How Do You Support Students Through Productive Struggle?

When your students struggle, your instinct may be to jump in and help them. You care about your students, and you don’t want to see them fail. Instead of intervening at the first sign of trouble, guide your students through productive struggle. This sounds counterintuitive, but for students to become independent learners, they must be able to persist in the face of challenges. This is a skill set that will benefit students in every aspect of their lives.

What is productive struggle?

In education, it can sometimes be challenging to understand and accurately define what it means for students to struggle productively. Productive struggle is when students are at full capacity with their understanding and continue to explore different avenues to solve problems. Students may make mistakes and try out different ways to remedy those mishaps, but they are still fully engaged with the activity. Think about other skills students might learn in their lifetime: how to ride a bicycle, how to shoot a free throw, or how to play the violin. Productive struggle seems natural when you’re learning those things. You fall, miss shots, and play the wrong notes. However, we do not discourage struggle in those areas. Struggle leads to learning because it allows students to fail forward and make progress toward success.

Productive struggle relies on guidance and intentionality in lesson and curriculum design. It is the point at which students are challenged but not overwhelmed. Challenges can become unproductive when concepts are completely out of reach or the struggle has no relation to the task at hand. For example, if your students are having difficulty planning a solution in an engineering challenge, allow time for them to struggle. Monitor the group’s work to ensure that the struggle comes from a productive place of trying to develop a collaborative solution and not from interpersonal issues or confusion around directions, both of which are examples of unproductive sources of struggle.

Why is it important?

Lev Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development defines the space between what a learner can do without assistance and what a learner can do with adult guidance. The Zone of Proximal Development is the zone where instruction is most beneficial as it is when the task is just beyond the individual’s capabilities. For students to learn, they must be presented with tasks that are just out of their ability range. Challenging tasks promote maximum cognitive growth. In his zone of proximal development, Lev Vygotsky believed that providing students with the appropriate amount of assistance will help them accomplish the task.

Embracing productive struggle in your classroom allows students to build resilience, perseverance, and grit. Students become capable, independent learners and fearless risk-takers. Learning to accept struggle in the classroom also teaches students how to struggle appropriately and productively, which serves as a building block for future learning struggles. Help students focus on science concepts by removing barriers to accessing content.

Why do teachers struggle with productive struggle?

Understanding that when something doesn't work, it’s a valuable learning opportunity instead of a failed idea is a mindset that can be challenging for educators. We know it’s difficult to let go of the reins, and it’s common for educators to interrupt productive struggle. Here are ways you may find yourself interrupting productive struggle.

• Providing support too quickly
• Offering to get students started or telling them how to move on to the next step
• Suggesting that they only use one solution path
• Praising only the correct answers rather than the journey taken to attain them

Successfully facilitating productive struggle is a skillset that takes time to master. The more you practice allowing space for productive struggle, the easier it gets.

How does PhD Science embrace productive struggle?

PhD Science® recognizes how important productive struggle is for development. And that’s why rigor and challenge are written into the curriculum. PhD Science was built around these three curriculum pillars:

• The curriculum helps students build knowledge through a deep exploration of scientific concepts.
• The curriculum is coherent, as student knowledge builds and transfers across lessons, modules, and contexts.
• The structure of PhD Science sets the tone for rigorous and joyfully engaging lessons. The structure supports productive struggle opportunities throughout each module. 

Let’s dive into an example from Level 4 on Energy.

In this fourth grade module, students study the anchor phenomenon, Windmills at Work, to build an answer to the module’s Essential Question: How do windmills change wind to light? Throughout the module, students use their knowledge of energy classification, transfer, and transformation to explain the windmill phenomenon. They develop the enduring understanding that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can be transferred and transformed to be useful in different ways. 

Students get to see the power of wind for themselves as they build their own windmills to observe the transfer and transformation of energy. Student groups have open time to explore the materials as they try different configurations to build a complete circuit that makes the LED light up when air passes the windmill blades. The photo on the left shows the materials, and the photo on the right shows one correct configuration that will cause the LED to light up.

What challenge could this activity present to students? Where might students struggle?

• Groups might have difficulty agreeing on a setup.
• Some students may struggle with their fine motor skills.
• Some students might not produce enough wind.
• Some groups might get their windmill working before others.
• Students might not succeed in getting their LED to light up.

Investigations like this one might require you, as the teacher, to provide scaffolds to ensure an appropriate level of struggle. No matter the type of support in place, it’s paramount that every student has the opportunity to problem solve.

It's important to teach students that it's okay for something to be challenging. Scientists don't always get it right the first time either. Failure is an integral part of the scientific process. We can help students understand that when something doesn't work, it’s a valuable learning opportunity instead of a failed idea. This mindset can be difficult for students to embrace because of how traditional school settings only look for the right answer and “failing,” so to speak, isn’t embraced as an opportunity to grow and learn.

How can we as teachers and facilitators support students with productive struggle? 

Thankfully, we don’t have to completely reinvent the wheel. Catherine Conner, author of “Understanding and Using Productive Struggle in the Classroom” states “to use productive struggle in the classroom or become a warm demander, consider modifications or additions to existing course design or teaching strategies rather than a wholesale redesign of a course. Sometimes involving students in the design or modification of a task or project not only helps them understand the process, but it also demonstrates the benefits of collaboration and working toward a common goal.”

Here are some ways research tells us we can help students through challenging situations:

• Acknowledge perseverance and effort in reasoning and sensemaking through process-oriented tasks or projects rather than right or wrong outcomes. 
• Establish noncompetitive learning environments by using process-oriented activities and assessments. 
• Foster learning from mistakes to build self-efficacy and resiliency—adopt a “no quitting” attitude.
• Encourage curiosity and risk-taking through exploration. 
• Honor students’ prior or “personal” knowledge to create meaning.

What are the teacher supports of PhD Science?

PhD Science has a variety of teacher supports in place to help you provide your students with the right level of support. The Teacher Edition occasionally includes reminders to allow time for productive struggle or gives suggestions on how to support students without overstepping. Side notes provide extra guidance on how to assist students as well as teacher tips for student groupings or investigation setup. In cases of Engineering Challenges, many solutions can lead students to be successful, which encourages novel thinking that may involve some struggle. We offer Collaborative Conversation Prompts that teachers can use to prompt thinking rather than giving away answers. The Collaborative Conversation Prompts are available for free as part of the Implementation Guide found in the Teacher Resource Pack. Think time is often provided to students individually or collaboratively prior to ideas being shared with the larger class. 

Productive struggle can be frustrating for students at times, and it’s important for educators to realize when a level of frustration may be near to provide appropriate accommodations and scaffolds. When students work through challenges and finally achieve their goal, it leads to those aha! moments that we all want our students to achieve. These moments generate excitement and build momentum in learning.