Conclusion

Education Classroom: Creating Opportunities for All Students to Listen, Learn, and Lead and Ready to Learn: The FRAME Model for Optimizing Student Success.

Peg earned a bachelor’s degree in English and a mentoring certification from Cardinal Stritch University, a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction and an alternative education certification from Marian University, and a reading specialist certification from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

To learn more about Peg’s work, visit www.peggrafwallner.com and follow her on Twitter @PegGrafwallner.

To book Peg Grafwallner for professional development, contact pd@SolutionTree.com.

Introduction

Spend any amount of time in the classroom—providing instruction, issuing assessments, and reviewing data about student learning—and you’ll see a spectrum of learning outcomes. On one end, there are students who seem to effortlessly absorb learning material and, on the other, are students who encounter obstacles and soon give up, accepting failure as inevitable. In the span between are students who encounter challenges as they learn but engage in productive struggle to overcome those challenges. Regardless of where your students reside on this spectrum, as a teacher, it’s your responsibility to ensure they all meet with content that challenges them to overcome struggle, maximize their learning, and eventually master learning standards. But what does productive struggle look like, and how can it be achieved?

As an instructional coach and reading specialist at a large, urban high school, I work with teachers in all content areas to seamlessly embed literacy into their daily lessons without disrupting the focus on activities that support students in learning curriculum content. Literacy skills are a critical component of every content area, and students who lack foundational skills for their grade level or course will inevitably struggle to learn (Onuscheck, Spiller, Argentar, et al., 2020; Onuscheck, Spiller, & Glass, 2020). For this reason, I often collaborate with teachers to create differentiated and scaffolded lessons for all student abilities so every student engages in what many educators refer to as productive struggle (Blackburn, 2018) or desirable difficulty (Bjork & Bjork, 2014). Educator, speaker, and consultant Barbara R. Blackburn (2018) defines productive struggle as the sweet spot in students’ learning relative to teacher-provided scaffolds and supports:

Rather than immediately helping students at the first sign of trouble, we should allow them to work through struggles independently before we offer assistance. That may sound counterintuitive, since many of us assume that helping students learn means protecting them from negative feelings of frustration. But for students to

become independent learners, they must learn to persist in the face of challenge.

As you will explore in this book, there are numerous variables that inform and affect how students respond to obstacles in their learning and how quick they are to give up. The challenge for teachers is to create a culture where any failure to learn is simply a common and natural indicator that the learning hasn’t happened yet. But it will. This is the essence of the not-yet approach. It’s about how teachers allow for and even encourage setbacks in the classroom, recontextualizing them for students as a crucial and mandatory part of learning. Teachers who foster a not-yet approach and culture in their classroom do the following. • Empower students to realize that setbacks and obstacles are a beginning point to learning and not an end point. • Normalize encountering and overcoming obstacles so they become part of the learning process as students produce new products (completed classwork, essays, projects, and so on). • Contextualize setbacks and obstacles as trial-and-error opportunities that assist students in process-based learning and, ultimately, progress. • Model how to graciously accept setbacks and obstacles as part of every student’s social-emotional endeavor to better themselves and those around them.

Classrooms that offer systems and routines around these actions inspire process (the learning), product (the result of that learning), and progress (the reflection of that learning). In doing so, teachers create classrooms that embed effective action as something ordinary rather than reactive. Teachers in such classrooms allow students the opportunity to overcome academic fear and replace it with a mindset that any struggle to learn simply means that learning hasn’t been accomplished yet. You will see the terms process, product, and progress laced throughout this book because, by looking at each through multiple, unbiased classroom lenses, the not-yet approach ensures students realize not yet means learning obstacles or setbacks are just part of the ongoing journey toward achievement.

In the rest of this introduction, you will read about the problems of practice common to conventional classroom approaches that inhibit a not-yet approach to learning. I then establish this book’s structure to help you understand the many factors that influence how students respond to obstacles and failure and how dedication to a series of classroom lenses ensures that productive struggle and a not-yet approach are norms for your students.