When Struggling Is the Point

I remember sitting in a department meeting ten years ago, nodding politely while a consultant in a slim-fit suit explained how “desirable difficulties” would revolutionise our results. He spoke in academic jargon that sounded expensive and, frankly, exhausting. He made it sound like we needed a complete pedagogical overhaul to get it right. But let’s be honest: most of the literature on how desirable difficulties work is written for a pristine, silent classroom where every student has a high-speed laptop and a personal tutor. In my experience, when you’re staring at thirty Year 9s who can’t find their pens, “desirable difficulty” isn’t some high-concept cognitive theory; it’s just the uncomfortable friction required to make a fact stick in a brain that’s currently focused on a TikTok trend.

I’m not here to sell you a shiny new initiative or a complex framework that will fall apart by the time the bell rings. My promise is simpler: I want to show you how to use these principles without adding three hours to your Sunday evening prep. We’re going to look at what actually happens when you stop making things too easy for them, and how to do it when you’re already running on fumes.

Managing Cognitive Load Theory in Learning When Time Is Short

The problem with most academic papers on cognitive load theory in learning is that they assume your students have arrived at your lesson with their mental hard drives completely empty and ready for high-speed data transfer. In reality, they’ve usually just come from a chaotic break or a double maths lesson that’s left them mentally fried. When you’re trying to introduce something new, you aren’t just fighting the complexity of the subject; you’re fighting the sheer exhaustion of the room. If you pile on too much at once, you don’t get “desirable difficulty”—you just get a room full of blank stares and a very loud, very frustrated sense of defeat.

If you’re short on time, don’t try to reinvent the wheel with some complex new scaffolding. Instead, focus on stripping away the noise. The goal is to find that sweet spot of optimal challenge where they are actually working, not just spinning their wheels. It’s about being ruthless with what you present. If a piece of information doesn’t directly help them bridge the gap between what they know and what they’re learning right now, bin it. We don’t have the luxury of “exploratory learning” when we’ve only got forty minutes before the bell rings and the next cohort of chaos walks through the door.

Optimal Challenge for Skill Acquisition Without Breaking the Class

The theory suggests we should be constantly pushing the boundaries of what a student can handle, but there is a massive difference between a “productive struggle” and a student simply staring at a blank page in total silence. If you aim for the ceiling every single lesson, you’ll find half your class has checked out by October. Finding that optimal challenge for skill acquisition isn’t about making the work harder; it’s about making the thinking more demanding while keeping the scaffolding sturdy enough that they don’t fall through the floor.

In practice, this often means moving away from the comfort of “blocking practice”—where they do twenty of the same thing until they can do it in their sleep—and moving toward something slightly more uncomfortable. I’m talking about interleaving vs blocking practice. It’s much easier to teach them ten similar problems in a row, but if you want that knowledge to actually stick when they hit the exam, you have to mix it up. It feels messier, and it feels slower, but it’s the only way to ensure they aren’t just mimicking a pattern without actually understanding the logic behind it.

Five Ways to Make it Work Without Losing the Room

• Stop the ‘easy wins’ trap. It feels good to watch a class breeze through a worksheet, but if they aren’t sweating even a little bit, they aren’t actually learning anything that’ll stick. If the lesson feels too smooth, you’re probably just managing their moods rather than their minds.
• Scaffolding isn’t a permanent crutch. Use the heavy support—the sentence starters, the word banks, the templates—to get them through the door, but you have to start pulling them away. If you leave the scaffold up all term, they’ll never learn to stand on their own, and you’ll be stuck doing the heavy lifting for them.
• Embrace the ‘productive struggle.’ When a student hits a wall, your instinct is to jump in and save them so the lesson keeps moving. Resist it. Give them thirty seconds of silence to actually grapple with the problem. That friction is exactly where the cognitive heavy lifting happens.
• Retrieval over rereading. Don’t let them just look at their notes to find an answer; that’s a shortcut that leads to a dead end. Make them pull the information from their own heads first, even if they get it wrong. The struggle to remember is more valuable than the ease of looking.
• Space it out, even when the timetable says otherwise. We don’t have the luxury of ‘spaced repetition’ software, but you can do it with a quick five-minute recap of something from three weeks ago. It feels inefficient in the moment, but it’s the only way to stop the ‘learn it today, forget it by Friday’ cycle.

The Reality Check: What to Actually Take Away

Don’t mistake “difficulty” for “chaos.” If a task is so hard that you spend twenty minutes just managing the fallout and the raised hands, you haven’t created a desirable difficulty; you’ve just created a management nightmare. The goal is to stretch their brains, not to break your ability to keep the room quiet.

Scaffolding isn’t a permanent crutch; it’s the training wheels you take off as soon as they stop wobbling. You use the support to get them through the hard bit, but if you leave it in place forever, they’ll never actually learn to ride the bike on their own.

Prioritise the “struggle” for the stuff that actually matters. You don’t need to make every single worksheet a mountain climb. Save that mental heavy lifting for the core concepts—the things they’ll actually need to remember when they’re sitting their exams in six months’ time.

The Friction of Real Learning

We spend so much time trying to make lessons ‘smooth’ and ‘seamless’ because we’re exhausted, but real learning is actually quite clunky. If a student isn’t stumbling slightly over a concept, they aren’t actually building any mental muscle; they’re just coasting on the momentum of what they already know. Desirable difficulty isn’t about making things hard for the sake of it; it’s about adding just enough friction so that when they finally grasp it, the knowledge actually sticks to them instead of sliding right off the chalkboard.

Ellery Mwangi-Selkirk

The Reality Check

So, where does that leave us? We’ve talked about managing cognitive load so your students don’t hit a wall, and we’ve looked at finding that sweet spot of challenge that doesn’t end in a total classroom meltdown. The takeaway isn’t that you need to overhaul your entire scheme of work by Monday morning—heaven forbid. It’s simply about recognising that struggle is often where the actual learning lives. If the lesson feels too smooth, too easy, or too much like a guided tour where no one is actually doing the heavy lifting, you aren’t helping them. Desirable difficulty isn’t about making things needlessly hard; it’s about purposeful friction that ensures the knowledge actually sticks when they walk out of that door.

Look, I know the workload is heavy enough without adding “cognitive scientist” to your list of job descriptions. But don’t let the jargon intimidate you. You don’t need a PhD to see when a student is coasting versus when they are actually wrestling with a concept. Trust your gut and trust your experience. At the end of the day, we aren’t just delivering content; we are building mental muscles. It’s going to be messy, and it’s certainly not going to be perfect, but the best teaching happens in the struggle. Just keep showing up, keep tweaking the dials, and remember that even on a wet Wednesday, a little bit of productive effort is worth more than a thousand easy wins.

About Ellery Mwangi-Selkirk

Most educational advice is written for a classroom that does not exist — twenty motivated pupils, unlimited preparation time, no behaviour to manage. I write for the room you are actually in. What retrieval practice looks like when marking is already three weeks behind, why the seating plan matters more than the starter activity, and which of the last decade's initiatives left anything behind. Nineteen years taught me that the good ideas survive contact with a wet Wednesday and the rest do not.