Life is hard and we try to make it easier. Every
technological advance we’ve ever made, from the digging stick to the
Smartphone, springs from this simple statement. Life is hard and we try to make
it easier. So it has always been; so it will always be.
There’s nothing very controversial about that idea, but
what’s interesting is the extent to which our desire to make things easier for
ourselves may undermine our efforts or make us less happy and successful. There
is something in us that doesn’t really like
it when things are too easy—and easier may not actually be better for us.
When I was a child, in the 1970s, the country was still in
the middle of its love affair with technology and science. Processed food was
better than natural food; infant formula was better than breast milk; TV
dinners and microwaves were better than cooking from scratch. So much
convenience! Life was hard, but technology could make it easier. It was the
World of Tomorrow that Disneyland and the World’s Fair promised for much of the
20th century.
The backlash started while I was still a teenager: maybe all
those chemically processed things weren’t actually good for you. The Whole Earth Catalogue, health food stores, and whatever
remnant of the hippie movement survived into their 30s brought a focus on
authenticity and naturalness into the mainstream. And more recently, we’ve seen
a different kind of backlash, against the very idea of ease. Now we want things to be “artisanal,” and we want to be
involved in the making, ourselves, if we can. Cooking from scratch is
difficult, time consuming, and requires some knowledge and skill, but for some
people, eating pre-packaged meals (no matter how organic or healthy) is just…a
drag. Suddenly we’re seeing all kinds of meal-kit services popping up to
provide just enough ease, while still
requiring us to do some of the work. It turns out that we actually like to do
the work. We get enjoyment and satisfaction out of it. We appreciate the fruits
of our efforts more when there is
some effort. Just…not too much. Build your own furniture…with an Allen wrench
from Ikea.
We’re seeing the same thing in automobile technology. Google
and others are pushing hard for self-driving cars, and someday I’m sure there
will be a percentage of people who make use of them. But for a whole lot of
people, driving is fun, and the thought of surrendering all control is not a pleasant idea. I wouldn’t be surprised to see
a future where most of us make use of a wide range of assistive technologies,
while still keeping our hands on the wheel. We’ll end up doing some of the work—enough to get some
enjoyment out of the process and feel a little
bit in control—while still reaping the benefits of the assistive
technologies that can unsnarl traffic jams and keep us from drifting out of our
lanes.
What does this have to do with education? A lot! We’ve been
searching for all kinds of ways to make learning easier, to increase student engagement
and motivation. Schools adopt 1:1 laptop policies to put computers into the
hands of every student so that they won’t have to take notes by hand. Schools
de-emphasize memorization on the theory that the Internet holds all the factual
knowledge students will ever need. Many schools use open-source videos to
augment or replace textbook reading. At my son’s high school, the science
teachers prepare PowerPoint presentations of their lessons and deliver those
slide decks, with their notes, straight to the students. Everyone applauds to
see adults making an effort to ease the path for students and not bog them down
with old-fashioned schoolwork like memorization, recitation, note-taking, and
textbook reading. But what if the drive to increase ease decreases learning?
What if learning something actually requires
a certain amount of effort?
Research seems to suggest that it does. Authors Peter C.
Brown, Henry L., Rodiger III, and Mark A McDaniel provide a wide array of
examples of how increasing student effort
at learning also increases later retrieval of that learning, in their book, Make
it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Writing things down by
hand seems to have a stronger effect on remembering what you’ve written than
typing or dictating the same words. Memorizing and repeating basic factual
knowledge helps build a foundation of conceptual understanding that makes all
future learning more meaningful and stickier in the mind. Active manipulation
of the instructional content, rather than passive viewing of it, makes a huge
difference in how deeply and permanently that content is learned. Spacing out practice
and assessment sessions over a period of time, rather than doing massed
practice and testing shortly after instruction, allows some time for forgetting
and makes the effort at retrieval both harder and more durable over the longer term. We’ve known for a long time
that cramming for a test may help you on test day, but it doesn’t help you
remember things a week later. Now we’re starting to understand why.
Some education thinkers and writers use the term “productive
struggle” to talk about this idea that a certain
amount of sweat aids learning. It’s like the idea of the Goldilocks
Zone or Vygotsky’s Zone
of Proximal Development: that sweet spot where conditions are just right
for growth. Make the work too easy and you won’t learn anything new from it;
make it too hard and you won’t even be able to do it. Think of lifting weights
in the gym: you could bench press a 1-pound weight all day, and it wouldn’t
have much effect on your muscle tone. You could struggle all day with a
500-pound weight and accomplish nothing but a headache.
This makes the work of the teacher even more complicated
than it already was, because every child’s zone of productive struggle is a
little bit different from every other child’s—and not only that, but his zone
of struggle may not be the same in math, English, science, or social studies…OR
in Unit 1, Unit 2, Unit 3, and Unit 4! Aim for the average every day—average amount
of instructional time, average difficulty level of assignment—and you’ve made
plans that fit no single student perfectly.
So what can we do? Assess constantly, adjust constantly,
have alternative explanations and questions at the ready at all times. And most
importantly…resist feeling sorry for your students when you see them sweat. Resist
the urge to make things easier for them, unless you have really good data to
guide you. You may not be doing them any favors.
