On unproductive struggle
Some practices to avoid in the English classroom
Twitter (X) has become a den of iniquity. I fondly remember the time when most of my professional learning came from my interactions there, and I built up my initial newsletter audience from the community of good people who supported the risks I was taking with what I wanted to say. Now, those good people are still there, but it’s harder to find them among the dross. Every now and then, I will pop over to see what people are worried about in the online teaching world, and this week, it’s productive struggle in mathematics.
For those of you who keep your heads in English, literacy and reading, productive struggle is a methodology that’s promoted in mathematics as a way of making understanding more secure. The idea is that students who figure out procedures for themselves will have a stronger conceptual understanding. It’s pushed by researchers like Jo Boaler at Stanford. Greg Ashman is not a fan and recently wrote the article that gets to the core of productive struggle — is it even ethical? I know from my own research that wilfully withholding information from students does nothing for their wellbeing.
Thankfully, we don’t have Productive Struggle™ in English, but we certainly have practices that lead to unproductive struggle. Three cueing would have to be the obvious one. And ok, that method has been the subject of a big marketing push, but struggle certainly wasn’t marketed as a key selling point. You won’t hear many English or literacy teachers tell you they’re a big fan of struggle like they do in mathematics — yes, Boaler has legitimised this view. However, we have plenty of practices in English that induce struggle and are not very productive.
If you’ve read this newsletter for any amount of time, you’ll know that I have opinions, yes, but I don’t present myself as a teacher who came fully formed out of the womb of ITE. Whatever I know about teaching has been hard-won. I rarely walk out of a lesson completely happy; I read a lot and I listen to the many people who know more than me. I sometimes get a bit deflated by the online culture of, 'You’re doing it wrong.’ Even when you think you’re doing it right, there will be someone out there telling you that you’re just one gigantic lethal mutation. I’m not here to do that.
This post has one aim: to explain some practices that are widely accepted but may not be great for our students. I have (mostly) weaned myself off these practices and I write this post without judgement. Most of this advice will work for primary/elementary and secondary school.
Cold writes
For a number of years, I had found this practice to be unproductive, but it wasn’t until I co-wrote a post with Jeanette Breen from No More Marking that I realised how pointless and possibly damaging it was. I knew that cold writes rarely produced anything of value, but not too long ago, they were the norm, especially in secondary. I remember hearing at a conference that writing was ‘like a muscle,’ that all it needed was exercise. For a number of years, our department would start every lesson with a cold write and I lament the trees that died for this purpose. This advice works for something like training for a fun-run, but writing is a complex, biologically secondary skill.
Jeanette explained to me that for students who aren’t proficient writers, cold writes can be quite distressing. It’s interesting that primary schools who perform well in NAPLAN (our national standardised literacy test) often teach basic narrative structures to the point of automaticity so that their students can write something other than word vomit, and don’t choke in the moment. It’s not an ideal situation but knowing about how texts are structured is important knowledge too. I’ve also been told to spend at least as long in class on supporting student planning as I do on writing and that advice has been transformative.
Advising students to write about what they know
One of the problems that Jeanette also pointed out to me was that we have a tendency to treat young writers like mini-adults. I suppose that makes English no different to other subjects where students are advised to ‘think like a scientist/historian/economist etc’. I stopped giving this advice when I realised that students often don’t know very much — well, not very much that an adult would want to read. I changed my advice, telling students that they should probably not draw from personal experience, but that backfired too. At one point — and you can think I’m a horrible person if you like — I created a list of no-go tropes: stories set in New York, men crying a single tear, suicide (or any death), domestic violence and eating disorders.
At this point, these probably sound like secondary school problems, but I think they speak to planning. Plenty of writers — most — don’t write from their own standpoint. This idea that standpoint is everything is a pernicious myth, but that’s for another post. Many writers conduct extensive research to do justice to a character or setting. A little bit of carefully supported and curated research will give even primary school students something a bit meaty, with plenty of opportunity for complex characters and rich description, to write about. It’s all about knowledge. Knowledge of genre is also a great starting point. Most students can write a convincing gothic story with an understanding of the tropes, archetypes, vocabulary and syntax.
Group work and especially jigsaw teaching
I have committed the cardinal sin of starting a unit with jigsaw teaching. I still do group work but only when my students are no longer novices and they need to stretch their legs as per Kalyuga’s Expertise Reversal Effect. I call my usual seating plan ‘economy class,’ with rows of two, three, and two. Some of my students complain loudly when the seating is in groups and they’re not facing directly toward the front. Having said that, they love group work, but they also love the confidence that comes with being able to contribute. Like everything, there is a time and a place, but groupwork is the pedagogical equivalent of a ‘sometimes food.’
I remember rethinking group work after reading Graham Nuthall’s The Hidden Lives of Learners. Nuthall rigged mics into a classroom and observed what students did and didn’t learn, from the teacher and from each other. Misconceptions abounded. It’s a groundbreaking piece of research, but the takeaway for me was very simple — I have no mics and I need to observe what students are learning while I am teaching. It’s a big ask and pretty much impossible to do during group work. Jigsaw teaching makes any kind of quality control or checks for understanding impossible. Peer learning is very powerful with older students who need to solve some of their own study problems outside the classroom, but jigsaw ensures that students get one very mediocre exposure to mediocre content, and that’s if you’re lucky.
Popcorn reading
Before I knew anything about the Science of Reading, I thought popcorn, or round robin reading, was a good way to create accountability and engagement. It has to be noted that I worked with girls who could read and who were compliant, but the thing about passive disengagement is that it looks for all intents and purposes like good teaching is happening. I moved to a school where it was clear that not every student was a proficient reader — you only torture a class once before deciding that another strategy is needed. We engaged Emina McLean to teach us about Questioning the Author, and I would have to say that’s where my Science of Reading journey really began.
QTA asks students to do much of the heavy lifting with interpretation and connecting the dots in a text but with lots of carefully considered and planned teacher support. Far from chalk and talk, students are asked to be active readers, with the teacher reading passages aloud then asking carefully curated questions about language and meaning, encouraging students to think ahead. What this means in effect is that we can be a lot more ambitious with our text choices. Perhaps the biggest realisation I have made about SOR is that what works for primary works (with tweaks) for secondary. And secondly, if students haven’t learned a skill in primary school, then it’s on secondary teachers to fix that.
I’d love to hear about your experiences of unproductive struggle in the comments.
This is so similar to my experience of realising how inefficient jigsaw activities and other group work can be. I used to think it was because I wasn't doing it right or I was a 'control freak' teacher who didn't feel comfortable when students were 'doing their own thing'. Over the last 7 or 8 years I have been buoyed by the research demonstrating that these activities are not productive for most students and actually detrimental to those with LD. Well written again!
Hi Rebecca, I really appreciate your honesty. Thank you for putting your thinking out there as many of us face these same issues. I'm not a fan of cold writes, because in primary we know our students very well and we don't learn much we don't already know through this process. I don't know if cold writes create anxiety, but the most vulnerable students are yet again the most disadvantaged. To me it's valuable time lost we could be teaching something useful. I see best results when I do a deep dive into what I term the 'rich pedagogies' such as a version of Talk for Writing or Scaffolding Literacy. What happens then is that the difference in what's produced across the class is reduced dramatically, because everyone gets the benefit of quality whole class lessons. (I am familiar with TWR too though I've never seen kids produce great narratives solely based on TWR.) Like you I have sometimes developed a list of no go topics, decidedly more primary oriented than those you list. I've often banned big numbers eg, 104739000 years ago... Or repeated use of 'one year later..'.