Welcoming Productive Struggle: Helping Kids Learn Without Giving Up

EP241: Struggle isn’t a setback ~ it’s part of the learning process. In this episode, we’re discussing how to welcome productive struggle in that powerful space where challenge leads to confidence, deeper understanding, and real growth.

As homeschooling parents, it can feel uncomfortable to watch our kids wrestle with something new, but this gentle kind of struggle is essential for learning.

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Find the Show Notes here  https://artofhomeschooling.com/episode241/

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcoming The Learning Struggle
• 1:34 Piaget’s Equilibrium And Real Learning
• 3:38 Why Challenge Builds The Brain
• 4:11 Strategies: Teach At The Just-Right Level
• 6:43 Scaffold Without Taking Over
• 7:49 Keep Challenges Small And Meaningful
• 8:34 Connection, Games, And Collaboration
• 9:06 Tracking Growth With Lesson Books
• 9:59 Destructive Struggle: What To Avoid
• 11:28 Practical Tips To Welcome Struggle
• 13:40 Mindset, Mistakes, And Einstein
• 15:03 Growth, Independence, And Resources
• 15:25 Closing: Choose Connection Over Perfection

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:09

You're listening to the Art of Homeschooling podcast, where we help parents cultivate creativity and connection at home. I'm your host, Jean Miller, and here on this podcast, you'll find stories and inspiration to bring you the confidence you need to make homeschooling work for your family. Let's begin. All learning involves a little struggle, that moment of wrestling with something new, stretching past what we already know. As homeschooling parents, we want our children to experience success and challenge. And striking that balance is one of the trickiest parts of homeschooling. That's exactly what we're exploring today. Welcoming the struggle, not rescuing kids from it. Most of us want to swoop in and help. Of course we do. We don't like seeing our kids feel uncomfortable. But when we solve the struggle for them, we take away the very thing that creates learning. We're robbing them of an opportunity. Let's go back to psychologist Jean Piaget. He talked about equilibrium and disequilibrium, words for how we process new information. Equilibrium is when new ideas fit into what we already know, when our background knowledge allows us to process and assimilate the new information. Disequilibrium happens when something doesn't fit and we have to adjust our understanding. When we encounter information that just doesn't align with our existing background knowledge, we feel uncomfortable and we have to puzzle things out in order to make accommodations for the new learning. Then the disequilibrium resolves and learning occurs. That uncomfortable space, though, that's where the magic happens. Learning requires it. As a teacher with a Master of Arts in teaching, I knew this in theory and still found it so hard to put into practice as a homeschooling mom of three. Watching a child wrestle with something new? Oh, it takes courage, theirs and ours. So the real question is: how much struggle is productive? Too much leads to frustration, overwhelm, our child giving up. Just enough, though, leads to confidence, a sense of pride, deeper learning, and that beautiful I did it glow. Productive struggle is the sweet spot. And here's how progress learning defines it. This is a quote. Productive struggle is when students tackle tasks slightly beyond their current level, requiring effort and problem solving to achieve deeper learning. End quote. This is exactly what we want for our kiddos, isn't it? Helping them to achieve deeper learning. There's also neuroscience behind this. Challenging tasks actually stimulate the production of myelin, which strengthens the brain's signals, basically upgrading our brain's wiring. A link to the Ed utopia article, The Neuroscience Behind Productive Struggle, plus a few more resources in the show notes if you want to dig deeper. And you can find those show notes at artofomeschooling.com/slash episode 241. Now for the big question: how do we invite productive struggle into our homeschools? Here are some strategies to encourage productive struggle. Number one, teach at the just right level. We want to teach our children at a level that ensures they will experience success while building on their prior knowledge and on prior mastered skills and prior experiences. It's a combination of challenge plus tools for success that might look like building math or phonics skills step by step, connecting new skills to mastered ones, pre-teaching in small bytes before a big lesson. Sometimes this means breaking things down further than we might have thought necessary or than the curriculum says to do, like building multiplication skills by first memorizing multiplication tables, and we would only do a few at a time, then learning mental math skills such as multiplying by tens, hundreds, thousands, then multiplying a two-digit number by a one-digit number, then multiplying a two-digit number by a two-digit number, a three-digit number by a two-digit number, and so on. This is where personalizing the curriculum becomes really important because some children are going to pick up on math skills really quickly, but struggle with writing. Others are going to need the math skills broken down even further than I described. So we really are observing each child to see where they are with certain skills and then helping them build on those. That's what teach at the just right level means. All right, strategy number two: offer support without taking over. Think of this like scaffolding. Use partnership writing where you're doing some writing together. Model thinking out loud. Break big tasks into small doable pieces. An example of this might be when you're teaching paragraph writing, you can do it through partnership writing, where we might write the topic sentence, the child writes the second sentence, and so on, with us ending by writing a concluding sentence. Strategy number three, keep challenge small but meaningful. One carefully worked long division problem beats 10 rushed ones, or 10 sloppy ones, or 10 where the understanding isn't really there. We want to foster hard work or challenge in small increments, focusing on quality over quantity. For example, we might present only one two-digit by four-digit long division problem, work through it with care, check the answer, and then let it rest until the next day. All right, strategy number four is foster connection and collaboration. I talk about connection a lot around here, and it's actually really important to learning. Games, conversations, teamwork, this collaborative writing. Learning really lands deeper when the relationship feels safe. So think of games like Bananagrams, Quiddler, or pairs in pairs, and they're all a really great way to foster connection and collaboration. And strategy number five, record progress over time. Main lesson books, notebooks, and portfolios give kids a visible record of their growth and their learning. We can help our children record their learning in a way that produces a tangible record of progress over time. Creating main lesson books are great for this. And then we can, with our children, revisit those books at the start and end of each main lesson block to celebrate their progress, but also see the progress. We can also help our children create main lesson books that can be used in the future as resources, such as a math notebook with examples, formulas, explanations, or language arts notebooks with spelling patterns, grammar rules, or spelling demons, the words that they've had trouble with. Kids love seeing how far they've come. All right, we're going to switch gears a little bit here and talk about what causes destructive struggle, because that is not something that's helpful to learning. What are some ways that teaching might result in destructive struggle? These tend to be situations where the child doesn't have the necessary background knowledge to do what you're asking them to do. They don't have enough support, they don't have clear expectations. So here are just a few examples. Dictating words that they haven't been taught yet, giving writing assignments with too little content knowledge, giving vague directions. We've all been there. I've done that. And expecting mastery of a skill that they've barely practiced. Maybe we introduced it, but they haven't practiced it a lot. Here are just a few scenarios that came to mind when I was writing this. Sometimes, maybe you can relate to this, we give instructions and then we just walk away. We expect our child to know what to do, but oftentimes what happens is that they might just quickly finish their drawing or writing and be done. Or perhaps we give an instruction and then walk away or get distracted and our child forgets what we asked them to do, or they lose momentum because we're not there for support. And then their work doesn't meet our expectations. The key is to recognize our role in the child's frustration and see what we could do differently. And finally, of course, we want to avoid anything that leads to a sense of shame, withdrawal, or that heartbreaking, I'm just not good at this. That's often a sign that we want to break things down further and offer more support. All right, I just want to give you some tips here for welcoming productive struggle because we do want to welcome it in, and we want to be there for it, be present to the productive struggle. So here's some tips for you. Help your child celebrate progress. Very important. Give clear instructions and have clear expectations. Teach your child where to find help. Dictionaries, past main lesson books, like I suggested, reference notebooks. Hold them accountable for prior learning by guiding them back to the previous main lesson blocks or skills blocks that you've done with them. Use multi-sensory methods, movement, manipulatives, art, music to help them engage. Don't assume that they should know something you haven't taught explicitly yet. Monitor the number of errors that they make and adjust the lessons as needed based on that. You can even try the playful let's trade strategy when frustration arises. If your child starts to get frustrated that their work isn't turning out, trade with them. This is a fun thing to try when you're working side by side with drawing, painting, modeling activities. They take your work and pick up from where you left off, and you take theirs and continue working with whatever is there. And then observe the results. Remember, it's better to be surprised and delighted that your child knows something rather than being disappointed that they don't. And he proudly declared that he already knew it. That is productive struggle at its finest. Now, as we wrap up, I have a gentle reminder for you. Struggle is not failure. It's evidence that learning is happening. Productive struggle doesn't mean that we abandon children to figure things out alone. It means we stand beside them, offering guidance without taking over. We choose tasks that stretch but don't crush. We help them sit with confusion without giving up. Mistakes aren't a detour. They are the path. They are opportunities for learning. Even Albert Einstein was on board with productive struggle. Here are a few great Einstein quotes. You never fail until you stop trying. Failure is success in progress. And a person who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. If Einstein can take 99 tries to get something right, and he has a great quote about that, our kiddos can take a few tries at it too. And as adults, we choose voluntary struggle all the time with working out, washing dishes, even when we don't feel like it, showing up for our children even when we're tired, choosing to learn something new, stepping outside our comfort zone. These things strengthen us. Just like my granddaughter learning to walk, talk about productive struggle. Our goal is growth, confidence, independence, and becoming lifelong learners. That's what we want for our children. We want to invite them forward without letting frustration shut them down. I'll put a link in the show notes to another resource that I think you'll really enjoy. It's the Rooted in Language video called Allowing Productive Struggle. So be sure to head over to Artofhomeschooling.com/slash episode 241 to find those show notes. Thanks for tuning in today. And here's to embracing the learning struggle one brave step at a time. That's all for today, my friend. But here's what I want you to remember. Rather than perfection, let's focus on connection. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you on the next episode of the Art of Homeschooling podcast.