When the work is theirs, but the thinking isn't.
A thought-provoking contribution from a colleague at the recent South West Secondary School Improvement Network summer meeting, organised by the Ted Wragg Trust, led me to reflect on a deceptively simple but profoundly important question: how often are children producing work that is genuinely the product of their own thinking? If the purpose of school improvement networks is to stimulate professional dialogue that continues long after the event itself, then this meeting certainly achieved its aim.
Learning Requires Thinking
As Willingham (2009) famously argues, "memory is the residue of thought." In other words, learning is shaped by what children are thinking about rather than what teachers intend them to learn. This has important implications for task and lesson design. Poorly designed tasks can become a poor proxy for learning, creating the illusion of progress whilst directing attention away from the knowledge or concepts or content that matter.
If children are thinking primarily about completing a worksheet, copying a model or example, or following a procedure, they may become proficient at those activities without developing genuine understanding. Attention is the gateway to learning: children must pay attention in order to think, and they must think about the right things in order to learn. The quality of learning therefore depends not on what children are doing, but on what their minds are engaged with while they are doing it.
Willingham (2009) also reminds us that "people are naturally curious, but they are not naturally good thinkers." Thinking is effortful; we might, at times, actively look to avoid thinking! It requires concentration, persistence and, often, struggle. As teachers, our role is not to remove that struggle altogether, but to design explanations, tasks, and resources that make the struggle worthwhile and productive. If we want children to learn, we must ensure that the cognitive heavy lifting remains with them. Before admiring what is on the page, perhaps we should first ask: what and whose thinking produced it?
Willingham tells us that memory is the residue of thought. Sweller, Ayres and Kalyuga
(2011) explains why. New learning is created when children actively process information and connect it to what they already know. Learning, therefore, is not something that happens to children; it is something children must actively do for themselves. This is why beautifully completed work can be such a poor proxy for learning. If the task has removed the need to think, then it may also have removed the conditions necessary for learning to occur.
Learning is not something that happens to children; it is something their thinking must create.
The Danger of Over-Scaffolding
Effective teaching involves reducing unnecessary cognitive load whilst preserving the productive cognitive effort that drives learning. If every decision has already been made, every sentence stem provided, and every misconception anticipated, children may produce impressive work but contribute very little of the thinking themselves. Ultimately, successful scaffolds should be temporary structures: their greatest achievement is not that children rely on them, but that children no longer need them.
Over-modelled writing; sentence stems that become entire paragraphs; completed exemplars that remove decision-making; teacher intervention at the first sign of difficulty – these can all result in success, but with no ownership and no thinking.
Why Struggle Matters
Schools often treat struggle as something to be eliminated. We instinctively step in when children find something difficult. Yet cognitive science suggests that certain types of difficulty are not obstacles to learning but the very conditions that make learning possible. Bjork and Bjork (2020) argue that "conditions of instruction that make performance improve rapidly often fail to support long-term retention and transfer, whereas other conditions that appear to create difficulties for the learner, slowing the rate of apparent learning, can enhance long-term retention and transfer." They refer to these as desirable difficulties: learning experiences that require greater cognitive effort in the moment but result in stronger, more durable learning over time.
As Bjork's work repeatedly demonstrates, there is an important distinction between performance and learning; what appears easy and successful in the short term is not always what is most effective in the long term. This challenges us to reframe our view of struggle. Effort is not necessarily a sign that learning is failing. Often, it is evidence that learning is taking place. If we remove every difficulty in pursuit of smooth classroom performance, we may inadvertently remove the very thinking that leads to lasting learning.
This presents a challenge for teachers. Faced with a child who is stuck, we often feel compelled to intervene immediately. Of course, there are times when support is necessary, but there is also a danger that, in our eagerness to help, we inadvertently steal the thinking. A moment that could have required the child to wrestle with an idea, retrieve prior knowledge, make a connection or persevere through uncertainty can quickly become an exercise in following instructions. The learning opportunity is transformed into a task to be completed.
The Teacher's Role
The teacher's role is not to make learning easy, nor is it to leave children struggling alone with an impossibly difficult task. Rather, it is to carefully engineer challenge while providing sufficient support for success. This balance is captured in Vygotsky's concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), which describes the space between what a child can achieve independently and what they can achieve with guidance and support (Vygotsky, 1978). As Townsend, Slavit and McDuffie (2018) note, productive struggle occurs when children work on problems that are not "overly difficult" but sit within a learner's zone of proximal development, allowing them to succeed through effort, guidance and perseverance rather than immediate intervention. In parallel, Cognitive Load Theory reminds us that challenge should arise from the learning itself, not from poorly designed tasks, excessive instructions or unnecessary distractions (Sweller, Ayres and Kalyuga, 2011).
The goal, therefore, is not to remove difficulty altogether, but to remove the wrong difficulties whilst preserving the right ones. Too little support and children become overwhelmed; too much support and we risk doing the thinking for them. Great teaching lies in navigating this tension, creating conditions in which children can grapple with ideas, make connections and experience success without being rescued from every moment of uncertainty. Ultimately, great teaching does not remove struggle; it makes struggle productive.
Perhaps, then, we should return to the fundamental question: how often are children producing work that is genuinely the product of their own thinking? It may be one of the most important questions a school can ask. The cognitive science is remarkably consistent. Learning requires thinking. Memory is shaped by thought. Desirable difficulty strengthens learning. Productive struggle develops understanding. Excessive support can reduce the very thinking we are seeking to promote. None of this suggests that teachers should abandon scaffolds, leave children to struggle alone or create needless difficulty. Rather, it challenges us to reflect carefully on whether our support is enabling thinking or replacing it.
As leaders and teachers, we should regularly ask ourselves: How often are children in our schools, and in our classrooms, engaging in work that is truly the product of their own thought? Not simply completing tasks, following processes or reproducing models, but wrestling with ideas, making decisions, retrieving knowledge and constructing understanding for themselves. The answers may be uncomfortable, but they are important.
The great thinking theft rarely happens intentionally, but it happens nonetheless. Our challenge is to create classrooms in which the thinking belongs not to the teacher, the scaffold or the task, but to the child.
References:
Bjork, R.A. and Bjork, E.L. (2020) ‘Desirable difficulties in theory and practice’, Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 9(4), pp. 475–479.
Bjork, R.A. (2013) ‘Desirable difficulties perspective on learning’, in Reisberg, D. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 56–64.
Sweller, J., Ayres, P. and Kalyuga, S. (2011) Cognitive Load Theory. New York: Springer.
Townsend, C., Slavit, D. and McDuffie, A.R. (2018) ‘Supporting all learners in productive struggle’, Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, 23(4), pp. 216-224.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Willingham, D.T. (2009) Why Don't Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
