What is productive struggle? I do not mean the dictionary definition per se. I mean the actual classroom example of productive struggle. In my opinion, productive struggle is when a student is wrestling with an idea in order to place it deeply within their cognitive memory so that they can reuse the information at another time or in another way. It is the wrestling part when we are really learning.
For example, while I have always been a techy teacher, I just completed my Computer Science endorsement in December of 2024. I will never forget how in the summer of 2023, I struggled. I like to imagine that I am relatively smart and that learning new things really comes naturally. However, that was not the case with computer science. That first semester I had to learn about logic gates, changing binary to integers, floating-point representations, and compression of text and pictures in the first lesson! I really felt like I was learning a brand new language. I found it interesting, but it was tough. I had a one-to-one meeting with my professor about it all. He said I needed to learn and understand the vocabulary first. He suggested ways to do it including taking one word at a time and really thinking about it and applying it in my head as I went about my day. That worked! After a while I really not only understood the vocabulary, but I also could apply it in practice.
This is what I feel is missing right now in education. I think that too many students do not want to do wrestling with the material. They want to understand it now so they can get back to doing whatever it is they enjoy doing, whether it be scrolling through social media or playing video games. School is not highly exciting to most students and so students really do not want to spend their time doing school.
In the 1980s, I was in high school. For me, it was not the Atari or the Odyssey that was exciting. It was MTV. I really did want my MTV. It was on the only color television in my home and I would have that on from the time I came home from school until I went to bed and then when I got up in the morning again. My mom was not much of a tv watcher so for the most part it was mine. I remember Fridays and the top 5 countdown and how excited I was to see if Def Leppard was still number one with Pour Some Sugar on Me. Those were such amazing times, but they were my distraction from school. Somehow though with MTV in the background, I wrote papers, completed assignments, journaled for Creative Writing class thanks to Mr. Fred Chesek, and drew diagrams for Drafting class thanks to Mr. Wall.
So, where was the productive struggle you may ask? Oh, it was in Chemistry and Physics. I would stay after and work with teachers on those topics. I loved science but until Mr. Dooley really explained how formulas worked, nothing clicked. After all, it was not all easy. So, there were times of productive struggle. I wanted it. I am not sure that students today want it. They want a way out. This is not true of every student. I am not making a generalization about all students, just many of them. Over my 30 year career, I have seen this more and more. It is rather scary to see how this is unfolding. I am not one for rote memorization, but sometimes it is the memorization that needs to happen to get it to stick in the brain. Can you imagine a doctor that did not know what to call your problem and used words like thingy? Or even a plumber who calls everything pipe even though I know those pipes must have names.
Where am I going with this? We have to figure out how to make the struggle actually matter to them. No app or shortcut is ever going to do the hard thinking for a kid. They have to find that little bit of personal drive that keeps them sitting at the kitchen table long after the screen is off, trying to make the pieces fit together. This is where students will master the material for their futures.
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