Learning the Right Way to Struggle

Hunter was 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 He found it hard to write letters and words.

When things get frustrating, Hunter knows how to articulate it. The phrase refers to the bottom of the learning pit, an imaginary place where students in Hunter's class in Illinois have been taught to leave when learning gets difficult. Hunter knows what he needs to do to get out of the pit, as well as what it feels like when he climbs up and out on the other side.

The learning pit as a metaphor is one of several educational strategies that lean into the idea that struggle is something to be embraced. JamesNottingham conceived it in the early 2000s when he was a teacher in a former mining town. Many of his students were low income and lived in communities with high unemployment. He wanted his students to get used to being a little uncomfortable.

At a time when students are reeling from two years of learning and isolation from their peers, the idea of making young people uncomfortable may seem misguided. As students look to rebuild academic confidence, it's a good time for teachers and parents to step back and be explicit that the challenge offers rewards.

The answer isn't taking away challenge, it's giving more tools to deal with challenge, according to Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology. The learning pit can be used to help children visualize ways to push through by asking for help and stepping up the effort.

It becomes a way of showing what might have been in the past.

She said that the idea of struggle is well-established. The director of the Melbourne Educational Research Institute spent 15 years studying the educational factors that influence learning. The factors that work best to accelerate learning were identified in the 10 Mindframes for Visible Learning. One is trying to do their best and not just doing their best.

The learning-pit metaphor is easy to grasp in the United States and Britain. A student who is struggling with a math problem can say to the teacher, "I am in the pit with this."

It is a nice visual for them to see what they are going to do with their learning and make it less scary.

The founder and executive director of The Challenging Learning Group said that his purpose was not to give them clarity, but to create confusion. I am trying to create that mental wobble so they have to think about it more when they are learning to ride a bike.

Students occupy three mental states when learning something new: relatively comfortable, relatively uncomfortable and panicked. He said that too many parents and teachers intervene when learning gets uncomfortable, denying students a chance to stretch enough to deepen their learning.

In order to understand why so many students are graduating with decent grades but are not prepared for college, the New York-based nonprofit organization, the TNTP, surveyed 1,000 lessons in five diverse schools. It found that students were successful in completing 71 percent of the work they were given to do in class. Only 17 percent of the time, the assignments reflected grade-level standards.

Not stretching students because there isn't time for the kinds of conversations that make learning interesting and can be consequential, especially for marginalized students. Lacey Robinson, president and chief executive of UnboundED, an organization that designs learning to be rigorous and meaningful, said that educators sometimes did not have the knowledge and training to fill in gaps, and that they often had low expectations for Black and brown students. This can cause students to lose interest in learning and fall further behind.

The model of putting students in a grade level below is illogical, according to Ms. Robinson.

The more you work that muscle, the more solidified your academic identity is.

Some researchers encouraged struggle to actually design for failure. When students engage in what he calls "productive failure", which is grappling with a problem, they learn new concepts more fully, and retain the knowledge longer.

A meta-analysis co-written by Dr. Kapur analyzed 53 studies from the past 15 years and found that providing direct instruction on how to complete a problem before practicing it or providing well-designed questions to provoke thinking on a concept were more effective than introducing knowledge about how to.

The first strategy is accepted because teachers have little time to spare and it is easier to tell students what to do. The latter method seems inefficient, because students waste time and develop wrong ideas when a teacher is there to show them how to do it. Students from North America, Europe and Asia performed better when they had to struggle first. The converse was more effective than the problem-solving practice.

When certain principles are followed, productive failure works best because the problems must be devised to be intuitive, challenging but not impossible, and students should work in pairs or small groups.

As students work to rebuild their academic confidence, using language like the learning pit or productive failure can help.

Productive failure is important because we need to re-norm failure as an opportunity to learn.