The Learning Engine

18 February 2025

Newsletter 020: Learning Through Productive Struggle

Greetings and salutations — welcome to another newsletter!

Have you ever faced a challenge that was difficult but not impossible, where you struggled but ultimately learned and grew from the experience?

That's what educators and researchers call productive struggle.

This newsletter will explore how finding the right balance between challenge and learning opportunity can lead to meaningful growth. We'll look at what makes struggle "productive," how it connects with learning, and ways to create conditions for productive struggle in our lives and work.

Let’s get to productive struggle!

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Ideas

At our best, humans love to learn and grow. We find challenges within our range of ability, meeting and overcoming those challenges through our abilities.

However, the hard part is finding the right challenge. Too little challenge and we get bored, sleepwalking our way through the task. Too much challenge and we get overwhelmed, frozen in place during the task.

Finding the right challenge leads to an idea called productive struggle — challenges with productive struggle lead to learning and growth!

What is “productive struggle?”

Every task has some level of challenge, with the level of challenge on a spectrum:

• Easy — “I can do this task with no issues and little effort.”
• Medium — “I can do this task, but the task will take some effort.”
• Hard — “I do not know if I have the knowledge and skills to do the task.”

Most tasks in our everyday life are in the easy or medium sides of the spectrum, though sometimes we can find ourselves facing a hard task — a tricky situation at work or a tough parenting scenario.

In addition to having a level of challenge, every task has a learning opportunity. The learning opportunity comes from development of conceptual models, both modifying knowledge and skills in the conceptual model and strengthening connections between linked conceptual models. As with the level of challenge, the learning opportunity is on a spectrum:

• Low — Tasks forced on you, with little choice or motivation and limited connection to future learning
• Medium — Tasks that have some connection to your interests and motivation, with some connection to future learning
• High — Tasks that are highly relevant to your interests and motivation, with strong connection to future learning

Interestingly, any task can have a medium or high learning opportunity — even the seemingly simple and mundane tasks! If there is a personal awareness and desire to grow, these routine tasks can create profound moments of learning.

From the ideas of challenge and learning opportunity, we can create a definition for productive struggle: Productive struggle is the combination of challenge and learning opportunity that gives a high amount of learning and growth.

This definition can also be written as an equation:

Medium or Hard Challenge + Medium or High Learning Opportunity = Productive Struggle

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Productive Struggle and the Model for Learning

Here is Belcher’s Model for Learning — take a moment and think about the learning process of learning as described by the model.

[For a much deeper discussion about the entire Model for Learning, read this essay: That’s How Learning Works?!?! A Comprehensive Model for Understanding the Learning Process.]

Productive struggle connects with my Model for Learning in a few ways.

1. When the learner is working on a task that is in the “productive struggle” category, the learner has to be fully engaged with the task. Being fully engaged means the learner is using their working memory to process the details of the task, plus the learner is retrieving, linking, and modifying their conceptual models in long-term memory. By fully engaging to productively struggle, the conceptual models are strengthened into better conceptual models.
2. Challenging tasks require the use of multiple sets of conceptual models, forcing the learner to test and refine the knowledge and skills within the conceptual models AND continue to build the connections between conceptual models. Again, this strengthens the conceptual models — helping the learner in future tasks.
3. One of the goals when practicing (with stakes) is to have an 80% success rate. Tasks with productive struggle are around this number, which helps the learner gain valuable insights from both their failures and success.
4. With the model, I’ve defined some Personal Factors: Emotions, stress, curiosity, learning orientation, and motivation. Productive struggle helps with each of these because the learner must understand how they are reacting to the struggle. By understanding their reaction, the learner (and coach) can adjust the challenge and learning opportunity — making the tasks more productive for learning and growth.
5. I’ve also defined some Social Factors, including psychological safety and collaboration. Productive struggle can help group dynamics by giving a challenge to the group, then allowing the group to work through conflict to meet the challenge. Meeting challenges together bonds people more tightly together and increases the individual and group’s knowledge and skills — making better teams.

[Note: Another term with similar ideas as productive struggle is called desirable difficulties. This term was popularized by the research of Robert and Elizabeth Bjork, who have worked on researching desirable difficulties over many years. For more information, search their names and the phrase desirable difficulties.]

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Stories

We all have stories on productive struggle; here are a couple of mine. I would love to hear your stories — please respond to this email because I would love to know your stories!

Story 1: In high school, I played football, basketball, and soccer; one reason that athletics are great is the built-in productive struggle. I had some great coaches who would push us with challenging tasks that had high learning opportunity, helping us routinely play well against better teams. In football, I played tight end and wide receiver — but was the backup quarterback. During my senior year, our (really good) quarterback broke his arm the week before the first game; the first game of every year is against our crosstown rivals, bringing a crowd of 10,000 to the game. I am not a very good thrower of the football (tough admission for a quarterback, haha) and our offense revolved around throwing and running — so the coaches changed the offense back to a run-heavy attack. This helped me not make mistakes while throwing and leaned into my strengths; I was good at getting us organized on the line and getting the ball to the right running back. This also helped the team because we had a few really good backs and one great back (two-time Super Bowl champion!!!) — helping us to a 4-2 record before the original quarterback returned. The coaches kept my job as the quarterback manageable, helping us productively struggle and succeed at our jobs.

Story 2: With my work as a curriculum designer for physics classes, I’ve become more interested throughout the years with the productive struggle for students. In my first few years of teaching, I was more concerned with the information I was giving students than the way that I had students practice and perform. This led me to not fully consider the challenge and learning opportunity in each practice problem, causing students to have too much challenge in the initial practice problems. Students were confused about how to even start the problem, which is not ideal. As I understood the way that tasks interacted and the order in which ideas needed to be practiced, I began to scaffold the practice problems much more clearly. This allowed students to choose their starting “level” and try a problem, then adjust their next practice problem depending on the outcome of the previous problem. Students responded really well to this approach because they were productively struggling; instead of being smushed by a really hard problem, they could find an appropriate problem and have learning through the problem.

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Questions

1. How are you learning through your routine tasks?
2. For tasks that matter in your professional life, how are your creating productive struggle?
3. When is the last time that you experienced a task that was way too easy or challenging? How did you react?
4. When was the last time that you experienced a task that was a low learning opportunity? How did you react?
5. When are times in your life when productive struggle has helped you?

Learning happens when we share what we are thinking, so I would love to hear your answers! Also, you can use these questions as conversations starters with friends and family — hearing their answers and having a conversation would be great!

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If this newsletter resonated with you, please share on the socials and with someone who you think would also benefit; I would greatly appreciate any help in spreading these ideas!

Thanks for reading this newsletter — and all the best!

Nathan