This course will focus on the benefits of productive struggle and teach you some methods for designing effective activities to support students through challenging tasks.
In this teacher professional development course, you will learn about the importance of allowing your students to engage in productive methods of struggle so that they can learn skills and strategies to overcome challenging tasks. You will be provided with activities and strategies to support your students and help foster productive struggle.
The course comes with a downloadable PDF of the content and a reference guide that helps you eliminate unnecessary hurdles in your challenging activities so that you can set your students up for success.
Requirements:
Hardware Requirements:
- This course can be taken on either a PC, Mac, or Chromebook.
Software Requirements:
- PC: Windows 10 or later.
- Mac: macOS 12 or later.
- Browser: The latest version of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox is preferred. Microsoft Edge and Safari are also compatible.
- Microsoft Word Online
- Editing of a Microsoft Word document is required in this course. You may use a free version of Microsoft Word Online, or Google Docs if you do not have Microsoft Office installed on your computer. Model Teaching can provide support for this.
- Adobe Acrobat Reader
- Software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins.
Other:
- Email capabilities and access to a personal email account.
Instructional Material Requirements:
The instructional materials required for this course are included in enrollment and will be available online.
- Productive Struggle Course Content
- The video and article will provide you with an understanding of productive struggle, teaching you strategies to support students throughout challenging tasks. The course also includes some "Reflect or Discuss" prompts to help you connect with the course content and ends with a "Try This Task" to guide you explicitly on how you might implement the ideas into the classroom.
- Quiz
- You will answer questions related to productive struggle. Quizzes are automatically scored and provide feedback on answer choice rationale.
- Implementation Reflection
- The reflection prompt requires you to plan for use of the "try this task" by either reflecting on the content yourself or discussing them with the colleague. You will then discuss a new concept you can attempt to implement in the future based on something you learned in the course.
- Considerations for Implementation
- This short statement helps you reflect on your ideas and assess whether you might be successful in your implementation.
- Videos and Further Reading
- Additional content suggestions are provided to enhance and expand your understanding of productive struggle.
What you will learn
- Define and learn about struggle and why it is important
- Build a plan for designing activities that promote and foster struggle
- Evaluate simple strategies you can use to support students during productive struggle
How you will benefit
- You will be able to allow your students the freedom to work through challenging tasks on their own after they begin utilizing the strategies you teach
- Your classroom dynamic will improve because you can offer increasingly challenging yet interesting, activities for students to grapple with
- These activities will allow students to work on increasingly complex cognitive skills, ultimately elevating your classroom and improving your student's academic performance
Self-Study