“The highest-priority skills for the future aren’t technical. They’re human.” — World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025

What if we measured student success not by their GPA or seat time, but by their ability to lead themselves, navigate challenges, and take responsibility for the room they’re in?

That question started in a high school entrepreneurship classroom, and it has grown into a schoolwide movement to reframe how we think about readiness, resilience, and leadership.

It’s called GRiT. While it began as a way to help students become stronger communicators and team builders, it has become something much bigger: a blueprint for the non-technical, human skills our students and our world desperately need.

The Skills the World Actually Wants

According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report (2025), the fastest-rising job skills aren’t tied to coding languages or compliance. They include the following, covered by teaching GRiT:

  • Creative thinking
  • Resilience, flexibility, and agility
  • Curiosity and lifelong learning
  • Self-awareness and emotional intelligence

These are the same skills our students tell us they often struggle with most. In interviews and self-reflection, they describe feeling anxious, feeling unsure of how to handle conflict, and feeling reluctant to take healthy risks. They don’t lack intelligence; they lack internal language, practice, and confidence.

This isn’t just a learning gap. It’s a relational intelligence gap (relational intelligence is the intersection between EQ, IQ, and PQ). And it is showing up in school culture, workplace readiness, and mental wellness indicators across the country.

Teaching GRiT: The Neuroscience of Readiness

In today’s learning environments, we’ve become more attuned to the importance of well-being, but we sometimes misunderstand how to get there. In trying to protect students from discomfort and desired difficulties, we shield them from the very conditions that build strength.

The truth is, productive struggle is not a threat to mental wellness; it is a foundation for it. Neuroscience helps explain why.

When students are challenged just beyond their comfort zone, in what Vygotsky called the Zone of Proximal Development, they activate the prefrontal cortex, responsible for executive function, problem solving, and decision-making. They also engage in:

  • Effortful retrieval and memory formation
  • Myelination, the process that strengthens neural pathways through repetition
  • The release of dopamine, which reinforces persistence and motivation

This is neuroplasticity in action. The brain literally rewires itself through effort, and students become more capable with every intentional challenge they overcome.

Read the full article about teaching GRiT by Kurt Wismer at Getting Smart.