Beyond ‘Grit’ and ‘Growth Mindsets’

Modern education is full of beautiful illusions. We tell ourselves that if students just believe in their ability to grow, they will improve. That if they only want success badly enough, they will achieve it. That if we can instill grit, a growth mindset or motivation, learning will follow.

These ideas offer emotional clarity in a system that often feels chaotic. They give educators a sense of moral purpose. We’re not just teaching: We’re shaping character. We are instilling the love of learning. And they promise simple explanations for complex problems: If students fail, perhaps it’s because they lacked a trait we forgot to nurture.

But these concepts, however well intentioned, don’t actually teach anything. They describe internal states that cannot be observed, measured or replicated. Worse, they shift responsibility for learning from instruction to personality.

This essay offers a different approach: What if we stopped asking how students feel about learning and started focusing on what they actually do? What if instead of trying to cultivate traits, we designed environments that reinforced learning behaviors?

Grit, mindset and motivation sound empowering. But in practice, they too often distract from the one thing educators can actually influence: behavior.

Grit: A Good Story, but a Weak Tool

The appeal of grit is easy to understand. In Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (Scribner, 2016), Angela Duckworth presents grit as a powerful contributor to success, offering an empowering message that sustained effort combined with passion matters. Her research showed that grit could predict achievement in demanding settings like military training and academic competitions. For teachers, it offered a narrative of hope: Any student can succeed if they persist over time.

But as enthusiasm grew, skepticism followed. A 2016 meta-analysis by Marcus Credé et al. found that grit’s overall predictive power was modest. More tellingly, the “perseverance” subscale was responsible for most of the effect, while the “passion” component, defined as “consistency of interest,” had more minimal impact. The takeaway: Grit may reflect behavior patterns already familiar to educators, like persistence on task, and knowing a student’s grit score offers little practical guidance for how to support their learning.

From a behaviorist perspective, grit isn’t a trait: It’s a pattern. What looks like perseverance is really repeated behavior under the right conditions of reinforcement. Students persist when their actions are acknowledged, supported and rewarded. Grit isn’t something students bring to the classroom. It’s something the environment either builds or breaks.

Growth Mindset: Belief Isn’t Behavior

Carol S. Dweck’s concept of the “growth mindset” has similarly become a fixture in educational discourse since the publication of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Random House, 2006). The idea is simple: Students who believe their abilities can improve through effort tend to outperform those who see intelligence as fixed. Posters, praise strategies and mindset surveys soon followed. In theory, if we help students believe they can grow, they will.

But belief isn’t behavior. And the research tells a more complicated story. A 2018 meta-analysis by Victoria F. Sisk et al. found that growth mindset interventions have minimal effects on academic performance, especially in real-world classroom settings. The idea may be psychologically appealing, but it lacks consistent, measurable impact on student outcomes.

Behaviorists would point out the obvious: Improvement doesn’t come from belief alone. It comes from revision. From trying again. From adjusting after feedback. These are observable behaviors, not internal convictions. Whether a student believes they can grow matters far less than whether they actually engage in the process of growth. You can’t easily measure a student’s mindset, but you can document an edit, a resubmission or a strategy change.

When students revise their work in response to feedback, they are learning. When they try a new approach after failing, they are learning. The teacher’s job is not to instill belief: It’s to design conditions where these behaviors happen. In other words, what matters is not what students think about effort, but whether effort becomes routine.

‘Motivation’: A Word That Explains Nothing

When students disengage, educators often reach for a familiar explanation: “They’re just not motivated.” It sounds like a diagnosis, one that points to an internal deficit. But what does it actually tell us? If a student doesn’t complete an assignment, does that mean they lacked motivation? Or did they lack clarity, confidence, time or support?

The term “motivation” gives the illusion of explanation without offering any actionable insight. As B. F. Skinner argued in Science and Human Behavior (1953), motivation is not a cause of behavior; it is a way of describing behavior under certain environmental conditions. To say someone is motivated is merely to observe that they are likely to act in particular ways when specific reinforcers are in place. The real instructional question, then, is not whether students want to learn but which circumstances make learning behavior more likely to occur.

In the classroom, this means shifting our attention away from internal states and toward observable structures. Are tasks clearly defined? Is feedback timely and specific? Are students rewarded for revising their work, completing multistep assignments or trying alternative strategies and not just for producing the right answer? These are environmental variables, and they are all within the teacher’s control.

Instead of asking how to motivate students, we should ask how to prompt action and reinforce it. What behaviors do we want to see more of? How can we design tasks and feedback loops to support those behaviors? The myth of motivation keeps us looking inside the student’s head. Behaviorism reminds us to look at what’s happening in the environment and change that instead.

The Danger of Seeing Traits as Truths

Grit, growth mindset and motivation feel persuasive because they mirror our own experiences. Most educators can recall moments when persistence paid off, belief fueled improvement or drive propelled achievement. So, it’s tempting to assume these traits explain student success or failure.

But this personal identification can distort how we interpret student behavior. If I believe I succeed because I’m “gritty,” then when a student struggles, I might assume they just don’t have what it takes. If I value a growth mindset, I may start labeling students as fixed or closed-off. Without meaning to, I begin assigning character judgments rather than analyzing learning conditions.

This is where trait language becomes dangerous. It turns behavior into personality. It shifts attention away from instruction, feedback and structure—things teachers can control—and places responsibility on internal, invisible forces. Worse, it opens the door to bias. We start seeing deficits in students instead of problems in our teaching design.

A behaviorist framework flips that lens. It treats every student’s behavior, good or bad, as a response to environmental cues, reinforcements and routines. If a student gives up quickly, that’s not a failure of character. It’s a cue to examine clarity, support or reward structures.

Teachers influence outcomes not by cultivating traits but by shaping conditions. When we see traits as truths, we stop looking for change. Behaviorism asks us to do the opposite: assume every behavior can change and then design accordingly.

A Better Way Forward: Teaching Behavior

Instead of trying to change how students feel about learning, educators can focus on designing tasks, feedback loops and classroom routines that prompt specific, repeatable actions.

Want students to revise their work? Build revision into the structure of the course. Want them to persist through challenges? Normalize early failure and provide feedback that rewards effort, not just accuracy. Persistence doesn’t come from personality; it comes from practice. Persistence behaviors emerge when the environment supports trying again.

The key is to identify the behaviors we want to see and design instructions that reinforce them. That’s the educator’s power. It’s not in diagnosing invisible traits, but in shaping visible routines.

Think about how we interact with artificial intelligence. If it gives an unsatisfactory answer, we don’t accuse it of laziness or lacking grit. We change the prompt. We adjust the input. We try again. That iterative process reflects a core behaviorist truth: When something doesn’t work, change the environment, not the entity.

Students are no different. If they’re disengaged, that’s not a moral failure, it’s an instructional signal. Behavior is data. And when teachers respond to behavior instead of theorizing about traits, learning becomes something we can actually build.

What Students Need

Students don’t need to be labeled. They need structure, support and chances to succeed through repeated action. When we stop trying to cultivate belief and start shaping behavior, we move from speculation to instruction, from vague hopes to measurable outcomes.

The job of an educator is not to light an inner fire. Build an environment where students attempt alternative strategies, resubmit work or ask clarifying questions after making mistakes. It’s not belief that drives learning; it’s what students do with the feedback they receive.