Quotes from Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things By Adam Grant

• “The Tennessee experiment contained a startling result. Chetty was able to predict the success that students achieved as adults simply by looking at who taught their kindergarten class. By age 25, students who happened to have had more experienced kindergarten teachers were earning significantly more money than their peers. Chetty and his colleagues calculated that moving from an inexperienced kindergarten teacher to an experienced one would add over $1,000 to each student’s annual income in their twenties. For a class of 20 students, an above-average kindergarten teacher could be worth additional lifetime income of $320,000.[*]” (Pages 7 to 8)

• “Most adults hardly even remember being five years old. Why did kindergarten teachers end up casting such a long shadow? 

  The intuitive answer is that effective teachers help students develop cognitive skills. Early education builds a solid foundation for understanding numbers and words. Sure enough, students with more experienced teachers scored higher on math and reading tests at the end of kindergarten. But over the next few years, their peers caught up. 

  To figure out what students were carrying with them from kindergarten into adulthood, Chetty’s team turned to another possible explanation. In fourth and eighth grade, the students were rated by their teachers on some other qualities. Here’s a sample: 

  - Proactive: How often did they take initiative to ask questions, volunteer answers, seek information from books, and engage the teacher to learn outside class? 

  - Prosocial: How well did they get along and collaborate with peers?

  - Disciplined: How effectively did they pay attention—and resist the impulse to disrupt the class? 

  - Determined: How consistently did they take on challenging problems, do more than the assigned work, and persist in the face of obstacles?

  When students were taught by more experienced kindergarten teachers, their fourth-grade teachers rated them higher on all four of these attributes. So did their eighth-grade teachers. The capacities to be proactive, prosocial, disciplined, and determined stayed with students longer—and ultimately proved more powerful—than early math and reading skills. When Chetty and his colleagues predicted adult income from fourth-grade scores, the ratings on these behaviors mattered 2.4 times as much as math and reading performance on standardized tests.

  Think about how surprising that is. If you want to forecast the earning potential of fourth graders, you should pay less attention to their objective math and verbal scores than to their teachers’ subjective views of their behavior patterns. And although many people see those behaviors as innate, they were taught in kindergarten. Regardless of where students started, there was something about learning these behaviors that set students up for success decades later” (Pages 9 - 10).

• “Character is more than just having principles. It’s a learned capacity to live by your principles” (Page 11).

• “Character is your capacity to prioritize your values over your instincts. Knowing your principles doesn’t necessarily mean you know how to practice them, particularly under stress or pressure” (Page 20).

• “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved”. —Helen Keller (Page 20)

• “The overarching value we place on education doesn’t only affect schools; it permeates societies. In the United States, if you ask people what career they respect the most, the most common answer is doctor. In Finland, the most admired profession is often teaching. 

  It might seem like an enviable accident that Finland’s culture happens to nourish excellent education. But a country’s values and assumptions about education aren’t a given—they’re chosen. Starting in the 1970s, Finland launched a major reform to professionalize education. As the education expert Samuel Abrams explains, they advanced a core value of “education as an instrument for nation building.”

  The reform began with overhauling how teachers were recruited and trained. Unlike Norway, Finland started requiring all teachers to complete master’s degrees offered at top universities. That attracted highly motivated, mission-driven candidates. They got advanced training in evidence-based practices, many of which were pioneered in other countries. They also paid teachers well. 

  These values and practices didn’t transform the culture overnight. In the early 1990s, a new leader came in and called for another set of dramatic changes to create “a new culture of education.” Policymakers started engaging teachers and students in a collaborative effort to define their ideal culture. They articulated a new assumption—teachers were trusted professionals—and supported it by introducing practices that gave teachers freedom and flexibility to shape a previously rigid curriculum. 

  Today, Finnish teachers have a great deal of autonomy to use their judgment to help students grow.

  …

  To discover and develop the potential in each of their students, teachers make a fundamental assumption that education should be tailored to individuals. Surprisingly, that doesn’t require small classes; a typical Finnish teacher has around 20 students. It involves a set of practices for personalized learning. Finnish schools create cultures of opportunity by enabling students to build individualized relationships, receive individualized support, and develop individualized interests” (Pages 160 - 161).

  My comment: They key point is that teachers are giving students what they need, not what standards require. Giving a Newcomer ESL student content on esoteric grammar and vocabulary that a native speaker doesn’t understand would not fly in Finland.

• “Each lesson [in Finnish schools) was a maximum of 45 minutes, followed by 15 minutes of recess. This is another practice backed by research: much like they do for adults, short activity breaks are known to improve children’s attention and some aspects of their learning” (Page 167).

• “Teachers weren’t catering to kindergartners’ so-called learning styles. They were giving them ample time to explore their individual interests. “Why?” some Americans might ask. Because Finnish educators assume the most important lesson to teach children is that learning is fun” (Page 168).

• “Reading is a gateway to opportunity: it opens the door for children to keep learning. But books face increasingly stiff competition from TV, video games, and social media. Compared to 2000, in 2018 the average Finnish teen was spending 77 fewer hours a year reading for fun. This isn’t unique to Finnish students; in America, students’ enthusiasm about reading continues to wane year after year. By high school, they’re typically somewhere between indifferent toward reading and disliking it outright” (Page 173).

  My comment: Thus, another argument for parents and schools to have controls over their kids’ electronic usage and use some kind of web filtering device. Yes, teachers can try to make learning fun, but they shouldn’t have to compete with electronic devices. 

•  “In a startling study, economist George Bulman analyzed a massive dataset containing every high school graduate in Florida from 1999 to 2002. The goal was to investigate whether their grades would predict their future success—measured in terms of college graduation rates and income earned a decade later. 

  Freshman year grades revealed nothing about students’ potential for future success. Sophomore and junior year grades did matter—every GPA point higher was worth 5 percent more income later. And senior year grades were twice as important: every GPA point was worth 10 percent higher income.

   But what really foreshadowed earning potential was whether students improved over time. Unfortunately, colleges typically erased that trajectory by collapsing it into a single score. They sorted students based on their average grades over four years, neglecting to consider whether they got better or worse.

  Similar patterns held for the odds of finishing college. Students whose grades improved from freshman to junior year of high school were significantly more likely to graduate from college—and less likely to drop out—than those whose grades declined over the same period. But admissions officers didn’t take that delta into account. 

  It’s hard to overstate how ridiculous that is. Schools judge you as much for your performance three years ago as for three months ago—and they don’t even bother to look at the most recent and relevant data at all. We penalize people who rise after rocky starts when we should be rewarding them for the distance they’ve traveled. 

  It’s time for universities and employers to add another metric. Along with GPA, I think they should be assessing GPT: grade point trajectory. They can calculate the rate of improvement over time with basic division: rise over run. Early failure followed by later success is a mark of hidden potential” (Pages 213 - 214).