The key to staying gritty through the post-trials period comes back to our first and most important student key behaviour ‘Engage your vision’. No student wants to re-work an English essay or complete another Maths past paper. However everyone wants the benefits of doing so! 

If your child’s goal/vision is firmly front of mind, they will have the resilience and resolve required to be gritty. The gritty student will rework the essay because they have contextualised WHY they need to do it. 

If a student is able to remain focused on all the short, medium and long term benefits this will provide them with the invaluable opportunity to operate with high levels of grit as they move into the very final stages of their 13 years of schooling. If a student is unclear on the benefits that await them at the top of Mount HSC it is inevitable the above mentioned distractions will take precedence.

• A student who is demonstrating Grit knows that they must continue to leave their comfort zone if they are to improve their capabilities and performance in the HSC exam. (Key behaviour # 4 – Push your comfort zone).
• A student who is demonstrating Grit is taking responsibility for the results that they produce. They know that no one is coming to rescue them and unless they work, nothing else will work. (Key Behaviour #6 – Own it!)

Tasks that we align with Grit at HSC CoWorks are:

• Going through a past exam or test, isolating the topics you underperformed in.
• Working through exam marker feedback to re-write and improve your responses. Remember you will be re-visiting these texts and topics in the HSC.
• Starting from the back of an HSC paper (hardest to easiest)
• Revisiting topics from the start of the HSC year
• Teaching a friend around a topic you find challenging. As Albert Einstein put it “If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough”

How can you help your child be Gritty through this post Trials period? 

• Keep the conversation focused on the long term benefits of how good they will feel when the HSC is over.
• Keep them coming to all of their HSC CoWorks sessions as we will keep them focused on the task at hand. 
• And if a little bit of incentive is required … Agree on some targets and rewards around our Measured Performance (effort score) to be achieved across this period. For example, ‘Reach a measured performance of 50+ between now and your graduation and you will have this much spending money for schoolies. Don’t reach the target and you will have this much spending money’. Alternatively, set a learning streak target. For example, ‘Reach a 30 day streak and you can have the car this weekend’. Click here to read our blog on how streaks develop habits. 

With 50% of overall HSC marks still available, it is imperative that we kick the post-trials slump out the door. Great assessment marks can still be brought down by poor exam results, and poor assessment marks can definitely be recovered by great exam results. What is required to put yourself in the best stead for the remaining 50%, is Grit. So, let’s get working!

For anyone interested, Angela Duckworth has delivered a fantastic ted-talk on Grit.

If your child is distracted and displaying low levels of engagement, read our blog post on;

The antidote to procrastination, distraction and low engagement.

For more information on how HSC CoWorks can support your child develop Grit, please contact us on 1300 967 890.