Okay so some of you may not remember this beloved toy of the 1970’s…but the famous weebles have a great life lesson for all of us!  My dad calls it stick-to-it-ness or “Making Hay”… Chuck Hibberd calls it resiliency….and today in the Chronicle of Higher Education they used my favorite term for this…one that comes out of the field of youth development….GRIT.

This mornings article in the Chronicle of Higher Education is talking about how a coalition of colleges are developing a new application for college.  One designed to measure potential college success of a student across program areas, and across various colleges.  One of the primary things they want to attempt to measure is grit.  The premise is that “we know success comes from engagement, specifically social and academic engagement, at a college.  It doesn’t necessarily come from your scores.  It comes from your grit, your willingness to engage.”

Basically we are talking about how resiliency is influencing success across many different fields of study.  I know someone is going to ask this…how do you measure success?  And truthfully that looks different in every field.  …But isn’t it interesting that the concept of resiliency is consistent when we are measuring success?    Maybe if we are interested in measuring success across our extension programming repertoire, we should be focusing on measuring resiliency?

Just a thought.  :)