The Power of Productive Struggle

As teachers, we want our students to embrace 21st century learning skills like collaboration, communication, creativity, and critical thinking. We know that these skills set kids up for success in high school, college, and the workforce. We all want our students to become positive contributing members of society, but teaching these skills is hard– especially when you are met with resistance.

It’s no secret that teachers are hard pressed to find the time within the school day to:

• follow strict curricular pacing guides
• teach social emotional learning skills
• keep kids engaged in both academic and behavioral learning

On the flip side, kids are being asked to challenge themselves over and over again throughout the school day. The level of student preparedness to rise to meet those challenges varies greatly–requiring a great deal of extra work for the teacher in the form of differentiation and flexibility.

How do we challenge students just enough that they are engaged in authentic learning and still having fun?

Fun as a Motivator

Fun provides the right kind of motivation—intrinsic, not extrinsic—for sustained effort on rigorous academic and social tasks. In turn, succeeding at such tasks creates not only long-lasting learning but changed beliefs about one’s abilities. Moreover, tackling these kinds of challenges and problem solving in group settings builds community.

For many kids, school is not fun. While school doesn’t have to be, and maybe even shouldn’t be, fun all the time, a dose of true fun at school can help offset the aspects of education that aren’t so fun.

The Unfortunate Power of Non-Fun at School

In the Harry Potter stories, when magical children arrive at Hogwarts, a sorting hat permanently assigns them to different houses. This process might not seem so bad in fiction. However, the way in which our real-life educational system puts sorting hats on kids’ heads over and over is decidedly not fun, and it can have pernicious effects.

By the time children reach late elementary school, they are judged repeatedly on their academic performance. These formal and informal perceptions become very apparent to the kids themselves, whether through report cards, ability groupings, or other kinds of self-evident means of sorting and assessing.

Unfortunately, these academic judgments can give rise to early fixed self-identities around school performance and, by extension, learning ability and even intelligence. Fixed mindsets of this type are detrimental to children’s growth; they can become self-fulfilling prophecies, having a negative impact upon a student’s willingness to engage in activities that require problem solving and critical thinking.

The Trouble With Testing

All too often, kids who bomb a third-grade standardized math test start to believe they’re terrible at math—and their ability to learn further math is undermined. Additionally, kids who aced the test can become fearful of making mistakes and suffer from impostor syndrome.

As schools assess children on the basis of what they’ve learned, and how quickly and well they’ve learned it, the activity of learning itself becomes strongly associated with school. Learning becomes a means to an end: good grades, teacher or parent approval, admission to the top math group, promotion to the next grade level, and so on. These motivations are extrinsic, not intrinsic.

Well-meaning teachers, departments, schools, and districts try to promote the love of learning for its own sake. But within school settings, the tide pulls systematically and strongly toward extrinsically motivated learning. Unfortunately, extrinsic motivation doesn’t really work for the kinds of higher-order critical thinking tasks at which we especially want kids to succeed.

Extrinsic Motivation: More of a Stick than a Carrot

Sadly and ironically, extrinsic motivation is much less effective than intrinsic motivation at creating deep and lasting educational impact—and yet we use extrinsic motivation all the time to reward performance and behavior in school.

Extrinsic rewards, also known as “if-then rewards” and “contingent motivators,” do motivate better performance on cognitively simple tasks. If you want to get someone to dig a ditch faster, you should pay that person more money. However, after a certain point, extrinsic rewards actually cause performance to get worse on cognitively complex tasks. The extrinsic reward narrows thinking and increases stress, hindering creative leaps that are necessary to solve the task. This effect, first discovered 80 years ago, has been replicated many times since then, including by Dan Ariely, as described by Daniel Pink in a fantastic TED talk.

Extrinsic motivators can also inflict longer-term damage on the desire to engage with challenges and problem solving.

The Power of Fun as an Intrinsic Motivator

What kids need is intrinsic motivation. We should prioritize and celebrate the fun and wonder of learning itself. We want our students to be excited about learning, so it has to include a level of fun.

Author Catherine Price describes true fun as “magical confluence of playfulness, connection and flow.” in The Power of Fun. She claims that “[i]f you use True Fun as your compass, you will be happier and healthier. You will be more productive, less resentful, and less stressed. You will have more energy. You will find community and a sense of purpose. You will stop languishing and start flourishing. And best of all? You’ll enjoy the process.”

And enjoying the process is exactly what we want for our kids.

Productive Struggle Leads to Personal Transformation

In education, “productive struggle” (which Manu Kapur calls “productive failure”) is considered ideal for learning. Students should be working on tasks that are “just right” in level of difficulty, with expert guidance that’s alternately reassuring and challenging. Under these Goldilocks conditions, learners grow in both skill and confidence.

Dweck’s growth mindset and Duckworth’s grit are famous qualities that enable, and in turn are reinforced by, productive struggle. Over time, productive struggle against a laddered sequence of authentic tasks in a field can fundamentally transform a learner’s self-identity around that field, moving from “I’m terrible at math and I hate it” to “I can do math and I like it!”

Is Productive Struggle Happening in Schools?

Unfortunately for schools, productive struggle on cognitively complex tasks is difficult to foster in extrinsically motivated environments. Performance on tasks that require hard thought decreases under high-anxiety conditions, especially in the presence of a high-stakes rewards structure. School grades present especially high-stakes rewards and ego-relevant threats, because grades are seen as diagnostic of important inherent characteristics, such as intelligence.

Challenging work can be risky to assign. Active learning activities that spur productive struggle lead to better learning outcomes but can actually cause students to feel worse in a traditional classroom.

But what if we made these complex tasks that require critical thinking skills into fun, collaborative, academic games? When students collaborate and engage in higher level thinking to solve problems, they are practicing the skills we want them to master to effectively face challenges. Academic puzzles, when purposefully assigned to students, can make a world of difference in developing the important 21st century skills we want them to embrace.

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Silverquicken’s difficult, cognitively complex challenges leave kids intrinsically motivated. Students work hard in Silverquicken for fun. The “a-ha” moments are meaningful and transformative, and naturally foster productive struggle in a collaborative setting.