03/12/2024
The productive struggle is something we love to work on every day with our clients.
Learning to work through frustration in a calm and assertive manner is a crucial life skill that many kids miss out on in our ‘immediate relief’ society. So many times we see our students get frustrated and want to throw down the rope and quit. The ‘productive struggle’ is not about giving a student a problem and leaving them to figure it out by themselves, rather it is the art of facilitating and encouraging problem solving skills in the client.
While asking Rojan to place his 2 front feet in the hula hoop seems like an easy task, it brought up an entire conversation between these two that eventually ended in success. Our student learned to adapt her communication to clearly engage with her equine partner, had to persevere (many times) but eventually developed connection and gained confidence in herself through this small but mighty task.
~”Productive struggle is developing strong habits of mind, such as perseverance and thinking flexibly, instead of simply seeking the correct solution. Not knowing how to solve a problem at the outset should be expected. The key is working through a problem, encouraging students to think outside the box, and not letting them get discouraged if their initial strategies don’t work.”
