Creating a Balance Between Challenges and Frustration

Imagine a very thin line stretching across your classroom. On one side of the line is the land of “too easy,” where learners have to exert very little effort and hardly grow. On the other side of the line is “too tough,” where no matter how hard your learners work, they’re unlikely to find much success.

One of the keys to helping students succeed in a challenging academic environment is making sure that they are properly supported. It’s one thing to just throw challenging tasks at learners; it’s quite another to help ensure their success.

According to Jordan Catapano, these tips can help ensure that despite your standards, learners are assisted toward achieving them:

Let them know their supports. Sometimes we have support systems built into our school – such as tutoring centers, peer mentors, or office hours – that could help provide more individualised attention to learners. Do your learners and parents know about these supports? What are their incentives for taking advantage of them?

Get more adults involved. Teachers are the first responders for student achievement, but they aren’t the only ones with skin in the game. Recruit additional support from parents, counsellors, administrators, and fellow teachers who may also interact with your learners. When a team of adult professionals rally around a learner, that learner benefits from many streams of support.

Believe in your learners. Leaners’ likelihood of success often begins with their instructor’s personal belief in their ability to do so. Do you genuinely believe that your students can succeed? Researcher and author Carol Dweck, along with others, recognises that teachers who believe in their learners get more positive responses and higher engagement from them.

Let learners KNOW you believe in them. Naturally, we can believe in learners all we want to. But, take it one step further and let your learners know you believe in them. Provide personalised sticky notes, make phone calls to the parents and pull students aside at the beginning or end of class to let them know that you’re in their corner.

Make adjustments for individuals. Some learners are ready for Step 10 while others might struggle with Step 2. That’s OK. What’s not OK is that we expect everyone to be working on Step 7 simultaneously. See if you can make adjustments with how you work with your students to ensure that their personalised level of learning is being targeted. That narrow line between boredom and frustration in your classroom really exists at an individual level.

Failure is an option. We learn by failing, learning from failure, and trying again. This is how we play videogames, how we find Mr. Right, and how we how we learn to cook. How will you facilitate failure as part of your learning process? Will students know that trying and failing is better than giving up?

Failure is not an option. At the same time, “big failure” is not allowed. Failure as in students not passing your class, students giving up, or students not working up to their potential is prohibited. It’s important that teachers draw the line and refuse to let students fail in a way that ultimately hurts them.

Challenge, rigor, and high standards are good. But if we push these too far to some point learners aren’t ready for, we risk frustrating them and giving their learning process a setback. One of the challenges of our profession is to find that happy medium where we can push students further than they thought they could go on their own without frustrating them to the point where they become disinterested. Accomplishing this, requires constant checks and recalibrations to ensure that we are creating an environment where students can truly thrive.