As educators, we hear a lot about productive struggle, especially when it comes to math. But letting students struggle is difficult for parents and family members, and even for teachers who understand that it’s an important part of learning.
Recently, at Heritage Elementary School, we’ve had the opportunity to focus a bit more tightly on productive struggle.
Let them be frustrated!
In my 5th-grade classroom we use ST Math, a visual math program that asks students to use spatial-temporal reasoning to solve puzzles and move a penguin named JiJi from one side of the screen to the other. By design, there are no instructions, so sometimes my students get frustrated.
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They see what’s happening on the screen, but that doesn’t mean they understand what they’re supposed to do. Nevertheless, we ask them to try to figure it out and then try again. We ask them to try nine times, in fact, before they ask us for help. Every time they fail a dot appears on the screen. Once they’ve accrued nine dots, we ask them, “What did you try? What happened when you tried that?” They can replay it on their screen as well, so we can actually go back and look at what happened and think through it with them.
I love being able to see those little dots because it’s good to have a shared challenge on the screen. We can talk about what’s happening and work through it together, because sometimes I don’t know how to play the games, either.
In any case, nine is a lot of failures for a kid to go through without getting frustrated! To get them ready for this approach, we had to do a lot of talking up front about productive struggle, explaining that learning builds new pathways in your brain and it takes a little while to carve them out. Knowing there was going to be some frustration going in makes it a little easier for them to deal with. We also had similar conversations with their parents and family members.
Getting parental buy-in
Parents can have a hard time with the concept of allowing their kids to struggle.
When we tell them, “You need to let them struggle. Don’t give them the answer,” they’ll say something like, “Well, my child’s frustrated, and I’m trying to help them.” I understand that impulse. The science on how the brain learns and the role of making mistakes is not something the population at large is generally aware of. We’ve had to do some education about that as a result, but when we explain to parents that we’re helping to build students’ visual understanding of math and their foundational understanding of the concepts, they see the importance of not giving answers—even if it’s still very hard.
We reinforce this message by talking to them about productive struggle when we have curriculum night, which takes place a couple weeks into the school year, then touching on it again at conferences. We also put blurbs about it in our newsletter. We even have our kids tell their parents about productive struggle in their Friday letters home, which are notes about what we did that week.
One way I explain it to the families is that if their kid was playing, for example, Super Mario Brothers and they died in the final battle of the scene over and over and over and over again, the parents likely wouldn’t say, “Give me the controller. Let me show you how to do it.” They’d tell them, “You’ll figure it out. Keep trying. What have you tried so far?”
Math and other kinds of learning work the same way. Parents don’t need to find the solution, they need to just say, “Okay. Stick with it. What do you notice? What’s happening? What’s the screen showing you? Can you learn anything from the feedback you’re getting?”
Productive struggle is everywhere
Productive struggle is applicable across the curriculum. For example, it has a strong connection to the scientific method. If you’re curious about something, you set up an experiment to test your hypothesis. If the experiment fails, some kids will think, “Oh, I was wrong. I’m stupid.” But that’s not what scientists think, and it’s not what we want our kids to think. We want them to think, “My hypothesis was wrong. Did I gain any information in the way it went wrong that would help me form a new hypothesis? How can I change my thinking based on the evidence?”
Or in reading, if students make predictions about the story and the events in the text don’t support those predictions, they have to take in the new information and adjust their predictions. Then they’ve experienced some small growth for the next book they try to read and can predict a bit better in the future based on that experience of being wrong.
We talk about productive struggle across the board in my class. We start each year with the Week of Inspirational Math, incorporating a lot of material from Jo Boaler and YouCubed. One of the topics they focus on is how the brain changes as it learns. We try to remind the kids all the time that when we make mistakes our brains are growing.
From productive struggle, students learn perseverance, confidence, and growth mindset. Mistakes and struggles are a good thing, because we often learn more from our mistakes than we do from our successes. Mistakes are where the learning happens. At my school, we definitely try to keep that message at the forefront with our learners all the time.
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