When to Help and When to Hold Back

Vicki Davis (00:00): Happy Thought Leader Thursday. This is episode 999. Yes, I said 999. Something extra special planned for tomorrow. Today, though, we’re talking about productive struggle with Barbara Blackburn, letting kids wrestle with hard things without letting them drown. Let’s talk about productive struggle.

Announcer (00:19): This is the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:24): Today we’re welcoming back Dr. Barbara Blackburn. If you have been around my show for very long, you know Barbara. She’s a top global guru in education, author of more than 40 books on rigor, motivation, and so many other things. Most recently, she has been on my podcast, the 10 Minute Teacher, episode 833 on rigor in education.

Last time we talked about rigor, but today we’re going a level deeper into productive struggle and how we let students wrestle with hard things without letting them drown. As we’re recording this, she has two new books on productive struggle, one for the earlier and secondary grades. Barbara, productive struggle, how would you define productive struggle? Is it just that frustration like I can’t do this? Or what is productive struggle?

Barbara Blackburn (01:19): It’s interesting when you say what exactly is it because just from an informal perspective, it’s the sweet spot. It’s the Goldilocks, it’s not too hard, not too easy, it’s just right. When I was working on the book, one of the things that I really wanted to do was provide a framework. So I looked for the research that would support it, what were the educational philosophies behind productive struggle, which it was amazing how much there was.

But I really came up with a structured definition, which I had done with rigor and it was really helpful. Productive struggle is an opportunity. So it’s something you give students an opportunity for. For students to participate in a structured instructional situation in which they adapt current knowledge to solve a novel problem. They’re given the opportunity, but it’s a structured situation. You don’t just throw something at them that’s hard. You craft something that’s going to let them take what they already know, but apply it in a new and different way that is going to be challenging. And that’s what productive struggle is.

Vicki Davis (02:23): Some folks when you talk productive struggle, like, well, school’s already too hard. You need to make it easier. And I’m like, hey, video game failure rate is about an 80 percent. So kids do like to play the video games. And here they have a productive struggle. They’re getting what they need to go to the next level, not everything at once. Cascading information theory is what they call it in video games. So you really talk a lot about releasing intrinsic motivation. So how does this productive struggle make kids want to learn more and not quit?

Barbara Blackburn (02:58): Well, students are motivated intrinsically by two key areas. One is value and two is success. So students are motivated when they see value in something, whether that’s relevance or whether that’s an activity because they’re more motivated by an activity. That’s what’s going on with the video games, is they’re motivated by the activity itself, or they may be motivated by the relationship. And what’s interesting is that all three of those can work together.

And in a productive struggle situation, you can’t just throw something at them, but you also can’t give them something they’re not interested in. So I need to find something that shows the relevance. My niece, I remember when she was in the first grade, for her relevance was the fact that the teacher used the names of her dogs in a math word problem. So it doesn’t have to be, you’re gonna apply this in life this way.

It can be a couple of different ways, but students need to see that. But the other key piece of productive struggle is that students need to feel like they can be successful. So again, you want it to be challenging, but not so challenging that they think that it’s a lost cause. When I think about students I taught, I remember hearing one student tell me one time that he knew that such and such a teacher didn’t respect him.

And I said, Well, how do you know that that teacher doesn’t respect you? And he said, Because she never gives me anything hard to do. He took the…

Vicki Davis (04:22): Wow.

Barbara Blackburn (04:23): …fact that it was too easy to mean that she didn’t respect him. Now, the reality was she was dumbing it down and she shouldn’t have been doing that. But she didn’t think about the respect angle of it. And that’s what students feel in terms of success. You want them to need to work at it a little bit now.

A key part of productive struggle that a lot of people forget about is that there is still support and scaffolding. You do not just throw them into an activity and leave them alone. You watch. You teach them how to scaffold themselves. You keep a good eye so that if you need to come over and step in and ask some guiding questions, you do that. You may need to step in with a graphic organizer that helps them organize. You don’t organize it for them, you help them organize it.

So scaffolding still happens in productive struggle because otherwise they do feel like you just let them out to dry. You know, you just left them out there and they don’t know what to do. So the success piece partly comes from what you still do. Productive struggle is so much an active part for the teacher. It really is not just students doing it by themselves. If anything, the teacher is more active in terms of monitoring and watching and guiding and really helping, but not helping too much.

Vicki Davis (05:42): And there is that tension. I mean, to me, you’re talking about the craftsmanship of teaching, you know, being the teacher that you don’t let them drown, but you also don’t rescue too soon because they have that productive struggle and you see that, but the bell rings in two minutes. You know, how do you advise teachers about not stepping in with that rescue moment in actually demotivating the child?

Barbara Blackburn (06:05): I would say when you think a student needs help, to count to 20 before you do anything. And then ask yourself, do they need my help now or can I wait a little bit? And if you’re not sure, then wait a little bit and go check on somebody else and then come back because they do need to struggle. I’ll tell you who we do this with the most is our struggling students, the ones who are always struggling. We think we have to save them.

And we’re never going to help them get better if we are always saving them. Because then what are they going to do by themselves when we’re not there? And so we really do have to gauge that. And I’ve been guilty of it too. When I was a teacher, I just so did not want my students to struggle. I wanted them to be happy and healthy and just great students. And if they needed me to save them, I would do that. But that is one of the worst things we can do. Now what I will do is if a student is really struggling, I’ll come over and say, you know, it looks like you’re struggling a little bit. What I want to do is I’m going to let you work for another two minutes and then I’m going to come back. But I want you to try something before I come back and I’ll check on that. And then when I come back, I say, show me what you tried. So I’m not again just saving them. I’m really, really encouraging them to try it on their own. And what we know from research, Marzano was big in this, is that if we encourage effort, students begin to demonstrate more effort and over time their achievement goes up. But if we say, it’s okay that you didn’t know that, you know, not everybody’s good at math, or gifted students, if we say, You’re so smart, I knew you would get that, they start showing less effort. And over time their achievement actually goes down. So with productive…

Vicki Davis (07:51): Well.

Barbara Blackburn (07:52): …struggle, you’ve really got to reinforce this effort piece.

Vicki Davis (07:55): And you know, this kind of goes into the debate about homework because one of the challenges is a teacher says, okay, I’m really respecting and trying to let them have the productive struggle. But the fact is, if they don’t finish it in class, they’re gonna take it home and in math, they’re gonna go do Photomath. You know, parents are trying to quote help their kids. I don’t know how to do the math. I’m helping my child by giving them a subscription to Photomath. Or my child doesn’t know how to write, they have no choice. What can they? Because there is a lot of justification going on right now.

A lot of it of making excuses for not letting kids have that productive struggle. But I mean, isn’t productive struggle part of a successful life? Like you struggle…

Barbara Blackburn (08:37): Yes. I mean,

Vicki Davis (08:38): When you write your books, right?

Barbara Blackburn (08:40): Yes, not as much as I used to, but I still struggle.

Vicki Davis (08:43): Ha ha.

Barbara Blackburn (08:44): I still will get to a chapter and have to really think through it and work through it and, you know, make some changes before I like what it is. I mean, we all do that. I don’t know of anyone who is out in the workforce who doesn’t struggle with something. We all come home. I mean, think about this for your listeners, think about this. When you come home today, what’s the first thing you’re gonna tell your family member, spouse, pet, whoever about? What are you gonna tell them about? Are you gonna tell them about the best thing that happened, or are you gonna lead with what you struggled with? And chances are you’re gonna lead with what you struggled with. And we all struggle with things. The reason, one of the reasons that I wrote the books on productive struggle is because I really think that’s the purpose of education. And I got this from my dad. That’s this picture behind me. He told me one time, right when I was a beginning teacher, I said, What is the purpose of education? He was a college professor. And he said, The best one I ever heard came from a third grade teacher. And she said, the purpose of education is to teach kids how to figure out what to do when they don’t know what to do. I love that because that is life. Every single day we have to figure out what to do when we don’t know what to do.

Barbara Blackburn (10:06): […] I kicked into figuring out what to do when I didn’t know what to do.

Vicki Davis (10:09): Yeah.

Barbara Blackburn (10:09): I mean, everything that I needed to do, I just kicked into gear. And we do that all the time. The air conditioner goes out. What do you do? Something happens to your car. What do you do? You run out of gas. What do you do when you don’t know what to do? That is life. And that is what productive struggle is.

And if we don’t teach that, then we are raising a generation of students who will not know how to problem solve. And our society will be far worse off for that.

Vicki Davis (10:39): Well, the word struggle, you know, struggle isn’t optional. Struggle is a mandatory part of life. The question is, is the struggle going to be productive? Are we going to move forward? Or is that struggle just going to be anxiety-producing, upsetting? We just get upset about it, but we don’t do anything. We just kind of like let life happen to us. And we want kids to have that productive struggle.

Let’s make this real in a classroom. Pick an elementary classroom and a teacher is teaching a subject, you pick the subject. You have strategies for helping kids with productive struggle? What might be one thing that’s done in that particular classroom as a result of reading your book for an elementary class?

Barbara Blackburn (11:24): Let’s do an upper elementary. Okay. That way the secondary folks keep listening. Okay. This will be a good one for you too.

Vicki Davis (11:28): Okay.

Barbara Blackburn (11:29): And this one is science. The productive…

Vicki Davis (11:32): Okay.

Barbara Blackburn (11:32): …struggle task is to build a bridge. Based on what we have been learning in class, build the strongest bridge possible using items you can find in our classroom. When you present your bridge, prove to the rest of your classmates why it is strong. That’s the productive struggle task. It’s open-ended, there’s some justification with it, there’s some creativity with it, there’s definitely problem solving. So you’ve got all these different elements and learning dispositions mixed in. The heart of the task is that you’ve got to choose the strongest elements. What I recommend is a graphic organizer that’s just a three-column graphic organizer, and they go around.

And they find their items and they list if they’re strong or weak, and then they rank their choices after they have them all. So the graphic organizer helps them think about not just if it’s strong or weak, but where they would rank. So which ones are stronger or weaker. And then they have the final items to use, and then they can justify why they built a strong bridge. And so something as simple as that. I’m not doing it for students. I’m just giving them a placeholder to put information. I think graphic organizers are very effective. I absolutely think they’re very effective because that’s what they do for students. They help them take all this information that’s in their head that’s jumbled up and actually organize it in a way that helps them solve the problem. And so that’s just one real simple example.

Vicki Davis (12:58): You’ve given us some great ideas, what is something that a teacher could go into their classroom tomorrow and bring into their classroom to build productive struggle into a lesson that they already have prepared?

Barbara Blackburn (13:11): Hmm, that’s a hard question.

Okay, I’m gonna go with mischievous misconceptions. Mischievous misconceptions. And what you do is that during lessons, whatever you’re teaching, anything you’re doing, you’re looking for students to make a mistake, to come up with a misconception. And what you wanna do is celebrate those. And you ask them to share it, then you have the class work together to solve it, and then you post it on the wall, the misconception, and then what it is correctly.

And you actually begin to celebrate the fact that mistakes and misconceptions are a natural part of learning and a natural part of struggling. And that if you make those and then learn from them, that’s to be celebrated. And I love that because that goes with everything.

Vicki Davis (13:59): Absolutely. It’s just part of the growth process is that sometimes we get it right, but if we don’t know it, you know, I used to tell students and I’m big on the pretest. I think we talked about that on another show. Hey, what do you know? And they would be so upset, I don’t know any of this. Well then why am I teaching it to you if you already knew it? It’s okay to not know it, but now you know what we’re gonna be teaching.

So that’s kind of part of it. So we’ve been talking with Barbara Blackburn. The name of the books are Productive Struggle in the K–5 Classroom: Strategies Across the Content Areas. And then her newer book, Productive Struggle in the 6–12 Classroom: Strategies Across the Content Areas. I will link in the show notes all of her back episodes because they are so practical, they are so real and grounded in the classroom.

And we do need to acknowledge that even with our struggles, we don’t make excuses, we always make progress. And I think that’s what Barbara’s ideas give us. So thanks for coming on the show, Barbara.

Announcer (14:59): Thank you for tuning in to 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Join us here every weekday and subscribe to the Classroom Matters newsletter. See you later, educator.