Frustrate Your Students: Teaching Students the Joy of Struggling

This is me in every video game (watch the right side).

Source: http://img1.joyreactor.com/pics/post/gif-battlefield-games-fail-2026895.gif

Yet for some reason, I still enjoy playing them. I remember being stuck in certain parts of games where I could not pass it no matter what. I'd try and die, try and die, try and die, and on and on until finally I had learned enough and figured out enough to pass that section.

That feeling of finally getting past that section was awesome because I knew I had worked really, really hard for it. Did I like it while it was happening? Absolutely not. I definitely would not have called it fun, but that experience to me is the definition of flow.

Edutopia has a great article on flow, but the basics of the concept are that students are given a challenge at a level just beyond their current understanding, receive immediate feedback, and are allowed space for failure.

Source: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/GKKlYKS97aA/maxresdefault.jpg

Flow is a frustrating process. Struggling is never fun, but in order for us to truly learn anything and to grow at all, we have to struggle.

Unfortunately, this is something our schools don't let students do very often: struggle. I think there are a number of different things we have to rethink if we want to develop students who know how to struggle productively and classrooms that allow them to do so.

(Note: If you dislike the next two points, ask yourself why you dislike them.)

1. Our Obsession with Pacing Guides Has to Stop

I get the thought process behind pacing guides. I can even appreciate them, as they do make life easier for teachers. But the way we approach them isn't good for students.

Source: http://www.memecreator.org/static/images/memes/4089431.jpg

There is absolutely no way to know how long it's going to take anyone to learn anything. To say that in a month's time everyone should be moving on is to accept that some students will never learn the concept. It demonstrates that we are more concerned with appearances, compliance, and uniformity than we are with learning, growth, and mastery. 

I definitely see the value in holding teachers accountable to a high-quality curriculum and strong assessments, and I also see the value in making sure that students in class A are learning the same things as students in class B, but pacing guides are an ineffective band-aid-style quick fix for this. They look nice. You can show them off and say, "Look! All our students are learning the same thing at the same time!" but what it really says is, "Look! All our teachers are doing the same thing at the same time!" 

If you want a pacing guide, go find an outdated text book. Pacing guides are not a new, novel concept. In fact, they are an outdated, ineffective concept based on the false premise that all students learn the same thing the same way at the same time.

If you want students to be able to struggle, forcing them to move on is synonymous with asking them to give up.

What can we do? (I won't say to ignore the pacing guide because we all like having jobs.)

• Focus on less. If we are constantly moving on and jumping around, there isn't time to struggle.
• Focus on repetition. If students fail and never get another chance at that learning target, they aren't being allowed to struggle or learn; they're just being told they're a failure.
• Focus on student choice. If there is one text and one assessment on the pacing guide, question why. If there isn't a good answer, open things up. Find similar texts and develop multiple options for assessments (just be sure to match up the targets). If students get to choose, they're more willing to struggle.

2. Time to Stop Pretending the Research on Standards-based Grading Doesn't Exist

(For the research side of this, read this article.)

Our grading model in most schools is significantly outdated. It emphasizes compliance above all else. You must do all the work to get a good grade. I may be in the minority on this one, but I strongly believe that the work doesn't matter. 

Source: http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/8e/8e0177e512f09723312c6b5d3eae8833efb97ff7140e11f53f010ea6469a9115.jpg

If I had a student who did none of the work I assigned, but they were constantly engaged in the standards they were supposed to be learning and processing the content at high levels in different ways and could demonstrate that to me, why on earth would they deserve a lower grade than someone who half-heartedly completed all the assigned work?

Okay, so maybe that doesn't happen often, but what about the student who's bored out of their mind because they can finish the assignments twice as fast as the rest of the class? Is that students struggling? Are they experiencing flow? No, they're experiencing boredom, and that boredom stems from the fact that they have to do the same thing as everyone else because our grade book mandates it. 

Students struggle at different levels. Flow happens when you get someone in that zone of proximal development, and you can't do that for every student unless they're doing different things and focusing on different levels. For as long as our grade books mandate that all students do the same things, we won't be able to create an environment for students to struggle.

A doctor would never look at a mountain of research supporting a new method and say, "Yeah, that just looks like it's going to take too much effort to understand." Why should we be allowed to do it in education when it comes to grading practices?

What can we do?

• Research, research, research. A while back I posted my reading list with tons of different places to start. Once I understood standards-based grading, I knew I had to change.
• Find a mentor. Your school undoubtedly has people already using standards-based grading. Team up with them and pick their brain.
• Try it out. If you fear failure, you'll never grow. Jump in. Struggle with it. It's worth it.

3. Make Your Classroom More Like a Video Game

The most fun I have in my classroom is watching my students struggle to earn badges. That sounds horribly sadistic, but it's absolutely true. What I did, and I've started small, is I took the ability to create writing with strong and varied sentences, and I broke it down into levels. For example, level one is just finding subjects and verbs. Level two is independent and dependent clauses. For each level, there's an assessment with resources to help them both learn the content and demonstrate understanding of it. If they ace the assessment, they earn the badge and can put it on their digital chart. (Here's a blog post with a video detailing how that's set up for my class.)

Here's the fun part: they can take the assessment as many times as they want, they can work together, and the best part, it's not graded. We just finished a trimester, and on my course evaluations students listed the badge challenge as both the most fun piece and the piece that helped their learning the most.

Your system might look entirely different, but the important components are:

1. Levels that build towards a larger understanding
2. Immediate feedback
3. Access to resources
4. The ability to collaborate
5. The ability to fail without long-term consequences
6. An expectation of mastery

What can we do?

• Level our concepts/content. Try to break your learning targets into clear steps that allow students to see their growth towards the target.
• Give feedback faster. Technology is a huge help here. Find ways to use it to reteach. (My previous post about aText may be helpful here.)
• Reward failure with an emphasis on growth. This is a big one, but try to train your students to look for growth in failure.

Before I get to the end of this post, I want to share the moment that solidified my view of letting students struggle in the classroom. I remember one specific student who nearly broke her computer when she got 9/10 (after having started at a 3/10 in her first attempt) on one of her badge assessments. I'm not exaggerating. She slammed her Chromebook shut so hard that I was sure the screen had shattered. She was ready to give up. She was so frustrated. I walked over to her, and all I had to do was ask her how much she had grown. In that moment, I could just watch her go from seeing the struggle as bad to seeing the struggle as what helped her grow. She started over again, and you would have thought she had just won the World Cup based on her celebration. Had I just given her the answer or let her give up at any point along the way, her learning wouldn't have been important. She wouldn't have been excited about her growth. 

We have to let students struggle, and the only way that can happen is if we create the environment for that to be possible. In the end, do we want students who only know the easy route or how to give up, or do we want students who have learned to embrace the struggle?