Learning is hard. In fact, as David et al. (2024) noted, thinking is actually unpleasant and becomes an aversive experience. When we are trying to learn something, we need a variety of supports if we are to feel comfortable enough to take academic risks and chance being wrong. And academic risk taking is an important part of the learning process. You have to put yourself out there, share your tentative thinking, explore new ideas, and wrestle with concepts that may be unfamiliar.
We all like to tell students that we learn from our mistakes. And it is true, we can learn from mistakes. We hope that teachers create environments in which students know that it is safe to make mistakes and see these as opportunities to learn. But doesn’t feel great to be wrong all the time. Instead, we also enjoy learning from our successes. In fact, productive success is an important part of the learning process. When teachers create conditions for students to experience productive success, they feel supported. And when students experience the occasion of the mistake or error, they need to know that should not be the source of shame, humiliation, or embarrassment but rather part of the process getting to success.
There are several ways that teachers can ensure that students feel supported to learn in school. The most obvious, and one that we have written about extensively, is through teacher-student relationships. These healthy, growth-producing relationships have many positive impacts on students, from creating a sense of belonging in school to letting them know they are seen and heard (Smith et al., 2024). But perhaps most importantly, teacher-student relationships are the foundation of a classroom climate that allows for mistakes to be celebrated. When students know that they have a strong relationship with their teacher, they are much more likely to feel safe enough to take risks.
In addition, students need to have high-quality learning experiences. Students spend hundreds and thousands of hours with teachers, and they know when they are, and are not, learning. We have written extensively about great teaching that impacts learning, but in this post, we’d like to focus on teacher input. There are a number of ways to provide students input, or new learning, from direct instruction to lectures to teacher modeling to shared readings. Unfortunately, we have seen a significant decline in teacher modeling, think alouds in which teachers open their brains and share their thinking, including their cognitive processing, with students.
Think alouds have a long history in education but seem to be scarce today (Davey, 1983). Teachers can use think alouds with a wide range of learning goals, such as when modelling writing, reading, working out mathematical calculations and for speaking and listening strategies (Victoria Department of Education, 2018). Essentially, the teacher stops during a task and shares their thinking in real time with students. Think alouds use “I” statements rather than “you” or “we” statements, such as “I can make the following prediction …” In addition, teachers explain the thinking behind what they shared. It’s really providing students a cognitive apprenticeship such that they can try on more complex thinking than they are doing on their own. And when students experience this, in conjunction with other phases of lessons, they are more likely to feel supported to do hard things.
As part of the quality learning experiences that students have, teachers must also consider the scaffolding they provide (Frey et al., 2023). It’s rather like Goldilocks – not too little and not too much. When teachers over-scaffold, students do not experience productive struggle but rather over-helping which can easily lead to dependence on the teacher. They learn to wait for the adult rather than grapple with ideas and information. In that case, the well-intended scaffolds reduce the rigor of the lesson and students don’t feel supported to learn but rather coddled and come to believe that their teachers do not believe that they can learn.
But under-scaffolding is also a problem as students collect failure after failure and begin to attribute their lack of success to themselves rather than the support they are not receiving. In that case, students develop a mindset that they cannot learn a given topic or content area, which is one of the cognitive barriers to learning that contributes to disengagement (Chew & Cerbin, 2020).
To combat this, teachers need to provide both just-in-time and just-in-case scaffolds and fade them intentionally as students confidence and competence grows. We did not say that this was easy. In fact, it’s one of the major challenges that teachers face. However, when we get it right, students feel supported to learn and start to enjoy the process and fruits of their labor.
Feeling supported in the learning process is an important condition of learning that teachers create. It’s more than our lesson plans and assessment tools. Those are important, but students want to know that you believe that they can learn and that you are there to ensure that they do. In that case, the supportive classroom becomes one in which students feel safe and successful.
References
Chew, S.L., & Cerbin, W. J. (2020). The cognitive challenges of effective teaching. The Journal of Economic Education. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/00220485.2020.1845266
Davey, B. (1983). Think-aloud: Modeling the cognitive processes of reading comprehension. Journal of Reading, 27(1), 44-47.
David, L., Vassena, E., & Bijleveld, E. (2024). The unpleasantness of thinking: A meta-analytic review of the association between mental effort and negative affect. Psychological Bulletin. Advance online publication. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/bul0000443
Frey, N., Fisher, D., & Almarode, J. (2023). How scaffolding works: A playbook for supporting and releasing responsibility to students. Corwin.
Smith, D., Fisher, D., Frey, N., Pompei, V., & Stewart, R. (2024). Belonging in school: An illustrated playbook. Corwin.
Victoria Department of Education. (2018, August 29). Modeling through think alouds. https://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/teachers/teachingresources/discipline/english/literacy/speakinglistening/Pages/teachingpracmodelling.aspx
