In our book club discussion on chapter seven of Dr. R. Ritchhart’s book, Cultures of Thinking in Action, we discuss the importance of challenging our students in the classroom, balancing direct instruction versus inquiry-based learning, and helping students change their mindset about failure – by turning mistakes into learning opportunities. We also think more about how our own beliefs about struggle, challenge, and failure impact both teaching methods and student outcomes. Finally, we identify ways to support student-led inquiry and discuss how building critical thinking skills in the classroom is one of the most important opportunities we can provide students to support their success outside of it.If you haven’t already had a chance to watch our discussions on Chapters 1-6 of Cultures of Thinking in Action, or read the blog posts that summarize them, visit: CULTURES OF THINKING IN ACTION BOOK STUDY GROUP to catch up.
Considering Our Own Beliefs About Struggle, Challenge, and Failure
“The pressure for mastery of academic skills sometimes pushes teachers to focus on transferring information quickly rather than allowing students time to grapple with ideas, sort through ambiguities, and deal with complexities (Meyer 2010),” writes Dr. R. Ritchhart in his book Cultures of Thinking in Action. “Too often, teachers tend to reduce the challenge of tasks with the goal of making work more manageable for students (Cheeseman, Clarke, Roche, and Walker 2016b; Choppin 2011; Stein and Lane 1996).”
Consider for a moment what beliefs and opinions about struggle, challenge, and failure are commonplace in your own school community. Ask yourself how your own beliefs about struggle and failure affect your teaching methods, and consequently, your students.
Extensive research in the field of education has shown us that positive struggle – struggle with a purpose – activates more parts of a student’s brain than rote memorization or following directions. The strong learning outcomes that result from allowing students the time and space to work out problems on their own is well documented. Why then, don’t we see this type of challenge occurring in all classrooms? What personal, institutional, and societal beliefs are impacting how educators engage with their students and what they require of students in response?
One reason this type of challenge is found in some classrooms and not others is that the definition of a positive, purposeful struggle is not always well understood in educational communities. Some communities may mistake posting the lesson’s standard as creating purpose and assigning “hard work” as a productive struggle. However, productive struggle and meaningful purpose only happen for students on a personal level. This requires creating opportunities for students to make connections and construct meaning of their own through extending their reasoning and engaging in cognitive risk taking.
In the context of KnowAtom, science students benefit from grappling directly with phenomena and using what they learn during hands-on investigation to make evidence-based arguments. These experimental and observational phenomena provide everything students need to struggle productively, while making sense of what they are experiencing themselves.
The Challenge of Time (or Lack thereof) and Student-Led Inquiry
If you’ve been to a training where they asked teachers about implementing more challenge and less simplification (as Dr. Ron Ritchhart puts it), you’ve probably heard one of the most common reasons educators give for why not – time, time, time. While many educators understand the theory behind productive struggle, when it comes to the nitty-gritty and the day-to-day, it's hard to slow down and give students the time they need to accomplish it.
Thinking is hard work! It takes time and requires students to show vulnerability and believe they can accomplish what we’re asking of them. There's a certain amount of irony here with the concept of time. The assumption is that it will take less time to transfer information directly to students, but when we reduce the challenge to make things more manageable, we’re minimizing the opportunity for deeper learning to occur. The learning that students achieve from direct instruction is surface level, and it’s harder to remember and replicate in different situations – including state testing.
Under the pressure to cover a certain amount of information over the course of the year, teachers can start to believe that we can’t slow down, challenge, and engage our students in inquiry-based learning. But that pressure is actually resulting in less ‘coverage.’
A key stumbling block for practitioners is the idea that we teachers should ‘teach the standards.’ Although the standards inform curriculum decisions, they are not curriculum – and have never been intended to be used as curriculum. The standards are akin to health codes, dictating minimum expectations but not the day-to-day menu of learning opportunities. The danger in believing that we should ‘teach the standards’ is that our instruction becomes focused on a self-defeating paradox: completing work that ‘covers the standards’ and knowledge performance, while neither of which necessarily leads to understanding.
The role of teachers has always been to teach students so they are empowered and equipped to perform the expectations of the standards in novel contexts. This means creating opportunities and environments that give students experiences that stretch their ability, developing it into new news skills and understanding. This may seem nuanced, but it is a powerful distinction from ‘teaching the standards’.
Engaging Parents as Partners in Promoting Proactive Struggle in the Classroom
Another obstacle may be educators’ belief that parents will react negatively to allowing students to struggle. It’s true that caregivers are a key audience in the understanding and encouraging of proactive struggle in education. To redefine how parents think about success and failure in our schools, teachers and administrators must work together to understand the importance of struggle and its role in learning, and communicate our own beliefs:
- Struggling in the classroom doesn’t mean students are “failing.”
- Your student is struggling because they are working really hard.
- We appreciate the importance of student-led investigation in our school community, and we understand the positive impact that independent inquiry requires.
- We not only support struggle in the classroom – we require it, struggle is an opportunity for growth!
An important step in redefining struggle in the classroom environment is teaching parents how to respond effectively to motivate their students when they come home and say, “things were really hard today. I really struggled. I didn’t know all the answers, but sticking with the struggle helped me find important answers.”
This isn’t any easy lesson, especially for parents and caregivers who equate struggle with failure. But we can provide parents with the information they need to understand how struggle activates deeper learning and helps build confident, life-long learners. We can teach parents how to celebrate hard work, show appreciation for struggle, and redefine what failure is. When we help caregivers improve how they talk about learning with their child, for example by asking open-ended questions that require them to explain how something works or reflect on what something means to them, we’re giving them the tools to help their child succeed. In many ways this is as simple as recognizing the struggle, validating the feelings that struggles produce, making a plan to push through struggles when they occur, and identifying the resources we have to make progress.
Balancing Inquiry-based Learning vs. Direct Instruction
Too often in the U.S., we think about education in terms of competition, with top students earning the top prize – high grades. If we believe that education is primarily about mastering a prescribed set of content, then ‘winning’ is defined as receiving the information that’s being transferred. But the research shows that a dependency on content transfer results in lower levels of learning.
Instead of teaching students to approach learning as a collaborative endeavor where they work together with teachers and peers to gain a better understanding of the world around them – just like scientists, engineers, and researchers do outside of the classroom – this model sets them up to work against each other. In contrast, inquiry-based learning is powerful and motivating. It's what every teacher wants and hopes to achieve. It inspires motivated, interested, engaged learners who are having fun while mastering complex concepts. Student-led inquiry capitalizes on their innate curiosity to figure things out.
One way of thinking about direct instruction as foundational is as being basic – the basis of things which cannot be taught any other way, like letter sounds. Dr. Ron Ritchhart talks about it as being most effective when learners know very little about a domain and when the instruction is going to highlight expert thinking. In this way, direct instruction is foundational. Teachers use it to introduce key tools and set students on their way to learning more, like how letter sounds combine to form two letter words. Direct instruction can help students engage in deeper learning by giving them the language to begin their own investigations.
Another way to integrate direct instruction in a meaningful way is as the framework, procedure, or process of student-led inquiry. When we engage students in thinking routines to approach a new concept, we’re using direct instruction to give them a framework for deeper thinking to occur. For example, instead of pre-teaching vocabulary, foundational instruction could engage students in how to engage a particular thinking routine to infer meaning of a word or concept from its context – a very useful inquiry practice to learn. This shows a blend of inquiry-based and direct instruction. The direct instruction helps students to use the framework, but the success of their investigation depends on how they put that framework to work in a setting that’s meaningful to them. While there are pros and cons to both direct instruction and inquiry-based learning, and there's a place for both, there needs to be the right balance between them.
To identify the negative effects that can result from making direct instruction the norm, consider students who are over-dependent on their teacher’s thinking. These students are passive listeners rather than curious participants. They have less autonomy and use their own problem-solving skills less often. These students are feeling disconnected from the act of learning. Instead, they’re thinking about how to give their teacher the answers they want. When direct instruction is commonplace, students are not learning how to learn and monitor their own progress. A teacher in a classroom like this may be fooled into thinking their students are achieving understanding, but when we don’t require them to tap into their own thinking, how do we know if, or what, students really understand?
How to Engage and Support Students in Productive Struggle
Dr. Ron Ritchhart writes that society’s beliefs about struggle outside of the classroom can also affect our thoughts on challenging our students inside it, writing,
“Another driver of both teachers’ reduction of challenge and students’ fear of challenge is that too many of us simply do not see the benefits of learning from our mistakes. We may have internalized society’s message that mistakes are failures that reflect badly on us and should be avoided.”
Research shows that making students think more deeply improves long-term learning outcomes. A challenge to achieving this level of engagement is students’ fear of failure. Too often, students view mistakes as failures. They become points of disconnection and an opportunity to disengage. As teachers, we encourage this mindset when we jump in to help students too quickly. By giving them the information they need, rather than pushing our students to use their abilities to get there on their own, we’re reinforcing the idea that mistakes equal failure. To encourage deeper thinking, teachers have to change our mindset and teach our students that mistakes are learning tools – steps on their way to understanding.
Making the shift to inquiry-based learning, where teachers are releasing responsibility and students are taking risks and working together – gets messy. Mistakes are naturally going to happen in that environment. When teachers approach those mistakes as learning opportunities, we’re helping our students re-define failure. As our students gain confidence and realize that we are there for support, not to give them the answers, they will begin to depend more on their own abilities and come to us for help less often. In this new role, teachers can focus on engaging students in reflection and thinking about different ways to approach a problem. We can encourage them to consider what they already know, where they are stuck, and what strategies they could use to help. When we push back and require our students to reflect and rethink, they will begin to develop coping strategies.
To introduce student-led inquiry practices at the beginning of the year, you can start with community building exercises. Give your students a really challenging, really fun and engaging prompt. Afterwards, come together to talk through their struggle. Ask them to reflect and share: Did you want to give up? What strategies did you use to help you move forward once you got stuck? This discussion gives students the vocabulary to talk about struggle in the classroom. Learning to make their thinking and experience visible helps students better understand and engage in the processes of inquiry-based learning.
Using Checkpoints to Support Inquiry-based Learning
One way to support student-led inquiry is by introducing checkpoints – planned stopping points where students check-in with their teacher. This provides the opportunity for teachers to formatively assess their understanding. At this time, you can help students to reflect on what they are thinking and learning, and where they want to go, before they move on to the next step. But it’s on us as teachers to support our students as they reflect and think through their struggle – not to give them the answers we think they need.
One of the challenges to introducing inquiry-based learning practices is our feeling as teachers that we don’t want to see our students get frustrated. Before you abandon proactive struggle in the classroom – really think about the differences between struggle and frustration. When students are struggling with a challenge, but they are empowered with the tools to solve it, that’s the type of positive struggle that requires and encourages deeper thinking, yet gives students a feeling of accomplishment when they’re through.
However, if the students don’t have the tools and resources to be successful, or if they perceive that there’s a secret code or a path to get there that they don’t know, that’s what leads to frustration. It can create the sense that learning is a game of ‘hide and seek’ with knowledge and an adult who t holds the gradebook. Check-ins provide a way for teachers to engage with their students before they get to the frustrated stage, encouraging them to think through challenges, consider the tools they have to help, and reflect on what they’re learning along the way.
Planning for Lessons that Challenge All Students Appropriately
Dr. Ron Ritchhart writes: “Given many teachers’ efforts to reduce complexity, it may come as a surprise to learn that students report they actually like and value a degree of cognitive complexity as well as the feeling of being pushed and challenged—as long as it accompanied with support (Cushman 2014; Hamari et al., 2016; Lamborn, Newmann, and Wehlage 1992; Meyer 2016).”
How do we determine whether our lessons are engaging students in productive struggle versus unproductive struggle? Are we challenging students appropriately or over-supporting them? One signal to look for is whether your students are attempting challenging work without immediately asking for help. As the year goes on, you should see a shift from students constantly needing support to them taking ownership of their inquiry and building confidence in their own thinking.
Another signal to look for is engagement. When students are bored and disengaged, it may be due to over-supporting them. In a teacher’s attempt to not overwhelm their students or frustrate them, they may have reduced the opportunity for students to struggle and consequently, to have that ‘aha’ moment when they figure it out on their own. Engagement is often a side effect of agency and empowerment. How empowered are your students to solve their own problems?
At KnowAtom, we recommend teachers, “Seek out tasks that create opportunities for different solutions or viewpoints and approaches.” By planning lessons that put students in the driver’s seat, we’re creating opportunities for them to personally engage with the new concept. With teachers there to act as a coach and facilitator, students can unpack complex ideas, build on their current knowledge, and achieve something important to them. When working hands-on with a partner as part of a collective effort, students learn that they can make meaningful contributions to an effort larger than themselves.
Challenging students with lessons that don’t require one right answer encourages them to come at problems from different angles and achieve an understanding that’s meaningful to them. These types of activities are also beneficial because they allow multiple entry points. Students who bring different experiences and levels of knowledge can still engage with the lesson. By pushing all students to think, no matter where they’re starting from, we’re giving everyone the opportunity to make a contribution.. By providing all students with the opportunity to create knowledge that’s useful to them, we’re engaging them in a productive struggle that encourages deeper learning.
Normalizing Struggle in the Classroom
The best way to diminish our students’ overall fear of struggle and failure is to normalize it. “I want to produce students who are able to think about achieving a particular goal and manage their mental processes,” says a teacher quoted in the book. To achieve this – we need to make struggle the norm of learning – by challenging our students. We need to notice and point out to our students that we see the depth of their struggle, the growth they’re achieving, the problem-solving strategies they're using, the cooperation they’re showing, and the initiative they’re taking.
A big part of making struggle productive is by recognizing it. Difficult things are hard in part because they're valuable. Things that aren't difficult aren't that valuable. They've already been done – we’ve already mastered those skills and understand those ideas. This is difficult because we haven't figured it out yet. It’s okay to feel frustrated. It's okay to feel challenged. Our next step is to think about what strategies we have in place and knowledge we already have to help us get closer to achieving our goal.
Finding the Point of Challenge for All Students
How do we find the right point of challenge that engages all students in inquiry-led practices? Dr. Ron Ritchhart writes, “Look for tasks that provoke students to make sense, reason, connect ideas, establish their own ideas, struggle, and get dirty or in the pit with concepts. Good tasks expose misconceptions or underdeveloped ideas and enable discussion that unpack and correct or enhance those ideas.”
When we encourage students to look for different solutions, to express diverse viewpoints, and to use different approaches to build an understanding – we’re creating an environment where all students can be creative, vulnerable, and create knowledge that is meaningful to them.
Cognitive conflict is a clear signal to students that this is an authentic opportunity to engage, to learn, and to take a risk. But when we over-support, over-scaffold, or remove the challenge, we’re dismissing that cognitive conflict. This type of engagement can feel scary and like something to avoid when teaching. At first glance it feels messy and uncomfortable. It feels like a struggle! But cognitive conflict creates the conditions in which students really want to learn – where they are in the driver’s seat and connecting personally with the subject at hand, where their ideas are valued, and where they are achieving those ‘ah’ moments. This is true inquiry, exploration, and discovery. When we remove or shy away from that, or when we deliver direct instruction to be efficient and move on, we’re not creating the conditions that kids want to learn in – and that promote deeper learning.
The value of building a classroom environment where people from diverse backgrounds and with different knowledge and experiences come together to engage in authentic learning seems more important now than ever before. Our classrooms need to be complex and perplexing places, where students practice authentic risk taking, social interaction, and making connections across concepts, knowledge, and understanding. Students interact with a lot of information outside of our classroom walls, and they live in a world where information that is widely shared can be foundationally inaccurate and misleading. Unless they've developed the skills to seek out complexity, react to and work with perplexing things, and question information based on those skills, we’re not as educators setting them up for long-term success.
