Tenacity – what it is and why it matters
Louis Pasteur famously said that the secret that led to him achieving his goals in life was his tenacity. As a student he initially had indifferent results at both school and university. Yet dogged persistence and resilience led him eventually to achieve both academic success and the great inventions for which he is well known.
Recently, research by McKinsey (Denoël, et al., 2017) into PISA’s data has showed that students’ mindsets have more impact on their academic perfomance than their socio-economic background does. The mindset most predictive of success was a cluster of attributes associated with tenacity.
Indeed, for the last two decades there has been a growing interest in related concepts such as Carol Dweck’s ‘growth mindset’ and Angela Duckworth’s ‘grit’ with a mounting bank of evidence showing their value to students at school and in later life.
The concept of tenacity
A combination of historical interest, empirical observation in schools and the kinds of research to which we have just been alluding led us to create a new overarching concept of tenacity in Developing Tenacity: Teaching learners to persevere in the face of difficulty. Our idea is broad, encompassing a range of dispositions promoting learning and achievement in and beyond school. Specifically, it incorporates resilience, persistence, perseverance, grit and self-regulation.
Resilience suggests mental toughness. Its Latin root resilire, means to ‘jump back’ or to ‘recoil’. It describes the property of elastic material to absorb energy and to spring back to its original shape upon release. In human terms, it has typically referred to a person’s mental ability to recover quickly from illness, disadvantage or misfortune. It is now commonly used as a subset of a larger concept – perseverance.