significant improvements in test scores. But students that had teachers that helped them improve in their motivation improved over the long term, not just in that one class.

The larger message of the book is that we can help student succeed. But what is most effective isn't the particular method of teaching grit to the one student. But creating institutions and systems where success is more likely to occur. Early intervention (and he details a number of early intervention programs that do not help), school environments (especially relationships with teachers and other students) and pedagogical systems that are focused deep learning, student focused problems solving and challenge seem to be effective. But changing systems and institutions is long term and difficult compared to rolling out another short term program.

This was a broadly helpful book. It has real research and science behind it. Because I am fairly widely read in the area, there was not a lot that was completely new. But as a short introductory primer, this is a very good place to start a discussion. I can see this being a great book for small group discussions among educators or parent groups. In many ways though, this is also a discouraging book because the problems of scale, time and culture are all working against long term change.

Succinct, Timely, and Inspiring

Paul Tough has written another insightful book that highlights the education crisis in the US. This time he expands in the ideas of his last book, to offer proven strategies from educational, cognitive and developmental research. He has a great way of making the research digestible and succinct--allowing it t guide best practices, not his own personal narrative. A great read/listen for people of all backgrounds.

Remind yourself why you wanted to be a teacher

This book was truly a gift to read. It gives lots of profound insight into the details of how to fix our messed up educational system. And the best part, it never leaves you wondering, "Well that's great and all Paul, but how the hell do I implement this in my classroom?". The author/reader is above all else: passionate. And it comes across in both the written words and their reading. A great text to read over summer vacation to empower you to plan for next year with a few new ideas in your bag.

Great book for advocates of education reform and parents

Great book for review of current literature in education and application of experiential learning programs.

With our current situation in American education, Paul Tough does a very nice job of outlining a few alternative educational methods. H