Desirable Difficulties
I had a Year 10 Latin student a few years ago who was really struggling with nouns. She puzzled over them at home before asking me to spend fifteen minutes of the next lesson explaining them – it turned out the key concept of declensions had been foxing her and once we got that sorted, she made considerable strides in her language work. She carried on at A-Level and continued to interrogate me about her translations, how she had made certain mistakes and how she could improve in her understanding. She went on to a languages degree at Cambridge and I think of her often as an excellent example of someone who wasn’t cowed by difficulties but saw them as crucial for developing her learning.
Professor Robert Bjork talks of ‘desirable difficulties’. Students often resort to strategies such as re-reading and highlighting in revision, thinking them effective for learning when the research is clear that they aren’t.
Durrington Research School puts it as ‘the conditions that do lead to long-term memory and therefore learning, seem to create challenges and slow the rate of apparent learning, thus making them uncomfortable and unpopular with many students,” Cold-calling in lessons, retrieval practice, spaced learning, varying learning context – these are all hard for the memory, but they should be and they are worth the effort.
Kate Jones, author of several books on Retrieval Practice, cites Brown et al and their 2014 study which proved ‘when learning is harder, it’s stronger and lasts longer; they also add that the more effort required to retrieve something, the better you actually learn it’. Having a growth mindset also helps – Inner Drive phrases it as ‘the belief that someone can learn and improve’. This is what my Year 10 student had in spades and a real desire to learn from her feedback – something which we are working on with our fearless learners ethos at school.