"Frustration Control"

Near the end of their study, Wood, Bruner, and Ross list six so-called scaffolding functions of tutoring. The fifth is frustration control:

“There should be some such maxim as ‘Problem solving should be less dangerous or stressful with a tutor than without’. Whether this is accomplished by ‘face saving’ for errors or by exploiting the learner’s wish to please’ or by other means, is of only minor importance. The major risk is in creating too much dependency on the tutor” (98). 

Frustration control has been one of the more frustrating aspects of my classroom in the past week, in part due to my fear of putting my students in a position of dependence on my experience with creating research questions. Two groups of students were particularly frustrated. The first group came up with a small handful of mildly interesting potential research topics; when I asked them what the associated question would be (to whom is this subject important and why?) they became noticeably agitated. Their responses indicated that they saw this as a matter of the instructor “knowing the answer” and being in the position to give that knowledge—and, for some reason, not doing so. They seemed ready for me to simply tell them what I thought their question should be. What’s difficult, I believe, about teaching students to develop research questions is that the type of instructor-student interaction that takes place is “the usual type of tutoring in which one member ‘knows the answer’ and the other does not, rather like a ‘practical’ in which only the instructor knows how”—but with the added element that the students kinda sorta do know how: will be using pre-existing writing skills and knowledge (which they know they have, but according to their diagnostic essays, think that they do not have (89). It seems, for the most part, that they’ve never been asked to use their skills in this way. 

Since my frustrating experience last week, I resolved this week to try some new approaches to frustration control: one particularly helpful method was making the students themselves responsible for controlling one another’s frustrations. When the groups presented their topics and questions in front of one another two things happened: (1) the students were able to see that everyone struggled to some degree with the assignment, even the groups who hadn’t chosen to write about squirrels, and (2) the students held one another responsible for discussing the relevance of their research questions. By the end of the period, my students had slightly more developed questions and seemed more comfortable with the assignment in general. I’m wondering, though, if I could have somehow lessened their frustration earlier on or whether frustration simply needed to be built into the course in a more overt way. 

Maybe I’ll know when I get that paper about squirrels? 

Works Cited:

Wood, David, Jerome S. Bruner, and Gail Ross. "The Role of Tutoring in Problem Solving." Journal of Child Psychology 17 (1976): 89-100.