Success and Challenge: The Roller Coaster Analogy

The greatest gift we can offer our students is a love of learning and a positive orientation to challenge. Together, these two traits help them feel limitless, capable of learning and accomplishing anything. Montessori education is particularly adept at helping children understand and embrace their relationships with challenge, which is the key to effective learning. When we picture optimal learning, we picture a child in “flow”. The mental state of flow (a.k.a. being “in the zone”) is studied in educational psychology and defined as being completely absorbed in an activity and finding enjoyment in the experience. Flow has four stages.

The Four Stages of Flow

1. The struggle phase, when we resist the amount of effort a challenge will take. This can be when children shut down or avoid work that is challenging to them.
2. The release phase, when we accept that our task will be effortful and engage in trying our best to struggle through.
3. The flow phase, where time passes by surprisingly quickly and we are singularly focused on the task. Self-consciousness and distraction recede. We are able to do our best work. The Synchronization Theory even suggests that the different regions of our brain are able to communicate with each other more easily in a state of flow.
4. The consolidation phase in which our brain accommodates the new knowledge and experience gained during the flow state.

Moving Through Struggle

If we think of optimal learning as a series of flow states, our goal as teachers must be to help children learn to move themselves through the struggle phase to the release phase of the flow process. So many children spend their amazing emotional and mental energies on this struggle, and never move through the struggle to release, where they can find success and the rush and excitement of flow. This rush of excitement and success is what will motivate them through the next struggle phase, so helping them experience this consistently, and feel ownership of these successes, is the cornerstone to nurturing children who can persevere through challenge and love learning. And this is not just metaphorical-the brain literally rewards us for pushing through struggles and feeling successful by sending us a hit of dopamine.

The Rush of Success

Yes, the same dopamine released in the addiction process of chocolate, sex, and cocaine is released when we persevere and feel successful! Nature knows this is a vital life skill, and we are built to learn it. Some children just need more help than others to experience the joy of challenge.

Teaching Children the Value of Challenge

I find it valuable to include children (elementary years and up) in this conversation. We learn about growth mindset and flow together. We learn about dopamine and the brain’s reward system. Then we discuss challenge through these different lenses. For younger children, this is a complicated topic. I have also found the following analogy, used as an impressionistic lesson/story, to be useful in opening these conversations with children.

“Learning is a like a roller coaster-there are smaller hills and taller hills on the ride. Each of these hills are like the challenges we face each day. The small hills take a little bit of effort to get the coaster up to the top. The really tall hills take A LOT of effort to get to the top. We can hear the gears clicking and chains creaking as we slowly climb the incline. Once we go through that effort, we’re at the top. What happens next? (We go down the hill.) What does what feel like? (Exciting! Woosh!) Yes! We get this rush of going down–it feels fun and easy and exciting. It wouldn’t have been possible without the slow effort of getting to the top of the hill. The hills that were the tallest and required the most effort also felt the most fun and exciting after we made it to the top. Traveling up the chains and gears to the top of the hill is like learning a new concept. It takes practice and struggle and work. But afterward, we get the rush of knowing we conquered the challenge and mastered this new skill.

*With hand motions to mimic going up and down roller coaster hills* Now picture that each of you is simultaneously on many roller coasters. On the reading roller coaster, you might be working hard up the large hill of beginning to read chapter books. At the same time, you just began to master writing complete sentences, and this no longer feels so hard; you are experiencing a rush of success. You are also on a gentle incline on math operations roller coaster as you get better with harder and harder division problems. You are also on a geometry coaster, a language mechanics coaster, a history coaster…

My job, as a teacher, is to plan lessons and give help so that you have the best possible experiences on these roller coasters. That includes getting up some really big hills so you can have the rush of flying down them. No one would feel good going uphill on every coaster all at once. We want roller coasters to be in different phases (of learning). This helps us feel success not only after each challenge, but also at some point each day, which will help fuel us through our current challenges and help us have a positive attitude and feel ready to put in effort for the next challenge that comes our way.”

Take-Aways for Teachers and Students

Including children in the metacognition around challenge and success helps the process be less adult-centered and gives them a greater sense of control. Understanding that the struggle and resistance is a part of the normal process of learning is important for both students and teachers, and can empower us to harness our energy to move past the unpleasant feelings challenge can bring and be confident that wonderful feelings of success and achievement lay on the other side.