3 Ways To Find The Learning ‘Sweet Spot’
Coach children into knowing when an activity has become too easy so they can adapt and adjust to boost learning
Fifteen 12-year-olds from the Sunderland Football Academy are engaged in a routine training activity. But as they persist, they start to check with each other as to whether what they are doing is too easy, too hard or just right. When they agree that it has become too easy, they quickly change the rules to make it a bit harder.
Their coach, Elliot Dickman, has trained the boys to be aware of their learning ‘sweet spot’ – when they are being challenged, but not overstretched – and to think like coaches, so they can adjust the level of difficulty for themselves.
Too easy and it’s boring; too hard and it’s demoralising. Learning happens best in the sweet spot – and nobody knows where that shifting spot is better than the learners themselves.
Students can be helped to become their own ‘mind coaches’, monitoring the mental stretch that an activity is giving them and adjusting it accordingly. It takes a confident teacher to progressively share more and more of the responsibility for designing activities with their learners. But it’s worth it.
Who wouldn’t rather be surrounded by turbo-charged young learners – unafraid of challenge and raring to go – than children who are passive, dependent or anxious?
3 ways to make it work for you
1. Let learners decide Design activities that allow learners to adjust the difficulty according to their own learning ‘sweet spot’.
For example, instead of dishing out a page of multiplication problems, have learners work in pairs to create their own problems, discovering how difficult they can make them while still supplying the correct answer.
2. Assess the ‘risk factor’ When pupils have home learning to do, allow them to choose (within limits) how adventurous they want to be.
Agree with them a numerical scale that indicates the subjective level of difficulty they chose. When you mark their work, multiply their ‘success’ mark by their ‘risk’ mark to get the final score, like in diving competitions.
3. Low threshold, high ceiling Apply a ‘low threshold, high ceiling’ principle to open-ended tasks.
This means ensuring the task set provides scope for all learners to access and engage with it, yet also provides latitude for all learners to challenge themselves by making more insightful connections and reaching for ever more sophisticated levels of response.
This page has been adapted from Best of the Best: PROGRESS (Crown House), curated by Isabella Wallace and Leah Kirkman, and featuring some of the most influential voices in education.
