Teachers can encourage desired behaviours by making them easier for students.  I’ve suggested making things easier by changing the default, breaking tasks into smaller steps and making the first step easy (approaches based on evidence from behavioural psychology,).  Making it easier doesn’t mean students should have it easy though.  I’ve often made things as difficult as possible: with one over-dependent GCSE group, my rules was never to do anything students could do for themselves.  They found this frustrating; Andrej once asked:

Can I have some paper, sir?  Or do I have to cut down a tree and make it myself?”

But it worked: students learned to solve simple challenges independently, which freed me to help them with more complicated ones.  We can help students act by removing barriers and making tasks manageable, but we can go too far.  This post suggests ways to get teaching ‘just right’, by balancing ease with worthwhile difficulties.

1) Make it easier, but don’t undermine other priorities

Mary Kennedy (2015) described each lesson as a response to “inherent challenges”: portraying the curriculum, exposing student thinking, enlisting participation and managing behaviour.  These challenges are “inextricably tied” and must be addressed “continuously and simultaneously”, but a solution to one challenge “may interfere with success in another”.  The most accurate portrayal of the curriculum may discourage students’ interest, for example; a technique which exposes student thinking may encourage poor behaviour.  Making a desired behaviour easier enlists participation and contains behaviour, but it is only worthwhile if we use student enthusiasm to portray the curriculum well and expose student thinking.  We want to make it easier so that students can learn better; not just so that students are engaged.

2) Make it easier, but don’t leave students unchallenged

Moreover, making learning easier may not encourage student participation at all.  I’ve seen students ignore tasks which seem insultingly simple – not worth the effort – and I’ve seen the same students gain interest as teachers challenge them with harder tasks worth completing.  Making it easier encourages a student who lacks the confidence to try; it is unlikely to help a student who doesn’t want to try.  We need to identify what is limiting student effort: a disinterested student may respond better to harder work.

3) Make it easier, but use desirable difficulties

Some difficulties are desirable: a technical term, not just a truism.  Desirable difficulties are techniques which make the lesson harder, and so reduce student performance (immediate correct answers); instead, they increase student learning (correct answers in future).  This doesn’t mean just making things harder; specific difficulties have been carefully tested (reviewed well by Soderstrom and Bjork (2015)) .  For example:

  • Varying practice: instead of asking students to find the area of five squares, then five triangles, alternate squares and triangles (Rohrer and Taylor, 2007)
  • Spacing practice: leaving time for students to forget partially, before revisiting key ideas (Soderstrom and Bjork, 2015)
  • Limiting guidance and feedback (van Merriënboer, Kester and Paas, 2006)

So, while we want tasks to be clear, easy and simple enough for students to do well (and feel that they’re doing well), our goal is increasing learning, not just performance.

4) Make it easier, but keep the bigger picture in view

We don’t want students to miss the big picture.  I’ve suggested breaking tasks into smaller parts which are more manageable, more comprehensible and offer a feeling of progress.  This has limits.  We may break a complicated idea into isolated, comprehensible sections, but we want these sections to coalesce so students understand the whole.  Likewise, students’ success in small tasks must grow into stamina with big ones: a sustained ability to write well (Lemov, 2015, p.299), maintaining the effort and attention needed to complete worthwhile tasks independently.  We can help students gain initial success by breaking up tasks and learning; we can help them gain eventual success by reintegrating these smaller parts.

Conclusion

Some teachers worry that evidence-informed practice means being told what to do.  But evidence-informed practice relies on the teacher’s judgement: their application of evidence to decide how to proceed with a particular class.  We can help students start, gain and sustain momentum by making things easier; we can ensure their learning is worthwhile, challenging and durable by making things harder.  Both approaches have their place: at any given moment, some students need more support, others need more challenge.  Only a skilled teacher can judge when to make it easier, when to make it harder and for whom; only a skilled teacher can get it ‘just right’.

If you found this interesting, you might like…

Previous posts in this series, advocating:

These are based on evidence from behavioural psychology, discussed here.

The guide I’m writing to using behavioural psychology for teachers: sign up here to learn more.

References

Kennedy, M. (2015). Parsing the Practice of Teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 67(1), pp.6-17.

Lemov, D. (2015). Teach like a champion 2.0. 1st ed. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Rohrer, D., Taylor, K., (2007) The shuffling of mathematics problems improves learning. Instructional Science 35, pp.481–498.

Soderstrom, N., Bjork, R. (2015) Learning Versus Performance: An Integrative Review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), pp.176–199.

van Merriënboer, J., Kester, L. and Paas, F. (2006). Teaching complex rather than simple tasks: balancing intrinsic and germane load to enhance transfer of learning. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20(3), pp.343-352.

[This post was edited in September 2019 to remove references to a defunct blog].