Learn the right way to fight

Mr. Nottingham, the founder and executive director of The stimulating learning group, an education company, said, “My goal is, instead of giving them clarity, to create confusion or cognitive wobble. Like when you learn to ride a bike and it wobbles – I try to create that mental wobble for them to think about it more.

Mr Nottingham identified three mental states that students occupy when learning something new: relatively comfortable, relatively uneasy and panicked. Too many parents and educators step in when learning becomes uncomfortable, preventing students from stretching enough to deepen their learning, he said. “It’s counterproductive,” he said, like trying to help a child learn to ride a bike by holding on to the back of the seat to navigate every bump, hole or obstacle.

In 2018, TNTPa New York-based nonprofit organization that focuses on improving K-12 education, questioned 1,000 lessons at five different schools to see why so many students were graduating with decent grades but unprepared for college. He revealed that in class, students passed most (71%) of the worksheets, class activities and other assignments given to them. But these missions were too easy; they reflected grade level standards only 17% of the time. “This gap exists because so little homework actually gave students a chance to demonstrate academic proficiency,” the survey authors concluded.

Failing to stretch students — because there’s no time for the kinds of conversations that make learning interesting and, at times, tricky — can have consequences, especially for marginalized students. Lacey Robinson, President and CEO of Without Borders, an organization that designs learning to be rigorous and meaningful, said educators sometimes lack the content knowledge and training to help fill gaps, and too often have low expectations. for black and brown students. This can cause these students to lose interest in learning; they are relegated to lower-tier hardware and fall even further behind.

‘We often find that educators use what I call this really illogical model of putting students at a lower level,’ Ms Robinson said, ‘in the hope that they catch up to the level they’re supposed to be at’. .

“Your academic identity solidifies the more you work that muscle,” she added. “And you work that muscle because of rigor and productive wrestling.”

Some researchers have gone beyond encouraging the struggle to actually designing for failure. Manu Kapureducational psychologist at ETH Zurich, has spent 17 years showing that students learn new concepts better and retain knowledge longer when they engage in what he calls “productive failure” – tackle a problem before getting instructions on exactly how to do it.