The Learning Challenge

How to Guide Your Students Through the Learning Pit to Achieve Deeper Understanding

James Nottingham

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781506376424
• eBook ISBN: 9781506376400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Embrace challenge and celebrate Eureka!

Challenge makes learning more interesting. That’s one of the reasons to encourage your students to dive into the learning pit—a state of cognitive conflict that forces students to think more deeply, critically, and strategically until they discover their “eureka” moment. Nottingham, an internationally known author and consultant, will show you how to promote challenge, dialogue, and a growth mindset through:

• Practical strategies that guide students through the four stages of the Learning Challenge
• Engaging lesson plan ideas and classroom activities
• Inspiring examples from Learning Challenges across the world

1 Introduction to the Learning Challenge

“All which the school can or need do for pupils, so far as their minds are concerned … is to develop their ability to think.”

(Dewey, 1916)

1.0 Preview

The most important points in this chapter include:

1. The Learning Challenge encourages learners to investigate contradictions and uncertainties so that they might more deeply understand what it is they are thinking about.
2. The Learning Challenge is a frame of reference for students to talk and think more accurately and extensively about their own learning.
3. At the heart of the Learning Challenge is the pit. Someone is said to be in the pit when they have a set of unresolved, contradictory ideas about something they are trying to understand.
4. Learners are not in the pit when they have no idea. To be in the pit is to have many ideas that are as yet unsorted.
5. The Learning Challenge is designed to help learners step out of their comfort zone so that they might discover insights that are more meaningful and long-lasting.

1.1 Introduction

The Learning Challenge (LC) is designed to help students think and talk about their learning. In some ways, it is a child-friendly representation of Vygotsky’s (1978) zone of proximal development in that it describes the move from actual to potential understanding. It can help develop a growth mindset (Dweck, 2006), prompt people to explore alternatives and contradictions, and encourage learners to willingly step outside their comfort zone.

The Learning Challenge can work with all school-age students as well as with adults. Originally, I developed the model to help nine- to thirteen-year-olds understand the role of uncertainty in learning but then broadened its application to be useful for anyone from the age of three onward. Although it wasn’t published until I wrote my first book, Challenging Learning, in 2010, it has been shared far and wide at education conferences and workshops since the late 1990s. Since then, it has captured the imagination of educators, students and their parents. It has featured in many periodicals, articles and books. It appears on many classroom walls around the world. It has even made it into the UK’s Financial Times newspaper (Green, 2016).

I’d like to think its popularity is due to its contribution in making learning more engaging and long-lasting. And from what many people tell me, that is indeed a key reason. But of course it doesn’t explain the whole story. Other reasons include how well it sits alongside John Hattie’s Visible Learning for Teachers (Hattie, 2011) and Carol Dweck’s (2006) Mindset. The model also helps to explain and build on the SOLO taxonomy (Biggs & Collis, 1982) and is an effective way to structure Philosophy for Children (P4C) and other approaches to dialogue. It can guide metacognitive questions such as these: How does my final answer compare to my earlier thoughts? Which strategies worked best for me this time? What could I do better next time? It also offers a rich language and framework for talking about—and thinking about—learning in general.

The LC sits comfortably alongside John Hattie’s Visible Learning, Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset, Matthew Lipman’s P4C and Biggs and Collis’s SOLO taxonomy.

Perhaps the main reason for the popularity of the Learning Challenge is its simplicity. It is easy enough to be understood by the youngest learners in schools and yet complex enough to keep the most advanced learners interested. Although that can also be a bit of a double-edged sword leading to some “interesting” misinterpretations, the simplicity and complexity are also part of what makes the Learning Challenge relevant to so many people.

As with so many models, the Learning Challenge did not start life as the one you see described and illustrated in this book. In fact, it began life as the Teaching Target Model (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The Teaching Target Model

Note: PA: potential ability; CA: current ability; SA: subconscious ability

I created the Teaching Target Model early in my teaching career as a way to explain to my students what progress looks like. This is how I explained it to them:

• The CA line represents current ability. This is the upper limit of what you are able to do independently.
• The SA line represents subconscious ability. This is what you are able to do automatically. It is something you can do without having to think at all about it, like hold a pen, walk normally, say your name and so on.
• The PA line represents potential ability. This is how far you can reach beyond what you can do comfortably right now. Typically, you will need to be challenged and/or supported to get to this next stage of development.

The LC began life as the Teaching Target Model that in itself is a description of Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development.

A good example to think about is learning to ride a bicycle. Presumably the first bike you rode had stabilizers (or trainer wheels) on the back. Though you might have found it strange to begin with, no doubt you will have got the hang of pedaling and before long will have been riding a bike with stabilizers with ease. This is what we could call an action within your Practice Zone. You didn’t need to deliberately think about it; you just got on, and away you went.

Later, one of your parents will have suggested taking your stabilizers off the bike. Then what happened? You wobbled. You fell off and got back on again. You probably complained that it was easier before and asked why you had to do it. Nonetheless you persevered with encouragement and kept going until eventually you got the hang of it. Throughout that time of wobbling, feeling unsure, wondering if you would ever succeed, you were in the learning zone. One of the best-known educational psychologists, Lev Vygotsky, called this the zone of proximal development, but we will call it the learning zone (or the Wobble Zone if you prefer).

That is what learning is all about: wobbling. If you are doing something that you can already do, then you are practicing, whereas learning requires you to step out of your comfort zone, to go beyond your current ability (CA) and try things that will make you wobble. Playing it safe by staying in your comfort zone and doing what you can already do will probably result in correct answers and completed work. I used to remind my students that we are here to learn together, not just do together. So I encourage you to take every opportunity you can to go beyond your CA and be prepared to wobble. If you are wobbling, then you are learning. And if you are learning, then you will flourish.

When a learner steps outside their comfort zone, then they begin to wobble.

My students generally responded very well to this model. They felt as if they were being given permission to take risks, try new things and get things wrong. This contrasted with a common belief they had developed earlier in their school life that the most important thing was to get things right, even if that meant playing safe and going for the easier option. Of course I wanted them to get things right, but I also wanted them to learn. So if it was a choice between getting things right or learning through mistakes, then I was very much in favor of the latter.

A drawback to the Teaching Target Model, however, was that I would represent the movement between practice and learning as a series of peaks and troughs, as you can see in Figure 1. My students would often interpret this as a series of mountains and valleys, with the top of the mountain representing the most wobbly part of learning. Though in many ways this was nice, it just didn’t quite feel right to me. On the one hand, I was trying to use the model to reassure my students that learning often makes people feel uncertain and vague, but on the other hand, they were recalling the feelings of achievement and satisfaction people often feel when they reach the top of an actual mountain.

A pit evokes feelings of uncertainty and discomfort, whereas being at the top of a mountain evokes a sense of achievement and elation. That is one of the reasons that a pit of learning works better than a mountain of learning.

So I knew it had to change, but I wasn’t sure how. Then when I heard John Edwards talking about a pit (see Acknowledgments), I had my aha moment. I just needed to invert the Teaching Target Model and make the wobbly bit a pit rather than a mountain! That way, the uncertainty and risk of learning could be represented by a pit rather than a mountaintop. And so the Learning Challenge evolved into the model you see today, one that has a pit at the core (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: The Learning Challenge

1.2 The Learning Challenge: A Quick Guide

The Learning Challenge promotes challenge, dialogue and a growth mindset. It offers participants the opportunity to think and talk about their own learning. It encourages a depth of inquiry that moves learners from surface-level knowledge to deep understanding. It encourages an exploration of causation and impact, an interpretation and comparison of meaning, a classification and sequencing of detail and a recognition and analysis of pattern. It builds learners’ resilience, determination and curiosity. And it nurtures a love of learning.

The Lea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustration List
• The Challenging Learning Story
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• The Language of Learning
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction to the Learning Challenge
• 2 The Learning Challenge in Practice
• 3 The Learning Challenge Culture
• 4 Concepts
• 5 Cognitive Conflict
• 6 Construct Meaning
• 7 Consider Your Learning
• 8 Mindset Matters
• 9 Links and Perspectives
• 10 The Learning Challenge in Action
• Appendix
• Index of Concepts
• References
• Index
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