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

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

Beyond the ABCs: Understanding progressive education

 Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash

Guest contributor Geoff Harrison is the founder and head of school at The Compass School. With over three decades of experience in education, he is bringing a new school to Austin: a school where students embark on a journey of curiosity, discovery, and learning rooted in research and progressive education principles.

As a parent, you want the best for your child's education. You've likely heard the term "progressive education," but what does it actually mean? It's more than just a buzzword; it's a philosophy that puts your child at the center of learning, emphasizing critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration over rote memorization. It promotes a joy for learning and helps to cultivate lifelong learners. This article will break down the core principles of progressive education to help you understand if it's the right fit for your family.

The Beginning of Progressive Education

Progressive education didn't spring from one single source but rather evolved from a confluence of ideas and movements, primarily in Europe and the United States, spanning the 17th to the 20th centuries. The term “American Progressive Education” was coined in the 20th century by John Dewey, Maria Montessori, Caroline Pratt, and Lucy Sprague, and it has been supported by recent neuroscience research, which acknowledges that a child who has autonomy—a voice in their own education—learns best.

It's important to note that progressive education has taken various forms and interpretations over time. While some approaches emphasize individual freedom and creativity, others focus on social reform and preparing students for democratic citizenship. However, the core principles of child-centered learning, active engagement, and critical thinking remain central to the philosophy.

Traditional education often focuses on memorizing facts and figures, preparing students for standardized tests. Progressive education takes a different approach. It believes that true learning comes from active engagement, exploration, and discovery. Instead of passively receiving information, children in progressive classrooms are encouraged to ask questions, investigate, and construct their own understanding. Students pursue their curiosity, develop compassion, cultivate courage, and enjoy a level of autonomy.

It’s All About the Learner, the Whole Child

Child-centered learning is at the heart of progressive education. The curriculum is designed to meet the individual needs and interests of each child. Teachers act as facilitators, guiding students’ learning journeys and providing support where needed. Learning is personalized and relevant to the child’s world. Progressive education also emphasizes hands-on, experiential learning. Students learn by doing, through projects, experiments, and real-world applications. This active approach fosters deeper understanding and makes learning more engaging.

Developing critical thinking skills is a priority in progressive schools. Students are encouraged to analyze information, evaluate different perspectives, and solve problems creatively. They learn to think for themselves, rather than simply accepting what they are told. Collaboration is another key component. Students work together on projects, learning to communicate effectively, share ideas, and respect diverse viewpoints. This fosters social skills and prepares them for collaborative work environments in the future.

Progressive education recognizes that children are more than just their academic abilities. It emphasizes the development of the whole child, including their emotional, social, and physical well-being. Schools often incorporate arts, music, and physical activity into the curriculum. Progressive classrooms often operate on democratic principles, where students have a voice in their learning and classroom management. This fosters a sense of ownership and responsibility. While assessments are still important, progressive schools tend to use a variety of methods to evaluate student learning, including portfolios, projects, exhibitions, and self-assessments. The focus is on understanding a child's growth and progress, rather than just assigning a grade.

Photo by Maxence Pira on Unsplash

The principles of progressive education have no limitations to where a child can grow and develop. It meets the needs of every child on their journey and promotes opportunities for advancement based on the individual child and not just standards. Learn more about it on the Progressive Education Network.

Geoff Harrison | The Compass School

What is critical thinking?

Guest contributor Stephanie Simoes is the founder of Critikid.com, a website dedicated to teaching critical thinking to kids and teens through interactive courses, worksheets, and lesson plans.

“Critical thinking” is a trendy term these days, especially in the education world. Alternative schools in Austin commonly advertise that they encourage kids to think critically. Conversations about critical thinking are often accompanied by some version of the Margaret Mead quote, “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.” But such discussions often neglect a crucial question: “What does it mean to teach children how to think?” Critical thinking is an abstract term. Are we all on the same page when talking about it?

As the founder of a critical thinking site for kids, this question is important to my work. We all get what “thinking” is, so the real question is—what makes it “critical”? I like to use a simple definition: critical thinking is careful thinking. It requires slowing down and questioning our assumptions.

Fast and Slow Thinking

Our brains are hardwired to respond to stimuli quickly, a crucial advantage in emergencies. When faced with a potential threat, immediate reaction is essential—there’s no time for deliberation. While this quick thinking might make us mistakenly perceive a harmless situation as dangerous, it’s a safer bet to err on the side of caution in high-stakes moments. It’s a matter of survival: better to assume danger where there is none than to overlook a real threat.

While fast thinking[1] is a valuable skill, it is prone to errors.

Here’s an example. Try to answer this question in less than 5 seconds:

If 1 widget machine can produce a total of 1 widget in 1 minute, how many minutes would it take 100 widget machines to produce 100 widgets?

After you’ve given your quick, intuitive answer, take as much time as you need to think about it.

Many people’s initial, intuitive response is 100 minutes. However, with more careful thought, we see that the correct answer is 1 minute. (The production rate per machine is 1 widget per minute. The rate doesn’t change with the number of machines.)

The key takeaway of this puzzle is that careful, deliberate thinking is often more accurate than quick thinking.

Applying slow, careful thinking to every daily decision would be impractical. Imagine how long you would spend at the grocery store if you conducted a deep analysis of every single choice! In many cases, our intuitive, fast thinking serves us well. However, problems can arise when we cling to the conclusions drawn by our fast thinking—especially in situations where accuracy matters.

In the widget machine problem, it’s relatively straightforward to recognize and correct our intuitive response with a bit of careful thought. However, letting go of our intuitive conclusions is not always this easy.

Humility and Critical Thinking

We might cling to our intuitive answers, even when faced with clear evidence or reasoning that challenges them, for several reasons.

First, it can be hard to change our minds when the intuitive answer feels very obvious or the correct answer is very counterintuitive. A famous example is the Monty Hall Problem. The correct answer to this puzzle is so counterintuitive that when Marilyn Vos Savant published the solution in Parade Magazine in 1990, the magazine received around 10,000 letters (many from highly educated people) saying she was incorrect!

It can also be challenging to let go of wrong answers when we have invested in them, such as by spending time and energy defending them. Sometimes, it’s simply a matter of not wanting to admit we were wrong.

Critical thinking requires more than just slow, deliberate thought. It also demands an open mind, humility, and an awareness of our minds’ flaws and limitations.

Building Blocks of Critical Thinking

Paired with slow, deliberate thought and humility, the following tools help us to be better critical thinkers so we can communicate more clearly—even when communicating with ourselves:

1. An understanding of cognitive biases: These are systematic errors in our thinking that can lead us astray. There are many online resources that explore these biases in detail.

2. An understanding of logical fallacies: These are flawed arguments. Logical fallacies can be used deliberately to “win” a debate, but they’re often made accidentally. Recognizing logical fallacies helps us to keep conversations on track. You can learn about some common logical fallacies in my Logical Fallacy Handbook or teach your kids about them with my online course, Fallacy Detectors.

3. Science literacy: We were taught many facts in science class, but many of us never really learned what science is and how it works. This is the foundation of science literacy. For an introduction to this, I recommend biology professor Melanie Trecek-King’s outstanding article “Science: what it is, how it works, and why it matters.” Another important part of science literacy is knowing How to Spot Pseudoscience.

4. Data literacy: Data literacy is the ability to properly interpret data to draw meaningful conclusions from it (and to know when drawing certain conclusions is premature). It means understanding how data is collected, identifying potential biases in data sets, and understanding statistics. Data literacy helps us make sense of the vast amount of information we encounter daily. You can introduce your teens to some common errors in data collection and analysis in Critikid’s course A Statistical Odyssey—a course that adults have enjoyed and learned from, too!

Preparing Kids for the Misinformation Age

A quick scroll through social media reveals a minefield of bad arguments and misinformation. You have probably come across logical fallacies like these:

“You either support A or B.” (False dilemma)
“Buy our product—it’s all natural!” (Appeal to nature)

The lack of science literacy among influential voices is also concerning. I can’t count how many times I have seen or heard the phrase,

“Evolution is just a theory.”

This phrase confounds the scientific and colloquial definitions of theory. If unintentional, it demonstrates a lack of science literacy; if intentional, this is a logical fallacy known as “equivocation,” in which a word is used in an ambiguous way to confuse or mislead the listener.

The need for data literacy is also apparent. You may have heard arguments like:

“Illness X has increased since Y was introduced, so Y must be the cause.” (Mistaking correlation for causation)
“There are fewer cases of food poisoning among people who drink raw milk than those who drink pasteurized milk.” (Base rate neglect)

We have an incredible amount of data at our fingertips, but without data literacy, we don’t have the proper tools to make sense of it all.

Critical thinking shouldn’t be taught as an afterthought; it needs dedicated, explicit instruction. Children face a battlefield of misinformation and faulty logic every time they go online. Critical thinking is their armor. Let’s help them forge it.

Stephanie Simoes | Critikid.com

[1] Nobel-prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls fast thinking “system 1 thinking” in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. I highly recommend this book to anyone who finds the content of this blog post interesting.

Finding balance in a self-paced process

Samantha Jansky and Janita Lavani are co-founders of Ascent: An Acton Academy in North-Central Austin. With many years of experience as Socratic guides and Acton curriculum developers, they have a lot to say about the balancing act required of both learners and adults in a flourishing self-paced learning environment. We’re pleased they agreed to share some of their wisdom with us on the Alt Ed Austin blog.

The ingredients of a healthy self-paced learning process can prove empowering and set learners up for success for life. However, there’s an element of balance required to pull them all together. Paradoxically, autonomy requires accountability, and flexibility requires structure. While it might seem as though these are in conflict, they work in tandem to give much-needed balance to an individual’s learning process.

Autonomy, as you could have guessed, is at the core of self-paced learning. At Ascent, the learners determine for themselves how and when to approach their work. They do so when they are motivated through pursuing their curiosities, when they are equipped to engage freely in their environment, and when they practice toward mastery. Learners are not bound by limits placed on them because of their age. They can go as far and beyond what is expected of them in a particular subject. They can also choose when to work on the material; perhaps they are someone who likes to focus on a certain subject for weeks at a time, or perhaps they like a little balance each day. Ultimately, it is up to them to decide how to approach their work.

The flexibility of self-paced learning plays into genuine autonomy. Learners practice adjusting timelines, revisiting concepts, and incorporating feedback, allowing them to navigate their learning journey with resilience and a growth mindset. it offers the opportunity to practice adaptability in the face of unforeseen challenges and push through when faced with resistance.

This flexibility, however, doesn’t imply a lack of structure or discipline; rather, it encourages individuals to take ownership of their learning journey and create the structure themselves through tools introduced to them (some examples include SMART Goals, the Urgent/Important Matrix, squad frameworks, and the badge system to stay on track). Self-paced learning means you work on each subject at your pace—slowing down when you need to grasp something, and accelerating once you’ve mastered a topic. Self-paced learning empowers individuals to keep moving forward.

One of the most important tools offered to learners in a self-paced environment is goal-setting: establishing realistic objectives and timelines to maintain a sense of purpose and direction. Goal-setting ensures that the learners stay focused, motivated, and accountable. In a learner-driven environment, the learners are accountable to their growth. A key difference between this and more traditional learning environments is that a learner’s standing in any subject area is not compared to a predefined standard; rather, their progress is measured against their past achievements and efforts. The practice of setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Tough/Time-Bound) Goals is critical in this regard. A true SMART goal is challenging. It pushes your limits to see what you can do, and it is built upon past progress and learning. This is where the rigor of a learner-driven environment comes into play.

The combination of clear goals, accountability, and active engagement creates a tremendous amount of structure in a learner-driven environment—but it’s not a “top down” structure created by someone else. When the learners have autonomy over their learning and their work output, they are the ones creating the structure they need to thrive, leading to a strong sense of responsibility.

Here’s a story that pulls all of this together. It’s one of many examples we have seen over the years of the magic of balancing autonomy with accountability and structure with flexibility.

It was a chilly February morning, and one learner was celebrating. Running around the studio, she was ecstatic. “I got my level 2 Math badge, I got my math badge!” The other learners in the studio were not silent on the matter, either. Loud jubilation and high-fives took place all over the space.

This young hero had finally found her stride in math—a process that included a lot of help but that was hers to own. For a couple of years, she had struggled to find flow in this particular subject. Her squad frequently supported her in goal setting, and her guides engaged her with questions and challenged her to set tough goals and develop a regular practice. She had the tools, such as SMART goals, a watch that reminded her to take quick breaks before getting back to work, a badge system that offered extrinsic motivators in each subject area, and powerful online platforms. She had the support of her parents, who checked in with her frequently but were also aware of when they needed to give her space; they also left her plenty of space to fail (and to own that, too).

This recipe was one for success, but she needed time to find her stride—to accomplish big wins in math on her timeline, at her pace. This allowed her gradually to build up confidence. She faced setbacks and learned to lean on her support system when she got an answer wrong—asking for help when she needed it—and eventually built up the mental muscle she needed to resist the urge to give up when she got an answer wrong. After months of setting daily math goals to create a habit, having the discipline to tell friends she was working, using her watch, and rewarding herself with reading after she finished her math goal, she created a structure that worked for her and found flexibility in her practice.

She had full autonomy (no one was going to make her do her work) but was also accountable to her goals and to the people she pulled in for support. She felt pressure, but it was rooted in her self-paced striving toward mastery. Most importantly, she owned the whole process, all the ups and downs, and so in the end, she realized her potential all on her own.

Samantha Jansky and Janita Lavani | Ascent: An Acton Academy