My dad never did anything the simple way.
When I was about ten, sidewalk surfing was the craze. This was before skateboards existed. We made our own: a cut-down 2×4, a rollerskate split into two axles, and you were flying down the hill. All the kids on my street were doing it. It looked like the most fun thing in the world.
I asked my dad to make me one. He said yes. And then he improved it.
Instead of rollerskate wheels, he used casters from his garage. You know, the kind that rotate 360 degrees. He was so proud of that upgrade.
That skateboard was unrideable. The first crack in the pavement and it would lurch in whatever direction it felt like. If you were lucky, you landed in the grass.
I thought about that skateboard today when a colleague mentioned “productive struggle” as a learning design principle.
I believe in productive struggle. I do. But here’s what I’ve been thinking about: it’s one of those phrases that sounds like a solution until you ask whose struggle, and how much, and toward what.
We don’t have general learners. We have this person, at this moment, trying to learn this thing. And the difference between struggle that builds capability and struggle that just scrapes your knee is whether we actually know where they are.
My dad’s casters weren’t wrong in the abstract. For a different rider, a different hill, maybe they were genius. But for a ten-year-old on a cracked sidewalk? They were just a hazard.
So I’m curious. How do you ensure productive struggle actually lands, especially when you’re designing for hundreds or thousands of learners?
What practical approaches do you use to calibrate the push without losing the person?
Because nobody really enjoys a skinned knee.