Students should do hard things they're not good at yet

“Okay, now open the valve…no, back it off a little bit…you’re doing great!” (Image by A_Different_Perspective from Pixabay)

At a party for The Little Middle School, I watched a student cut herself a piece of cake.

It was a challenging motor planning exercise with many elements. At what angle should the knife be held? What side of the cake should I cut into? How do I deal with the fact that my height relative to the cake is not optimal? How do I get the cake onto my plate with this cake knife? How do I balance the weight transfer of the piece of cake onto the plate I’m holding if my dominant hand is busy with the cake knife?

She managed — barely. But it was time well spent. The more she practices such tasks, the better she will get at them. There is no shortcut and no substitute.

It’s always easier and more efficient to do things for children, especially if they’re small. The urgency of getting out the door means that I should pour your juice, butter your toast, tie your shoes, and zip your jacket. The bureaucracy of school means I should give you an easy-to-grade worksheet featuring fill-in-the-blank questions than to ask you to write a paragraph about what you remember from your reading assignment, and I should just to tell you to “keep change flip” instead of spending time modeling the concept of dividing a fraction by a fraction.

These common shortcuts that don’t lead us anywhere worth going. This is how we end up with twelve-year-olds who don’t know how to make themselves breakfast or write cohesive, coherent paragraphs. What are we rushing out the door for, anyway? What is the point of what we’re learning in school?

If you believe, as I do, that adults have the responsibility of developing confident, capable, and resourceful human beings, it is clear that to do things for children that they could be doing for themselves carries short-term benefits that harm a child’s long-term prospects.

When I, as a teacher, ask a student a question in a one-on-one lesson, it is so tempting to fill the silence with information, hints, and encouragement, just as it’s tempting to say, “let me do it,” when a child is struggling to put on his shirt. But that gap before we rush in to help is where the learning happens. In the discomfort of, “I don’t know this,” or “I can’t do this,” a human being has to figure something out. They may not get it on their own, but we will never know if we don’t leave space for it to happen.

In the context of formal education, stripping away the help (what educators call “scaffolding”) allows us to see what a student can truly do on their own. Scaffolding is useful, but not when it obscures reality. When we can see a student’s capabilities clearly, we can make a better plan moving forward.

For example, many guitar teachers play along with their students. This can be really useful: It helps students to get the feel for the music more quickly and leads to a fuller-sounding performance (people play together in bands for a reason). However, some guitar teachers never let their students play alone! Not only does the student become reliant on the teacher to cover up mistakes, he never takes a lead role in the performance, content to simply follow along. After a few years of this, some students can’t play by themselves — which means that they can’t play. In order to correct the problem, guess what: The student will need to be asked to play by himself. from there, all issues can be identified and addressed.

If a student is struggling to determine which of two decimals is greater, I can quickly show them a procedure to follow to get the right answer, whether or not they can demonstrate their understanding of the why behind it. It takes much longer to ensure and extend their understanding of place value by asking guiding questions that lead them to build models and make inferences. It could take weeks instead of minutes. Is it worth it?

In my world, it is. It can be a little scary, though. When you see, in a student’s own handwriting, in their own words, what they can actually convey of what they know and understand, you might see that they have a long way to go. And at first, the going is much slower. We’re used to science fair projects that demonstrate mom and dad’s resourcefulness and graphic design skills, school plays in which all the jokes, costumes, and scenery were created by adults, and essays that benefited from the deft hand of an experienced editor. Students’ own work seems unpolished and underdeveloped by comparison.

However, when we make room for developing human beings to try and fail at difficult things, we give them the opportunity to get better. We can put our focus and praise on progress and effort instead of the outcome. This is real learning.

Ironically, if we are willing to experience the disappointment of poor results and the anxiety of being behind schedule, we will find that the outcomes actually improve. Having been given the time and space to practice and perfect important skills, the children in our care will be able to make meaningful contributions to family and community life long before they reach adulthood.