Abstract:

Research shows that struggle is a significant contributor to meaningful learning (Boaler, 2016), but in many schools, teachers do not encourage productive struggle (Stigler, 2009). Because they have rarely faced struggle in their own preparation, teacher candidates are inexperienced in persevering through cognitive dissonance (or any psychological discomfort) and may be resistant to engaging with it. Practicing teachers benefit from productive struggle during the curriculum design process because, in engaging with difficult concepts, they deepen their conceptual understanding before lesson planning and transferring that learning to their students (Tringer & Hughes, 2021). As teacher educators, we hypothesize that inexperience with productive struggle will deter teacher candidates from engaging in curriculum design and, ultimately, implementing lessons that encourage productive struggle for their own students. In this presentation, we share a review of literature related to productive struggle, discuss the Tringer and Hughes (2021) study of implementing productive struggle through curriculum design with practicing teachers, and request feedback on our design for a pilot study with teacher candidates based on Tringer and Hughes’s work. Our ultimate goal is to understand how teacher candidates’ views of productive struggle change over the course of a teacher preparation program that requires them to engage with it meaningfully during curriculum design. We will also discuss future directions of the research, including investigating how teacher candidates will transfer their experiences to facilitate productive struggle with their future students.

Keywords:

Productive Struggle, Teacher Education, Curriculum Design.