Curriculum
Cameron Azer | Assistant Principal
Learning to take on a Challenge
Challenges are the pathway to growth. When our children habitually avoid challenges, their learning stalls. When they learn to understand, value, and embrace challenge, the opportunity for learning accelerates. So, helping our children develop a healthy relationship with challenge becomes one of the most important ways we can help them become better learners.
Becoming a Skilful Learner:
How our children respond to challenges is a key element we can call 'Learnership' – the skill of learning. Learnership is a skill developed over time. It helps our children to get more out of every learning opportunity. Most importantly, Learnership is something we can teach our children that helps them to thrive both in school and life.
Comfort Zone Vs Learning Zone: What is the difference?
For many people, getting outside their comfort zone means trying something new.But something new, isn’t always something challenging. Very often “new” is simply an “easy thing we haven’t done yet”. There is little struggle involved in this type of challenge, it comes with a great deal of certainty, and confidence that we’ll succeed. These challenges feel more like a task. They keep us busy, but they don’t help us get better. These types of challenges are in our Comfort Zone. To be truly challenged our children need the opportunity to stretch themselves beyond their current abilities. These types of challenges feel like a problem. Unlike a task where the path to completion is easily recognised, the solution to this challenge is not immediately apparent. They leave us feeling uncertain, and they involve struggle. The challenge feels “hard”. When our child feels like this, it’s a good sign they are in their Learning Zone. Being in your Learning Zone feels uncomfortable. When our children find themselves in the Learning Zone, their first reaction is often to get out of it. Suddenly anything else seems like a more attractive option. They look for distractions, seek out easy options or adopt any number of avoidance strategies.
Struggle can be Temporary:
It’s important to help our children recognise that the feeling of struggle and discomfort that comes with being in their Learning Zone is temporary. It passes. Many children believe if they are struggling now, then the next step in learning will involve even more struggle. They believe that the further they go, the more uncomfortable they’ll feel. So naturally, they turn away from further struggle. The reality is that effort is the currency of growth, and struggle is the price we pay for that growth. The reward is that what we experienced as hard today, becomes easy tomorrow. It doesn’t get harder and harder and harder. It’s hard, then it’s easy. Then they move on, and the next step is also hard, until they make that easy. Being in the Learning Zone, and experiencing the struggle that comes with it, is not only a normal part of learning, but also an essential part of growth.
Our students in the classrooms will continue to have the opportunities to experience all of these emotions in and outside of the classroom. As educators, we have an important role in building our students' understanding, knowledge and skill to build their capacity in 'Learnership'. By normalising the struggle we can start to become comfortable with being uncomfortable.
For more information please visit:
James Anderson's signature work defines Learnership as the skill of learning.