Struggle for Smarts?

I wonder how many of us can think back to a time when our teacher called a student to the board who knew (or thought they knew) a solution to a problem, to draw/write it out so the rest of us could see the right way to do it? I’m betting a strong majority of us consider this to be a pretty common classroom tactic; so what is so significant about it?

I recently came across an interesting account of an experience a Psychology graduate student, Jim Stigler, (now a Professor of Psychology at UCLA) had while researching teaching methods in Japan. It was a fourth-grade math class and the students were learning how to draw 3D cubes on paper. One kid was completely not getting it, to which the teacher responded by telling him to put his up on the board. This immediately stands out as an interesting (and completely foreign) approach to me. Here at home, it is usually the best students who are invited to the board to demonstrate proper solutions, and the rest of us are all to learn from watching that. Stigler recalled that the student dutifully came to the board and continued his attempts to draw despite still not grasping the concept. Every few minutes, the teacher would ask the rest of the class if he had got it, to which they would shake their heads ‘no’. Stigler grew anxious and nervous for the student, who himself seemed to remain calm and diligent. By the end of the class the student had drawn a correct cube – the teacher again asked the class if he had gotten it right to which the class broke out in applause while the student returned to his seat, clearly very proud of himself.

Now to me, this would have been a mortifying experience; right up there with the “naked in the lunchroom” dream. This story made me think about how differently eastern and western cultures approach th experience of intellectual struggle, and while culture is so diverse and one can point to counter examples in both, I think it generally comes down to a western view of struggle as an indicator of weakness (you’re just not very smart); whereas eastern cultures tend to view struggle more as an opportunity and a tolerable, even predictable part of the learning process.

What’s important here is that how we conceptualize struggle profoundly impacts our behaviour. Stigler also conducted a study of both American and Japanese Grade 1 students in which both groups were given an impossible math problem and then measured to see how long it would take them to give up. The American students worked on the problem for less than 30 seconds on average and gave the impression of “we haven’t had this before, so we don’t know how”. The Japanese students worked on the problem for the entire hour and only stopped because the research session was up. When told the problem was impossible, they responded in wonderment at the idea of a problem being “impossible”.

What do you think? Is an adjusted view of intellectual struggle something we can learn from other cultures, if proven to have desirable effects on learning outcomes? If so, how do we go about adopting these views in the classroom?

References:

Spiegel, A. (2012, November 25) How Eastern and Western cultures tackle learning. Retrieved from http://npr.org/sections/health-shots