How can we make discomfort lead to learning?
Educators know that in order to learn, a student has to experience and push beyond discomfort. But it's not just a school-years skill.
There’s a special kind of discomfort that I feel when I’m confronted with an obvious mistake. It’s not an uncommon feeling. Still, when I logged on to a Zoom call with a teacher named Will earlier this summer, I wasn’t expecting to feel that discomfort. When I saw Will’s face, though, I realized that I’d gotten the wrong email address from my friend Erin, who’d introduced me to two men, both teachers named Will, at a party a few weeks before. The two Wills weren’t interchangeable, though, and the fact that the Will I was looking at teaches Science while the Will I expected teaches English made me panic that the interview I’d prepared - about student discussion - would be a disaster.
Fortunately, this Will reassured me that, despite what my bias said, Science teachers do actually discuss science with their students, and the interview went smoothly. Ironically, even though I never actually owned up to my mistake, discomfort became a major theme in our conversation. The best teachers in Will’s life, he said almost immediately after we began, were the ones who “constantly pushed” him, who believed that discomfort was central to their students’ growth. This wasn’t much of a revelation or a surprise to me; if I coded and quantified the responses of most of my interviewees to the question “who was your favorite teacher and why?” about fifty percent would respond in a similar way. I kept thinking about discomfort after the interview, though, for two reasons: first, I saw that discomfort really is a through line of teaching and learning, across contexts and decades; and second, discomfort doesn’t always or maybe even often mean that you’ve learned “your lesson” or “the lesson.” Its primary purpose might just be to make you think differently.
It seems almost too obvious to point out that discomfort is an essential element of teaching, but I don’t know if it’s perceived outside the world of education to be as central as it is. Will understands that discomfort is a central element of the learning process, but even a teacher who lacks Will’s reflective nature would already know this. It’s a fundamental understanding of learning rooted in dominant philosophies of teaching (Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is always especially memorable), the kind that most teachers encounter in teacher-training programs. For me, it took becoming a teacher to see that what the most memorable teachers in my life had in common was their belief in this discomfort - they hadn’t ever roundly praised me without also challenging me. Discomfort really does seem to be a central value of education, across generations and traditions, though it’s enacted more or less effectively for reasons related both to individual teachers and to the contexts in which they work.
Ensuring that discomfort leads to learning, though, requires defining and redefining discomfort as distinct from the feeling of being psychologically unsafe. Critics who feel that teachers want to “coddle” and “soften” kids tend to ignore this distinction. I find, as a teacher, that I have to define that line constantly in order to design for discomfort, but the line morphs year by year, perhaps even month by month; the definitions of either term, in the context of a school, aren’t stable. Covid-19 wiped away any familiar contours of such a line, and finding it again has been a challenge ever since. A teacher knows that it’s her job to find new and compelling ways to make students uncomfortable while preserving their safety, because research across the past few decades has explored the correlation between feelings of physical and psychological safety at school and student success. This piece, and the others that it cites, can give you a taste of the complexity of this question, which will be always-gummed up by the fact that student responses are subjective. And while teenagers aren’t reliably capable of defining the difference between discomfort and safety, they’re still the best resource that teachers (and other adults) in their lives have when they begin to define it. Authentic Connections is one organization that meaningfully describes, collects, and synthesizes data on students’ experiences of safety and discomfort for educators to design around. It’s worth noting that the ability to effectively create safe discomfort varies depending on the resources of a school, the curricular freedoms afforded to teachers, and the burden of the workload that a given teacher deals with; for this reason, teachers who accomplish this task in underresourced school systems deserve specific praise. Discomfort is a timeless pillar of education - and its meaning is and always will be context-dependent and mutable.
When people conflate comfort and safety, they’re often concerned with the content, not the skills, around which courses are designed - focusing on whether certain arguments, ideas, or debates should be “off limits.” After all, most people seem to agree that students should face uncomfortable trials in order to develop skills like problem solving or critical thinking. But a teacher needs to think about fostering discomfort in both the form (the structures of classroom assessments, the way a teacher communicates) and, the content of the class (the difficult questions and uncomfortable conversations that those structures address). The simple reason for this is that kids need to be equipped to face both uncomfortable tasks and uncomfortable, messy material that exists in the “real world” of which they are always and already a part. That’s part of why I came to admire Will so quickly during our conversation: he thinks about both sides of discomfort, not only designing engineering assessments to be challenges that will make students uncomfortable in their difficulty, but also designing them to intersect with important, politically complex scientific questions of climate science that people of every age struggle to solve. I’d argue, after talking to Will, that teachers can only equip students for the world into which they’ll enter if they develop in those students the skills to manage and act effectively in response to both uncomfortable tasks and uncomfortable ideas.
Most of adult society doesn’t do a great job modeling this discomfort as a lifelong discipline. Like many of my friends, I often wish that other people faced the discomfort of complex or inconvenient knowledge, but I don’t want it nearly as badly for myself. After, one of the greatest privileges of adulthood the choice to avoid discomfort, to design many parts of my life in a way that will allow us to avoid it. How dare anyone disrupt the comfort we’ve so carefully crafted? I’m a 29-year-old writer and educator, and I live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I’ve clearly designed plenty of parts of my life to enhance comfort. The fact that I have to seek out or stumble upon discomfort tells me a lot.
By guiding students to experience discomfort not just in the work they do but also in the big questions they encounter along the way, then, Will and I and teachers like us require them to flex muscles that many of us (adults) allow to atrophy, whether because we’re unwilling or unable to. I think that part of the reason adults don’t do this as well on their own is that we don’t adequately invest in creating a psychologically safe world (whether or literal or figurative) for one another to experience the discomfort of failure, either in accomplishing a task or in answering a question. Discomfort can work in the classroom precisely because teachers do the work to navigate, consider, and reconsider what the definition of discomfort is and to hit that context-specific, even student-specific mark. So now I’m wondering: what would it mean to do so for one another as adults? Is it even possible?
Will’s historical hero, Diane Nash, embodies the spirit of continual engagement: she has carried her work with SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) as a student during the Civil Rights movement through her entire life. Her story, to Will, shows “what it looks like to be engaged as a young person and then continue to be across your life.” The idea, which Will attributes to Nash, that people should “act in the best interests of those to come” permeates his ethic and helps him lead students to “think beyond their own consumerism to what the world looks like beyond them.” This, in turn, leads “to better-engaged citizens - more knowledgeable, more understanding, and more empathetic.” His Environmental Studies class is going to look at the core concern of climate change, which makes everyone uncomfortable for one reason or another; his task, as he describes it, is not to lead students to a static understanding of, say, climate change debates and solutions, but to help them build the skills to continue facing inconvenient and painful present realities and then imagine how to respond while thinking about others who we can’t yet see. The purpose of discomfort in the classroom doesn’t have a specific or ideal end product; rather, it’s a skill and a discipline intended to make us better citizens forever.
Maybe, too, by teaching students to recognize and their own discomfort as they work through it, we’ll prepare them better than we were prepared to build a culture of discomfort long after schooling years. Teenagers, especially Gen-Z teenagers, often annoy adults because they don’t have the choice to avoid discomfort, so they talk about it all the time, often in undeveloped (but also occasionally brilliant) ways; their lives, because they’re in school, are actually and necessarily founded on facing and moving through difficult tasks and charged course material. One of the best parts of the current teenage generation (I’ll write about this in the coming weeks) is the way that they really think it’s cool to give a damn. It’s fine if other age groups find their expression of caring so much to be annoying; in fact, we could usually use a reminder that discomfort is as important for a forty-year-old as it is for an eighteen-year-old. The discipline of working through, and learning from, discomfort, is learned. But it’s not a badge that we achieve: unless we train kids to carve it into their beings, and unless we value and maintain it ourselves, it doesn’t last long enough to make the difference that it might.
My mistake, in interviewing the wrong Will, wasn’t an unfamiliar one. I’d made similar mistakes before. Learning from discomfort isn’t something we do a handful of times and never again. Each time I face the discomfort of my own lazy preparation, I learn something new: to research the last name before I request an interview, to actually read the white papers published on the author’s website before we meet, to learn how to say “where’s the bathroom” before I get on the flight to Vietnam. It’s the same discomfort, but it’s always a different context, a different world. Discomfort is part of the humbling, the excitement, the labor of the classroom; it’s also part of the humbling, the excitement, the labor of life.