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Seeking Challenge

Card Contents

Learner Reflection

When you’re developing a new skill are you more likely to practice something you’re comfortable with over and over again until it’s second nature, or push forward into new territory quickly? How does your approach change in different contexts?

When content isn’t inherently challenging, where do you look to find your own challenges? What kinds of big problems motivate your curiosity?

Educator Reflection

There’s a common perception that students are intimidated by content that is too challenging. While this is true, content that is too easy can often be similarly demotivating. Can you imagine any ways in which your course could provide students with flexible challenges that meet them where they are?

Video games can teach us a lot about education. Customizable and “plesantly frustrating” challenges can motivate, engage, entertain, and educate (Gee, 2007).

Sample Scenario

I see this conversation being particular valuable in two different contexts:

Consider the first major assessment in your course. You collect student papers, start looking through them, and you find yourself astounded with how well they're doing. Meeting your students where they are would involve restructuring the rest of the semester, either by accelerating the pace of your curriculum or supplementing it with additional topics. While this could help keep your students challenged, it also adds significant administrative work to your plate, and it runs the risk of coming across as punitive to students who feel a need to focus their time and effort on other courses, and if there are a few who aren't excelling you also risk overwhelming them with the additional expectations. Asking your class to share some of the ways they might find additional challenges can help them identify their own "stretch goals" for the assignments in your course. After hearing some of their ideas, you might be able to make minor adjustments to the requirements of future assessments (not decreasing the rigor, but a lateral adjustment) to accommodate their approaches.

Alternatively, if there's a particular small group of students who are excelling, consider raising this question in a one-on-one conversation, perhaps during office hours, as a means to challenge them to push themselves further.

I would resist the urge to award additional credit for students who take on these "above and beyond" types of activities. Neither of these approaches should lead to new expectations for the class, but opportunities for students to pursue something they're already passionate about even further!

Faculty Highlight: We are still looking for examples of faculty at UNL who have had these conversations with students to share their stories. If you found this topic beneficial and are willing to share your experience please email scain@unl.edu.

Digging Deeper

If you're interested in exploring this topic more deeply or looking for recommendations of how to respond to student input, these resources may be helpful:

Choice, Ownership, and Voice through Authentic Learning (COVA)
Is Difficulty Overrated? The Effects of Choice, Novelty and Suspense on Intrinsic Motivation in Educational Games

Feedback

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References

Gee, J. P. (2007). Good video games+ good learning: Collected essays on video games, learning, and literacy. Peter Lang.

Classroom Conversation Cards were created by Steven Cain with developmental input from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Center for Transformative Teaching. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.