Adapted from Kelly Gallagher’s The Teaching Life.
I like this folktale (origin unknown):
| A man is watching a butterfly trying to emerge from its cocoon. The struggle continues for several hours without much progress, so the man takes a knife and carefully cuts part of the cocoon to aid the butterfly. With that help, the butterfly emerges. The man expects it to spread its wings and fly, but that is not what happens. Instead, the butterfly’s wings are too weak to fly, and it soon dies. It turns out that the act of wrestling its way out of the cocoon was necessary to strengthen the butterfly’s wings, and by trying to help the butterfly, the man actually harmed it. |
Struggle is essential to healthy growth. We know that helicopter parenting is bad for students. So is helicopter teaching (Kittle and Gallagher 2020). To grow strong, students need space to make their own decisions, to wrestle, to screw up, to overcome failure. Teach them that struggle is normal, that it’s necessary (see the value of confusion). The earlier they learn to wrestle, the stronger and more confidently they will climb the K–12 ladder (pardon the mixed metaphor). When your impulse is to help a student, stop and ask yourself, “Wait . . . am I doing too much of the work?”
In thinking about the importance of struggle, we need to remain mindful of the difference between productive struggle and operating within oppressive structures, as we don’t want a grit ideology to become a replacement for systems of injustice (see growth mindset). And while struggle is absolutely necessary for healthy growth, we must remember that there is also a tipping point. Too much struggle can be demoralizing—just ask any dyslexic student who has gone years without a proper diagnosis. Struggle is only good if students feel they are making progress (see zone of proximal development (ZPD)—or at least they see the possibility of progress—and sometimes this only occurs when they are taught how to process their failure. Remind your students that experimentation is a good thing, but that the nature of experimentation is that it often doesn’t work out. That’s OK. What can we learn from it?
This is where the art of teaching comes into play. How much struggle is productive for your students? How much is counterproductive? Finding that tipping point can be tricky, but when you make these decisions, it may be helpful to remember another piece of folklore of unknown origin: We must prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child (see rigorous lessons).
The Value of Confusion
Sheridan Blau, one of my mentors, taught me the value of confusion. We don’t want students to hide their confusion, he said, we want them to reveal it. Why? Because confusion presents us with opportunities to learn. Rather than dread it, we should covet it. Confusion is the place where learning happens. This is why I had an “embrace confusion” poster in my classroom.
Resiliency
I had a parent ask me: “I have a fourth grader at home, and he waited until the last night to start working on a big project. He wouldn’t have finished it on time, so I helped him. Did I make a mistake?”
In a word, yes.
I understood where this parent was coming from. There is hardly a human desire more powerful than wishing your child to be successful. But failure—and how to deal with it—is an important part of building a child’s resiliency. When parents bail out their children, their kids run a higher risk of developing an unhealthy codependency on the teacher. It is counterintuitive, but allowing a child to learn a lesson the hard way increases that child’s chances for success later on. This is why I shared this concern with parents every year at Back-to-School Night.
Growth mindset
The idea of having a growth mindset (Dweck 2006) has been widely influential. It has helped counter stereotypes by reinforcing that intelligence is not fixed but developed, and it has helped to reframe mistakes as opportunities for growth. I particularly like the notion that people who have adopted a growth mindset never stop learning.
All good. But let us not forget that a child’s socioeconomic background often plays a bigger role in student success. Placing the onus entirely onto students often ignores systematic inequalities such as underfunded schools, a dearth of community resources (e.g., libraries and bookstores), and a lack of access to high-quality education. It is also easier to persist when you are not hungry.
I taught in a high-poverty high school for thirty-five years. My daughters, on the other hand, attended a well-funded high school. One’s mindset did nothing to close the wide chasm of opportunity offered between the two schools. For more on this opportunity gap, read Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, which was written in 1991. Sadly, this educational apartheid still exists.
Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)
This concept, developed by Lev Vygotsky, a Soviet psychologist, helps teachers design lessons that present the optimal level of challenge for students. If a task is below a student’s ZPD, then it is too easy and little learning occurs. If a task is within the student’s ZPD, then students, with scaffolding provided by the teacher, can move to deeper water. If a task is beyond a student’s ZPD, frustration and disengagement set in.
To help students stretch their ZPD, I often adopted a “I go, we go, you go” approach. If I wanted to teach students how to analyze a complex chart, for example, I began by analyzing one by myself in front of them, thinking aloud as I did so. Then I gave them another chart and asked them to analyze it in small-group settings. After these two rounds, each student was asked to analyze a complex chart on their own. The goal? We want to move students into productive struggle.
Rigorous Lessons
We have all had this happen: You plan what you think is a good lesson, but midstream it becomes painfully obvious that what you planned is too easy for your students. It is not challenging and they breeze through it. What you thought would take twenty-five minutes to complete was finished in ten minutes.
Whenever I got that uneasy feeling that a lesson might be too easy for my ninth graders, I stopped and asked myself, “Could a seventh grader do this?”
"Rigor does not mean it is so hard that students hate it. Rigor means that the task is so engaging students will spend hours working on it."
