Teaching for learning often resembles the Goldilocks story. If things are not just right, Goldilocks is not happy. Her sampling of chairs, porridge, and beds showed some chairs and beds to be too soft or too hard and some bowls of porridge to be too cold or too hot. By experimenting, she found her “just right” spot.
When children find lessons that are too easy to too hard, and I add, not interesting or of no perceived value to them, they also are not happy. They express their unhappiness by wandering off into boredom, distractive behaviors, and absenteeism. The “just right” lesson can catch each child’s attention and positively challenge their emerging skills sets. Such is a teacher’s constant dilemma – designing lessons with enough rigor and interest, not too little nor too much, to cause learning.
The sweet spot.
In “Productive Struggle Is a Learner’s Sweet Spot” (ASCD, Vol 14, No. 11), Barbara Blackburn describes the tension in instructional design teachers face in creating lessons that are “just right” on the scales of interest and rigor. “Student success occurs when you create an instructional environment that sets high expectations for each student and provides scaffolding without offering excessive help. The key is to incorporate productive struggle.
Productive struggle is what I call the “sweet spot” in between scaffolding and support. Rather than immediately helping students at the first sign of trouble, we should allow them to work through struggles independently before we offer assistance. That may sound counterintuitive, since many of us assume that helping students learn means protecting them from negative feelings of frustration. But for students to become independent learners, they must learn to persist in the face of challenge.”
https://ascd.org/el/articles/productive-struggle-is-a-learners-sweet-spot
Blackburn speaks of two essential elements for teaching in the sweet spot. One is using the tension between the Goldilocks’ just right and too hard to provoke children to learn. Instruction that is too easy will not cause learning. It is the tension between what a student knows and can do now and what they need to know and do next that is the cutting edge for their learning. Teachers use the tension to motivate, instruct, and reinforce new learning.
Blackburn’s second element is scaffolding new learning so that all children incrementally secure their learning and developmentally grow their knowledge and skills through productive struggle. Blackburn does not allow Goldilocks to settle back into comfort but keeps pushing Goldilocks to learn to know and do what initially is too hard for her. For Goldilocks-like students, what is just right today will become too soft in the future
Blackburn locates that sweet spot by finding the critical attributes of the new or next learning in her curriculum. Madeline Hunter taught us to assess critical attributes by sorting the ideas, concepts, and generalizations of knowledge and the rigor of skill sets to identify what children need to learn “right now.” This creates the sequence and the rate and degree of what will be taught to cause learning. The scaffold ensures that children are prepared and ready to climb from one step of the learning sequence to the next. Children learn the facts and skills in the order required to create concepts and generalizations needed for new progressions of their curricular learning.
When an appropriately considered scaffold is absent, children easily drift into boredom and disinterest. “Over time, students who are continually and insufficiently challenged tend to become disengaged and complacent, exerting lower effort and gaining only superficial learning. As a result, some fail to develop resilience and perseverance with difficult tasks.”
https://ascd.org/el/articles/thriving-in-the-zone-of-productive-struggle
Lev Vygotsky added to our understanding of how children learn with “the Zone of Proximal Learning. “According to Vygotsky’s theory, the ZPD describes the area between a child’s current and future ability. The ZPD is a hypothesized construct that describes the range of children’s abilities from what they are capable of doing to what they are unable to do on their own. When teaching, teachers should encourage child learning by using activities and supporting strategies that enable a child to accomplish a task with the assistance of another peer or teacher. It is important while scaffolding that teachers ask questions and give tasks that target a child’s current developmental level. As children begin to master skills on their own, teachers adjust their teaching strategies accordingly so that children continue to advance.”
Just right is “kind of hard.”
There is an intersection where applications of productive struggle and proximal learning can be used to enhance student learning by finding the “just right” spot.
Does it make sense to make learning slightly harder?
Annie Murphy Paul wrote, “Yes, and the reason is twofold. The first reason to make learning harder is to make it interesting. Learning something new and complicated is hard in itself, as we saw above. Lightening the learner’s cognitive load will allow her to learn more effectively without becoming frustrated or confused.
But once the learner has attained some degree of mastery, ratcheting up the difficulty will help her stay in her “sweet spot” of engagement, where the task is not too hard as to be frustrating and not so easy as to be boring. This is also the place where learners can practice encountering adversity and challenge and overcoming them, a key experience in the development of grit.
The second reason to make learning harder is that it makes learning work better. UCLA psychologist Robert Bjork has developed the idea of “desirable difficulties” — difficulties that we actually want to introduce into students’ learning to make it more effective. Bjork notes that many of the learning activities that make students feel competent and successful — like reading over a textbook passage several times so that it feels familiar — actually they do very little to help them learn. What they should do instead is something like this: close that textbook and ask themselves to recall from memory what they’ve just read.
It won’t feel as good. They’ll struggle to remember the words that were just in front of their eyes. But this activity, known as retrieval practice (or simply self-testing) is an example of a desirable difficulty that will dramatically increase students’ learning.”
https://www.greatschools.org/gk/articles/making-learning-easier-harder-for-kids
Paul suggests that cognitive load is a factor in what makes learning new content and skills easy or hard. “Cognitive load refers to the amount of information our working memory can process at any given time. For educational purposes, cognitive load theory helps us to avoid overloading learners with more than they can effectively process into schemas for long-term memory storage and future recall.”
How much is “just right?”
As we design lessons for cognitive load, we consider the number of pieces or chunks of new information the brain can process at once. “In a famous paper humorously describing “the magical number seven plus or minus two, “Miller claimed to be persecuted by an integer. He demonstrated that one can repeat back a list of no more than about seven randomly ordered, meaningful items or chunks (which could be letters, digits, or words). Other research has yielded different results, though. Young adults can recall only 3 or 4 longer verbal chunks, such as idioms or short sentences (Gilchrist, Cowan, & Naveh-Benjamin, 2008). Some have shrugged their shoulders, concluding that the limit “just depends” on details of the memory task. Recent research, however, indicates when and how the limit is predictable.
The recall limit is important because it measures what is termed working memory (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974; Miller, Galanter, & Pribram, 1960), the few temporarily active thoughts. Working memory is used in mental tasks, such as language comprehension (for example, retaining ideas from early in a sentence to be combined with ideas later on), problem solving (in arithmetic, carrying a digit from the ones to the tens column while remembering the numbers), and planning (determining the best order in which to visit the bank, library, and grocery). Many studies indicate that working memory capacity varies among people, predicts individual differences in intellectual ability, and changes across the life span (Cowan, 2005).
It has been difficult to determine the capacity limit of working memory because multiple mechanisms retain information. Considerable research suggests, for example, that one can retain about 2 seconds’ worth of speech through silent rehearsal (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974). Working memory cannot be limited this way alone, though; in running span procedures, only the last 3 to 5 digits can be recalled (less than 2 seconds’ worth). In these procedures, the participant does not know when a list will end and, when it does, must recall several items from the end of the list (Cowan, 2001).
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2864034
Once “just right” is taught, teach children how to remember/study.
One may think that Goldilocks was just goofing around in the three bears home. But she wasn’t. She tasted porridge to find something to eat and she tested chairs and beds for something to sit and sleep on. So, it is with lesson design. Learning must be focused on the right outcomes.
Paul also referred to Bjork’s “desirable outcomes” or expectancy theory. In his example of a study habit – re-reading – he shows that when a child re-reads material several times, the expected outcome is familiarity not memorization what was read. To memorize, a child must set the expectation of recall not familiarity. Hence, instead of re-reading, close the book and try to recall what was read. If not successful, read again, close the book, and try to recall. This is practicing the expectation that the child really wants – to remember what was read not just be familiar with it.
As we teach children new information and skills, we want them to internalize what they learn not just parrot it back to us. Early on in their school careers, children must be taught how to create memory and not just expect memorization to happen. The ability to memorize is just as important as content and skills. To do this, teach a small chunk of new information, then ask children to repeat it back to you. Have children read a paragraph, set the reading aside, and tell you what they read. Extend their listening and reading to larger chunks of information. And correct them when their repeating or telling is not correct. Practice this in class and tell them they need to do this when they study at home. We teachers assume children know this intuitively and they do not.
The Big Duh!
The design of good instructional lessons is not easy. Assess what children know now and what they need to know next. Assemble new information and skills that are at the hard edge of what would be relatively easy for them to learn. Set the motivational hooks of novelty, interest, and challenging material for children before they engage in new learning so they will choose to engage in learning. Don’t provide help too soon – productive struggle builds resiliency. Teach them to study and create short- then long-term memory of what they learned.
Then, do it again for their next lessons.