Normalizing Struggle

“I’m the only one having trouble.”

“Everyone gets it except me.”

I spoke this week to a high school counselor who told me how frequently she hears comments like these from students who come to her asking to be removed from an AP or honors class. It seems that the many students who are struggling in tough classes believe no one else is experiencing difficulty.

That’s not entirely surprising. We live in a society that likes to conceal our struggles and hide our failures from the neighbors. We send holiday form letters extolling our superlative year accompanied by pictures of our perfect children, editing out the parts that include little Johnny’s battle with depression and Susie’s F in Algebra 2. On social media, we carefully curate our lives so our followers see only what we want them to know about ourselves, likely leaving out the parts that paint us in a less than flattering light. I spoke to a friend whose teenage daughter posts photos on Instagram but takes them down if they don’t receive enough “likes” because she doesn’t want others to see that she posted something that didn’t receive widespread friend approval. We grew up watching deodorant commercials urging us, “Never let them see you sweat.” Struggle, it seems, is shameful and should be hidden from others.

There’s grave danger in the classroom when we let students believe that they are alone in their struggles. Part of developing grit and a growth mindset requires an acknowledgement of difficulty and some productive conversation about how to dig yourself out of a hole or how to get past a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. We have to normalize struggle rather than hiding it like it’s a dirty little secret.

Perhaps the simplest way to do this is to acknowledge struggles to the full class: “Quite a few of you are still having difficulty with writing a thesis statement for your DBQ essay. I hope that those of you who came to tutorials this morning before school felt, as I did, that your understanding is improving. I’ll be here after school and tomorrow morning if you want some more help or if anyone else wants to stop by. If you’re having trouble at this point, that’s not totally unexpected, but I’d like to help you figure it out as soon as possible.”

A statement like that one not only shows struggling students that they are not alone but also makes it clear that seeking help during tutorials is beneficial and something other students take advantage of. An indirect invitation like this might spur a student to seek some help.

More likely, though, you’ll have to be more direct. If you know a student is experiencing difficulty, invite her privately--not embarrassingly in front of all her friends--to come in for help. Better yet, specify the time and date, and tell the student you’ll see her then. Get parents involved; I found that a solution-based parent phone call lets Mom and Dad know that you care and want to partner with them to help their son or daughter succeed. Your helpful tone of voice comes through much more clearly over the phone than it will in an e-mail.

Another option for bringing struggle to the forefront is to suspend instruction periodically to check in with everyone in a class meeting. Circle the desks or chairs up if you have room so everyone is on equal ground, and host a productive, growth-oriented class discussion about how things are going. Create a safe space for students to share what they are finding difficult and what seems to be working for them. Students love to give one another advice. Hearing other students share their confusion or difficulties lets students know they aren’t alone. When you share your own stories of encountering challenges, you break down some barriers that could exist between you and your students.

A couple of warnings are probably useful in conjunction with this.

Struggle is normal. Make sure students know that. But if every student is experiencing struggle or is not performing up to your expectations, you can’t blame the entire class. That’s when you need to examine your own instruction and your expectations. Must beginning-of-the-year students perform at an end-of-year level to earn a satisfactory grade? Have you eased students into a challenging task, gradually increasing the level of difficulty, or did you just throw them into the deep end and complain when they aren’t able to swim?

I sometimes hear teachers, when defending a widespread lack of success on an assignment, say that they are grading students on the end-of-the-year rubric but that there’s a safety net in place. In other words, lots of students are going to fail this assignment, but the teacher has a plan later on to allow them to redo and improve their mastery and, at the same time, raise the grade. I’d argue that the initial lack of success affects some students so negatively that there’s no hope for recovery. Many students facing a devastating failure will just give up; they’ll see it as an indication that they’re not capable and will shut down. Hiding the safety net until later is just plain scary. Don’t make them stand on the high dive and jump off unless they know that there’s water in the pool below and a lifeguard on duty. Maybe it’s better to let them hone their diving skills from a lower platform at first, spotting them to assist in the execution of the dive until they can do it successfully on their own.     

Let’s quit treating our struggles like some misfit locked up in a secret room in the attic in a Victorian novel. They’re not something to hide from the world; instead, we should acknowledge them, address them, push through them, and grow stronger because of them.