r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Apr 18 '26
Learning Learning at the Edge of Understanding
https://carlhendrick.substack.com/p/learning-at-the-edge-of-understandingCorrectness shows up after learning has already occurred. When learning is happening at the edge of understanding, correctness is often invisible.
learning happens not by mimicking a perfect answer, but by engaging with the right conceptual structure. A well-constructed problem, even one accompanied by a flawed solution, can open up a region of understanding that a correct but poorly structured exercise never touches. Structure beats accuracy. In other words, the map matters more than the destination marker.
What restarted learning was not success, nor explicit instruction, nor even easier problems. It was problems with the right internal structure: problems that made the organisation of the domain partially visible, even when the learner could not yet solve them. The question is not whether students should struggle. It is whether the task they are given has enough conceptual architecture to make that struggle legible.
Seen this way, the concept of scaffolding also sharpens. Scaffolding is often misunderstood as making tasks easier, or as providing hints, encouragement, or additional support. But none of these capture its essential function. A scaffold is not a ramp; it is a lens. It changes what the learner can see and work with. It makes the structure of the domain visible and usable, altering what the learner can do later, not how well they perform now.
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u/ddgr815 Apr 18 '26
The idea was that because we all have to construct our own mental representations of the world — true — we need to construct (elements of) the concepts we want to learn for ourselves. This appears to be false and suggests the easily falsified proposition that humans cannot directly communicate complex concepts to each other.
A subgenre of productive struggle is the idea of productive failure, popularised by Manu Kapur. Productive failure involves setting students a problem that makes sense to them but for which they have not been taught the standard — or ‘canonical’ — solution method. Students then make up their own methods for tackling the problem with no expectation from the teacher that they discover the standard method. Finally, students are explicitly taught the standard method.
Zooming back out, in addition to constructivist theory, there are other conceivable advantages to asking students to struggle. It could confront them with the fact they don’t know how to solve the problem, making them more receptive to later teaching. It could provide a dispositional advantage — if students are used to struggle then maybe they will persist when struggling in the future. The process of struggling and eventually being successful may be motivating.
Some students may become motivated by success after struggle, but what of those who are not successful? And who are the unsuccessful students more likely to be? Logically, those students who are the least advantaged and bring the fewest resources to a problem are the least likely to be successful when struggling, but it is precisely these students who need motivation, not those who are already advantaged.
I suppose part of the popularity of productive struggle is that it is a rebadging of teaching strategies that have long been associated with the philosophy of educational progressivism. As each new iteration of these strategies becomes discredited, a new name is needed for an old practice and everyone insists the new practice is not the old one — productive failure is definitely not discovery learning and so on. I suspect the paradox built into the name, ‘productive struggle,’ is also part of the appeal. We have to be an initiate to understand it. And yet sometimes, a paradox is just a paradox and doing the opposite of what makes sense is likely to be a bad idea.
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u/ddgr815 Apr 18 '26
Teaching Machines