When learning gets messy: The power of productive struggle in early elementary

The Compass School is a research-driven school in Austin that grounds its educational approach in neuroscience, psychology, and education research. Anna Yakabe, a founding member and Director of Learning, shares insights from their Innovation Lab, where young learners develop the perseverance and problem-solving skills needed to create meaningful change.

In Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things, Adam Grant reminds us that the real magic of learning comes from the struggle.

Grant describes learning as a journey shaped by how we respond to challenges. When children wrestle with something new, they're strengthening the neural pathways in their brains that lead to long-term understanding and resilience. Each mistake, frustration, or I-don't-get-it-yet moment is an invitation to stretch the mind and build perseverance.

This concept of productive struggle has deep roots in education research. J. Hiebert and Douglas A. Grouws introduced the term in 2007, though it wasn't until H. K. Warshauer's 2011 paper that it gained widespread recognition within mathematics education. The concept draws on several foundational frameworks, including Bjork's theory of Desirable Difficulties and Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development. These frameworks share a common insight: learning happens most powerfully in a particular space. When tasks are too easy, students experience boredom and minimal growth. When tasks are too difficult, students experience frustration and disengage. Productive struggle exists precisely in that sweet spot where the challenge is significant enough to require effort and creative thinking, but not so overwhelming that it becomes counterproductive.

While Warshauer's work focused on mathematical thinking, the principles of productive struggle apply across disciplines. The question that matters most to educators and parents is: What does this actually look like in a classroom with six- and seven-year-olds?

From Theory to Towers: Design Thinking in Action

Recently, our young learners faced a challenge in our Innovation Lab that brought these research insights to life. The task: design a structure out of different size plastic cups for a LEGO person that stands at least 39 inches tall and can withstand a wind gust from a fan.

After a quick prototype and testing, students found that the fan caused structures to collapse instantaneously. One student captured the moment perfectly: "There needs to be weight to give it stability." This observation marked the beginning of their productive struggle.

The Messy Middle: Where Real Learning Happens

What unfolded over the next three days wasn't a neat path from problem to solution. It was iterative, frustrating, and essential to deep learning.

Students brainstormed: How can we add weight? They tried tape, hoping adhesive strength would compensate for structural weakness. They experimented with stacking cups of various sizes and materials, testing whether diversity in their building blocks would create stability. They placed LEGOs at the base, reasoning that a heavy foundation might anchor the entire tower.

Each attempt taught them something. Each failure led them to a revised design. This is the design-thinking protocol in its most authentic form—not a worksheet about problem-solving, but the actual experience of wrestling with a real challenge that has no predetermined answer. Students moved through cycles of defining the problem, generating ideas, prototyping solutions, and testing their effectiveness.

The breakthrough came from an unexpected place. What if the weight didn't need to be at the bottom? What if it could wrap around the structure like a sleeve? Students created a square LEGO structure that slid over the third cup from the bottom, adding stability exactly where the tower needed it most.

When the fan finally turned on and the towers stood firm, the celebration wasn't just about success. It was about the journey they'd taken to get there.

The Role of the Educator in Productive Struggle

During the cup tower challenge, no adult handed students the answer. No one told them where to place the LEGO sleeve or which cup would provide the best anchor point. Instead, educators asked questions: What happened when you tried that? What might you do differently? What are you noticing about the structures that are more stable?

The role of the educator is not to eliminate struggle, but to make it productive. Educators provide scaffolding through questioning rather than direct instruction, supporting students' thinking without removing the challenge that makes learning meaningful.

Why Productive Struggle Matters More Than Ever

Progressive education has long understood what neuroscience now confirms: Children learn best when adults support them through obstacles.

The research is clear. When students engage in productive struggle, they develop a growth mindset. They begin to see difficulty not as a stop sign but as a signpost pointing toward growth. They build executive function skills like planning, flexibility, and self-monitoring. Most importantly, they develop the courage to try, fail, and try again.

According to neuroscience research, when students work through challenging problems, they are building and strengthening neural connections. The effort required creates deeper, more durable learning than passive reception of information. This aligns with Grant's emphasis that achievement isn't about having the most natural ability but about developing the character skills that help us unlock our potential. Those skills—perseverance, adaptability, creative problem-solving—are built one productive struggle at a time.

Building Courageous Learners

When we give young children the space to struggle productively, we're not just teaching them about engineering or physics. We're teaching them about themselves. We're showing them that they are capable of facing uncertainty, of persevering through frustration, of collaborating to solve problems that no single person could tackle alone.

The next time you see a child wrestling with something difficult, resist the urge to jump in with the answer. Instead, lean into the discomfort. Ask a question. Express curiosity about their thinking. That struggle is not a problem to be solved. It's the very place where learning comes alive.

—Anna Yakabe | The Compass School

The mechanics of cultivating growth mindset

Srinivas Jallepalli is the author of Education Empowered: A Holistic Blueprint for Building Better Schools and a Better World. He also founded Sankalpa Academy, a growth-mindset school created to offer gifted-level education to all children, and cofounded the Higher Orbit Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes educational equity. We asked him to share some thoughts on “growth mindset” based on his extensive research for the book.

If you stand on a street at dawn, you can feel the city waking up and everything feels possible. Childhood is like that. It isn’t one long day; it’s a series of early mornings—“windows”—when the brain is unusually ready to wire new beliefs and habits that can last a lifetime. The most powerful of those beliefs may be: I can accomplish anything.

For their landmark study of language acquisition in the early years, Betty Hart and Todd Risley sat on many living-room floors and watched and listened. Their observations revealed something so basic that it might be easy to overlook: a stark difference in how much and how richly adults from different backgrounds talked with their children. The gap wasn’t just in word count—it was in conversational turns, encouragement, and the sense that a child’s voice mattered. It turns out that these early exchanges were highly correlated with vocabulary growth over the years, school readiness, and even achievement in higher grade levels. But the greatest benefit is in building identity: repeated serve-and-return talk teaches a child: My ideas are worth exploring.

Other scholars—Garcia and Otheguy, Flores and Rosas, and Faltis, for example—also point to issues with schooling that compound the challenges children from minority communities face. They argue that a cultural mismatch between families and a school system rooted in middle- and upper-class White norms is a key deterrent in the United States for these communities. Incidentally, evidence from feral and institutionalized children, Maria Montessori’s work at the Scuola Ortofrenica, and significantly higher scores for homeschooled children on the Piers-Harris Self-Concept Scale underscore the central role of enculturation, agency, and identity in human development (Education Empowered).

“Your beliefs become your thoughts. … Your values become your destiny.” This inspirational quote, traditionally attributed to Gandhi, sums it up well. This idea isn’t a cliché, it isn’t hyperbole. It’s neurological wiring in action. In the language of Education Empowered, subconscious programming happens when a message is repeated with emotion and social proof. If a child repeatedly hears, “You’re not a math person,” that phrase gets stored under truth and will silently steer choices for years. If a child repeatedly experiences “When I try strategies, I learn,” that becomes the stored program. The window isn’t just age; it’s recency and frequency—the density of messages during sensitive periods.

Education Empowered uses the story of Hermione and the House Elves in the Harry Potter series to make a crucial point: the chains that bind are often the scripts we don’t realize we’re reading from. The elves aren’t weak; they are programmed—by the world’s expectations and their own rehearsed self-talk. Hermione doesn’t just free the elves; she invites them to imagine new roles and practice them until they feel natural. This is precisely how growth mindset works in children.

How can we benefit from this understanding? The Department of Public Health in Georgia took the lessons from Hart and Risley’s work and acted. Their innovation was disarmingly practical: using the WIC program—where nearly every infant and caregiver already shows up—to coach parents on language enrichment and parent-child interaction. No new app. No new building. Just reimagining diaper changes, bath time, and grocery trips as micro-seminars in brain building. Coaches help caregivers narrate what they see, ask open questions, wait for the baby’s response, and mirror it back. Because it’s anchored in real routines, the coaching sticks. It’s not “homework”; it becomes home. And when caregivers change the soundtrack of daily life, children internalize a different story about themselves: I am a participant, not a passenger. This narrative offers an excellent start. If parents and schools then follow up with reading materials that are enriching, engaging, nuanced, and inspiring, we are well on our way to wiring confidence, high expectations, grit, and courage into our children.

The following four windows of opportunity for fostering growth mindset make the process relatively concrete.

1. Birth to 3: Wire confidence through identity.
   This is the Hart & Risley era. Babies aren’t keeping score of correct answers; they’re counting turns. Narrate (“I’m zipping your jacket—up, up, up”), name feelings, and practice wait-time. Celebrate effort (“You kept trying that sound!”). Every serve-and-return is micro-proof that initiative matters and the child’s ideas matter.

2. Ages 4–7: Script values and inspiration through play.
   Children try on roles the way actors try costumes, and it helps to minimize cultural misalignment. Offer challenges with visible feedback: puzzles with multiple strategies, invented spelling that improves every week, stories with values that inspire. Label process not person: “You tried two ways,” “You asked for a hint.” These phrases write the growth script line by line.

3. Ages 8–12: Make struggle normal and strategic.
   Teach the practices behind progress: spacing, retrieval, worked examples, and reflection. Allow them to confront options, multiple choices, irony, hypocrisy, and strategy. Invite students to annotate their setbacks: What did I try? What will I try next? Turn “wrong” into data. When adults model revisions in their own work, children learn that improvement is a professional skill, not a personal rescue. Mindset dies when schedules deny second tries.

4. Adolescence: Align belief with purpose.
   Teens will work incredibly hard for something that matters to them. Enable them to experience agency repeatedly. Link growth to contribution: tutoring a younger student, building a community resource, or pursuing a project that solves a real problem. Help them experience freedom as an opportunity to make a difference.

Hart & Risley showed that early talk forecasts later outcomes, but the deeper lesson is agency: children who are invited into conversation learn that their efforts can move the world. Georgia’s WIC-based coaching proves the solution can be elegant and equitable—bringing brain-building into places families already trust, for example. Education Empowered adds the blueprint: expose the invisible scripts, replace them with rehearsed, purposeful roles, and let children practice freedom with guidance. When we stack these pieces, we don’t just close “gaps”; we open windows—again and again—until a growth mindset is not a slogan but a lived, daily rhythm.

The dawn is already here. Our job is to step out and build a new world.

Srinivas Jallepalli | Education Empowered

Why critical thinking is key to using AI wisely

Returning guest writer Stephanie Simoes is the mind behind Critikid.com, a website that teaches critical thinking to children and teens through interactive courses, worksheets, and lesson plans. This article is meant to help educators (and parents) more effectively teach kids to use large language models and other forms of AI in positive ways.

 
In the Phaedrus, Plato expressed concerns that if men learned writing, it would “implant forgetfulness in their souls.” A 1975 issue of Science News referenced a survey that revealed that “72 percent of those polled opposed giving every seventh-grade student a calculator to use during his secondary education.”

Generative artificial intelligence is the newest target of that same opposition, and the debate has intensified since the U.S. Department of Education released its Proposed Priority on Advancing AI in Education.

“Advancing AI in education” can mean different things, but it generally falls into three main areas, all of which are addressed in the DoE’s proposals:

1. Teaching how to use AI—media literacy and how to effectively use LLMs as thinking helpers 

2. Teaching how AI works—expanding computer science lessons to teach the fundamentals of AI systems

3. Using AI to support instruction—empoying AI-driven tools to provide analytics and virtual teaching assistants 

Because I teach critical thinking—and because some critics worry that using AI is destroying our ability to think critically—I will explore the first area in this article.

One of the proposed priorities is teaching students to spot AI‑generated misinformation. That one isn’t especially contentious; spotting misinformation, including AI-generated misinformation, is a core part of modern media literacy.

The more controversial question is whether students should use large language models as “thinking partners.” The virality of the recent MIT study, “Your Brain on ChatGPT,” has amplified the fear that LLM use dampens our thinking skills. In the study, 54 adults wore electroencephalogram (EEG) caps while writing short essays. One group wrote unaided, another used a search engine, and a third relied on ChatGPT. Neural activity was highest in the unaided group, lower with search, and lowest with ChatGPT.

Those results, however, come with big caveats: the paper is still in preprint, the sample was small, and none of the participants were K–12 students.

Moreover, the reduced neural activity during ChatGPT‑assisted writing may simply indicate cognitive offloading, the practice of using external tools to reduce mental effort. From maps to calculators to writing lists of things we need to remember, humans have long been engaging in this practice. Cognitive loading isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it allows us to spend our mental energy on higher‑order tasks. However, it must be implemented carefully in a classroom.

For instance, calculators support higher‑level math education only after students learn arithmetic. Similarly, children should develop basic writing and reasoning skills before using AI as a helper.

Moreover, we need solid subject-specific knowledge before using LLMs as research assistants; otherwise, we lack the expertise to evaluate the results. If we skip those steps, we risk producing a generation of incompetent experts.

But used correctly, AI can be a powerful tool for strengthening students’ critical thinking skills.

Critical thinking is slow, careful thinking. It allows us to question assumptions, spot biases, and weigh evidence. LLM outputs can be flawed or biased like any human source, so their responses deserve the same scrutiny. That scrutiny must sit alongside intellectual humility—recognizing when we don’t (yet) know enough to judge a claim. Students already practice these habits when they evaluate social media posts or websites; LLM outputs are simply the newest arena to apply the same skills.

A drawback of LLMs is that they amplify confirmation bias when we prompt poorly. Ask, “Give me evidence for my belief,” and they may oblige. This flaw can be turned into a lesson about both responsible prompting and confirmation bias. Teach students to prompt “Show the strongest evidence for and against this claim,” and then point out the human tendency to pay more attention to the pieces of evidence that support our preconceptions.

Better yet, have students ask the LLM to challenge their beliefs: “Show me evidence that I am wrong about this.” By prompting for dissent, students learn to explore their beliefs and may even change their minds about some unsupported ones.

History shows a pattern when it comes to new technology: panic, adaptation, and, finally, integration. The task of educators isn’t to shut the door on AI, but to teach students to use it wisely.

—Stephanie Simoes | Critikid.com

Project Week at Headwaters School: Turning curiosity into creation

Paul Lambert, Headwaters School mathematics guide

Like Paige Arnell’s recent guest post for the blog, this piece by Paul Lambert is about one school’s approach to creativity—in this case a step-by-step collaborative method to get special student projects underway. Paul is a mathematics guide at Headwaters School in Austin, Texas.

Every year since 2004, Headwaters School has held Project Week, a unique departure from regular classes during which students choose their topic of study, determine their learning objectives, and share their passions with our school community. Over the years, Project Week has inspired a variety of creative projects, including building a robotic wolf, writing and illustrating a children’s book, designing a biometric sensor, and producing a short documentary about Project Week itself.

Embarking on a big creative endeavor like this can feel overwhelming for our students, so for the last two years we have instituted a structured, step-by-step idea-generation process tailored for middle and early high school students. This framework allows every student to transform their curiosity into a fully realized creation.

Step 1: Brainstorming

We start by getting students' creativity flowing. Each student spends five uninterrupted minutes writing their interests, curiosities, or things they’d like to explore on sticky notes—one idea per note. To encourage a productive session, we emphasize three practices:

• Deferring judgment: Every idea is valid at this stage of the process.

• Encouraging wild ideas: Unconventional concepts often lead to breakthroughs.

• Prioritizing quantity: More ideas mean more possibilities.

By the end of this stage, students have a stack of sticky notes brimming with potential.

Step 2: Mind-Mapping

Next, students work in groups of three or four to organize their sticky notes into categories. Each group decides how to categorize ideas and how each idea fits inside the category. Then, they create a mind map with “Project Week” at the center and their categories branching out as spokes. This collaborative activity helps identify connections and themes, setting the stage for focused exploration.

Headwaters students mind-mapping

Step 3: Concept Development

Once students have collected and categorized their interests, they dive into developing some full project concepts. Students are encouraged to think about how they could combine multiple interests (from the same category or across categories) into one project idea. This is a process that takes time and a great deal of careful consideration.

1. Each student divides an 11" x 17" sheet of paper into three sections and is given 15 minutes to develop three distinct project ideas with as much detail as possible.

2. The papers are then passed to the next member of the group. Each student has 3 minutes to add to or modify the concepts on this page, ensuring no one erases anything.

3. Papers are passed around the group until all members have added to each paper.

This method encourages diverse perspectives while preserving the originality of each idea.

Concept development in a Headwaters classroom

Step 4: Gallery Walk

To gather broader feedback, we have a Gallery Walk. Students display their concept pages around the room or on their desks, and their peers provide constructive comments and suggestions as they stroll around the space. To foster a supportive environment, we ask students to offer two positive remarks for every critique.

By the end of this stage, each concept is enriched with fresh insights, helping students refine their ideas further.

Step 5: Finalizing the Project Idea

With these improved ideas, students choose one concept to develop into their final Project Week plan over the next week. They reflect on key questions to guide their decision:

• What do you hope to learn?

• What skills do you hope to develop?

• What do you hope to create?

• Why is this project important to you?

• Why is this project interesting to you?

Answering these questions helps students articulate the purpose and significance of their project, preparing them to pitch their ideas the following week.

Why This Process Works

This idea-generation process was adapted from the Engineer Your World course at the University of Texas and designed with our middle and high school students in mind. It breaks the intimidating task of starting a project into manageable, engaging steps while fostering creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking. By the time students present their project pitches, they’ve already invested thought, effort, and enthusiasm into their ideas while also receiving feedback, lowering the risk when presenting.

A Headwaters sixth-grade passion project on female artists

Through brainstorming, mind mapping, developing their concepts, and peer feedback, students learn how to turn a simple curiosity into a meaningful project—and, in the process, discover the joy of exploring their passions.

—Paul Lambert, Mathematics Guide | Headwaters School

The imagination is an essential tool

We’re pleased to welcome Paige Arnell to the blog as a guest writer on the role of imagination and creativity in education today. Paige is the head of school at Kirby Hall School, which serves PreK through 8th grade learners in Central Austin.

The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking.
—Ursula K. LeGuin

The changing landscape of childhood is much discussed in the parenting and education world. The reality of digital saturation generates much debating of how, when, and where, and pundits of varying authority weigh in on benefits and dangers. Whatever your philosophy, there is no question that we’ve entered a radically new way of growing up. 

There are many points of entry for the anxious here. No matter your pedagogy or teaching philosophy, for all educators it is a time of considerable questioning and revising. 

One thing that is becoming more and more evident is that for earlier generations so much of the “work” of learning was happening outside of the schoolhouse door.  When children were bored and left to their own devices—without devices, when children were gathering in groups together to make their own entertainment, when children were staring down the long hours of a blank afternoon, they were actively engaging in this essential work of imagining. Out of necessity, they made something out of nothing. They invented a landscape of discovery and collaboration. Obviously, some children did more than others; there were leaders and followers. This is not new information. Waxing nostalgic for childhoods of the past appears to be a perpetual exercise of adulthood; however, what we are newly considering is how much this work of recreation dramatically affected the tasks of the classroom. We now are seeing that children entering school without this practice are at a deficit, and that the tasks of deep learning are becoming more difficult for them. 

Imagination is the foundation of critical thinking. Without imagination, we have no creativity, we have no curiosity. Without imagination, one might argue, we have no thinking. 

This is nothing new, and resources abound for creative activities for children. Unfortunately, what many of these amount to are really no more than decorative activities. A creative writing prompt, a craft with a specific end product, a writing “journal” with pre-filled images and fill-in-the-blank responses. Perhaps some glue, glitter, and markers will be involved. These are nice activities, and many children enjoy them, and they make for cute wall decoration, but they rarely require real working of the mind.

These times require more from all educators. These times require us to ask ourselves more challenging questions. They require us to evaluate what it might mean to prioritize the imagination within our classrooms and schools. 

If we truly take as a foundational principle the claim that “the imagination is an essential tool of the mind,” how might we need to reconsider the primacy of imaginative activity in learning environments, primarily in early childhood education? What does it mean to be free to imagine? Does it mean that we give ourselves permission to think of new things? Does it mean we give ourselves permission to try something really new—at least for us? Does it mean that we allow ourselves to act a different role, to move our bodies in a different way, to try a different voice, to try a new style of writing? Does it mean that we allow our mind to wander so freely that anything can happen … a puddle can become the ocean and twigs and leaves can become great ships? Does it mean that we allow ourselves to write familiar words in new combinations?

Yes, we might say, and we might say yes quite easily. In these times—in these times in which the mind is distracted almost continuously and so very rarely given the quiet and time it needs to drift into the world of imagination—in these times, educators must push themselves even further. We must push ourselves beyond a simple yes and into a deep consideration of the fundamental changes that a radical commitment to honoring the work of the imagination would look like beyond glittery decoration. 

If we believe that the transformative and powerful work rests on a bedrock of imagination and creative thinking—that critical thinking and the production of ideas can only grow from this rich soil—then how do we need to change our classrooms? It seems we must give our students a few things:

• We must give them time, specifically, unstructured time. If we fill their days with tasks and to-dos, they may never reach the space in which a stick becomes a wand or a telescope. 

• We must show them our own willingness to play and engage with the world in new ways. If we view children’s imaginative free time as time for us to check out of their world, we are showing them that imagination is secondary.

• We must give primacy of place to their creations and to their work—no matter how messy it may be. Imagination vitally requires process and not production. Let’s take down the professionally made posters. Let’s allow our students to create the classroom.

We’re called now to create communities in which school provides an almost sacred place for play and exploration, for the joy in creating and making messes. Parents and educators have an incredible opportunity to support each other in this work that may not produce a worksheet one can tape to the fridge, but rather supports the growth of a mind in all of its wonder and full humanness.

—Paige Arnell, Head of School | Kirby Hall School

Discover some gems south of the river: The Small Schools of South Austin Educational Fair

Frequent blog contributor Marie Catrett, of Tigerlily Preschool, and her colleagues at the Small Schools of South Austin, have an invitation for you and your family:

I'm spreading the word about the upcoming Small Schools of South Austin Educational Fair happening on Saturday, April 5th, 9am–noon, at upRising Church, located at 8601 S. 1st Street, Austin Texas 78748. This is a free family event, open to all. 

Small Schools of South Austin is a group of educators, each of us independently running a small school program somewhere south of the river. Our collective is a varied group. We have differing educational inspirations and philosophies—some of us focus on outdoor learning, some are play based. Many of our members are Montessori guides, while others find inspiration in Waldorf or the Reggio approach. We have programs that view learning through the lens of exploring art or prioritize giving children space and freedom outside the city limits. Still others of us are looking to reinterpret existing labels, attempting to describe something that hasn’t existed before. Many of us are teaching and raising our own children. A common cause for creating a small school is that the program you wanted for your child didn’t exist yet. And if you’re pretty brave, determined, and maybe a little crazy, you make it happen. 

Small schools are wonderful schools. You can find reduced class sizes and beautiful, home-like environments with so much love and character. In these spaces, children are seen. In these groups, children become known. There’s a sense of freedom and choice on the part of those teaching. We are here to bring our vision, without administrative hindrances, directly into the lives of the children who need us. 

It can be hard to discover that we exist as an option for your family. We’re tucked away. We’re part of a connected but smaller immediate community. You need to hear about us from a neighbor maybe, or a friend. We’re, well, small. 

The Small Schools of South Austin collective formed to help more families connect with our programs. In the fall we host a multiple-schools-wide open house day, where each school opens their doors for the morning and families are able to tour several of the programs they’re most curious about. This spring marks our inaugural educational fair, where around twenty participating programs will be set up under one roof. Families are invited to come browse our tables to learn more about each of our programs and upcoming enrollment options. Schools will offer hands-on activities for children at many of the booths, host several local vendors, and feature a music performance. 

Please encourage your friends and neighbors to attend. We are community gems who want—and deserve—to be discovered. 

We hope to see you there! 

—Marie Catrett, Teacher-Founder-Director and proud Small Schools member | Tigerlily Preschool