Curriculum Day Report 

'Productive Struggle,' it's our new buzz term. What does it mean and how it does it relate to learning? The OGPS staff found out about it on our Curriculum Day last Friday.

Productive struggle is an approach that is premised on the idea that students learn best when provided with opportunities to struggle and spend time in the ‘zone of confusion.’ According to researchers Peter Sullivan, Doug Clarke and Charles Lovitt: All students should experience at least some important aspects of the task as mathematically challenging. 

Michael Minas presented the staff with some really exciting and challenging ideas. We trialled being students and spending time productively struggling, then we planned for sessions that we could effectively scaffold our students through this struggle. This process is especially helpful in our weekly problem solving sessions that we call: Number Ninjas.

We won't just be throwing students in the deep end. We have worked out some great plans to help support students adapting to having some time on their own to think about what a problem is asking of them. Perhaps they could draw it, then think about a strategy to start solving it. Once students have had a little time on their own, they can collaborate with peers to continue working on their problem solving plan. If they need a few hints and a bit of direction, they can access an enabling prompt. This might be a picture, or part of a diagram or table to help set them off on the right track. If they have solved the problem effectively and need to keep challenging themselves, they can access an extending prompt. The extending prompt uses similar ideas from the original problem but extends numbers, challenges the patterns or organisation of it.

For more Enabling and Extending Prompts please see below: