I know the pain of learning struggles intimately.
As a child with severe learning difficulties, I lived in a constant state of confusion and struggle. I worked harder than those around me, yet my effort rarely produced results. Every lesson seemed to confirm that my mind could not do what was being asked of it. This was not the temporary frustration that precedes understanding — it was a relentless, unproductive struggle that eroded my confidence and sense of self.
When a child is in this state — exhausted, disheartened, and left behind — the instinct is to ease their path. Historically, this has been a compassionate, and in many ways understandable, response from parents, educators, and systems. In the fixed mindset era or what I call the pre-neuroplastic paradigm (before we understood that the brain could change) we believed the kindest action was to reduce learning demands. Make the task easier. Remove the difficulty. Avoid the struggle.
This approach has deepened in recent decades, shaped not only by these historical beliefs but also by a cultural shift. The modern world offers immediate answers, frictionless solutions, and constant opportunities to bypass effort. In education, this can mean leaning more heavily on accommodations, modifications, and assistive technologies — all of which have value when applied judiciously, but which can also unintentionally remove the very experiences that foster growth.
Struggle and the Brain: Why Effort Matters
From a neuroscience perspective, struggle is not necessarily an obstacle to learning — it is the pathway to it. The brain is a dynamic, plastic organ. When we engage in a demanding mental task that is just beyond our current capability for mastery, we trigger a cascade of neurobiological processes. Synaptic connections strengthen. New neural pathways are formed. Networks reorganize to process information more efficiently.
Neuroscience calls this effortful processing - the act of working through difficulty which has the potential to increase the efficiency of the engaged neural networks. It’s not just the doing of a task that drives this change; it’s the straining toward mastery that forces the brain to adapt. In this way, cognitive challenge is as essential to brain development as physical resistance is to muscle growth.
Psychologically, meeting a challenge and succeeding also builds a critical growth mindset, what researchers call self-efficacy. This belief in our own ability to influence outcomes fuels motivation and a willingness to face future challenges.
The Problem with Avoiding Struggle
Of course, not all struggle is productive. When a learner’s cognitive profile has areas of weakness, effort can feel like running in quicksand — exhausting and leading nowhere. I know this firsthand.
In my own childhood, I had a severe weakness in Symbol Relations, the cognitive function that allows the brain to connect and integrate ideas. This meant I could read words, but I couldn’t grasp their meaning quickly enough to keep pace. I would reread a sentence again and again, trying to hold the pieces together, but they slipped away before I could link them. No amount of “trying harder” changed that reality, and the result was years of frustration, shame, and self-doubt.
I’ve seen the same pattern in others. One child I worked with had profound weaknesses in what I call Symbol Recognition, the capacity to retain the look of symbols, including a string of them that make up words. For this child, words would not “stick” in her mind long enough to be recognized the next time she encountered them. She could be drilled on sight words for hours, only to have them vanish from memory by the next day. Without intervention to strengthen that function, she would have grown into an adult who remained effectively illiterate — not because she didn’t care or try, but because the mental tool she needed was underperforming.
This is the crux of the issue: when the struggle is due to an unaddressed cognitive deficit, effort alone does not lead to growth. It leads to a cycle of failure, eroding both skill and spirit.
Faced with this painful reality, it is no surprise that educators and parents often try to shield students — especially those with learning disabilities — from further challenge. Accommodations and modifications do provide some degree of access to curriculum, and reduce frustration in the short term.
While these supports offer relief, they also carry risks. Over time, many learners develop learned helplessness — the belief that success is only obtainable with external help. Think about the student who doesn't pick up a pencil or open a book without their Teacher’s Aide telling them to do so. Simple tasks become paralyzing without external direction or support.
Or the child who struggles with a math problem repeatedly telling themselves, “I’ll never get this,” and eventually gives up entirely. The teenager who avoids speaking up in class, fearing they will fail no matter what they contribute. In both cases, they believe their effort doesn’t matter. This is the reverse of the earlier mentioned, self-efficacy. They believe they are incapable of influencing outcomes through personal effort as this has been their experience.
Perhaps most disturbing is, after years of effort without a matched outcome, individuals no longer see themselves as the captain of their own ship. They either blame others for their short comings (“you said you’d remind me so I wouldn’t be late!!!”) or attribute their success to something outside of themselves (“I only passed because the teacher felt sorry for me”). This external locus of control, where circumstances, others, or even (bad) luck determine their reality, can shape the rest of their lives.
These patterns persist into adulthood, often giving up before they start. Anxiety, frustration, and low self-esteem create a self-reinforcing cycle of avoidance and disengagement. Becoming overly reliant on others for direction or support inevitably means struggling in social or professional situations, feeling chronically powerless, and feeling incapable of independent thought or action.
Shielding a learner from struggle may solve an immediate problem, but it can inadvertently set the stage for a lifetime of diminished potential and restricted agency.
Reconciling Different Kinds of Struggle
So if avoiding struggle can actually be detrimental, and the science tells us that struggle is an essential ingredient to growth, how do we know the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ struggle?
We must first ask critical questions: Why is the learner struggling? What does the task demand cognitively? Which specific cognitive weaknesses may be contributing to the struggle? A differentiated view of one’s cognitive profile is needed because not all learning difficulties stem from the same underlying challenge. For example, a child with dyslexia may struggle with phonemic awareness, while another with the same diagnosis has weak visual memory or difficulties with eye-tracking. Each profile creates very different patterns of struggle, and each requires a distinct approach.
Of course for me, becoming aware of my specific cognitive weakness was a turning point in my own life. I began working with tasks designed specifically to target and strengthen my weak cognitive function. And based on foundational neuroscience research, I knew I had to include some element of struggle in my attempts. I constantly calibrated the difficulty of the task when it became easier for me. I knew I had to push the limits of my ability in order to change it.
In other words, I had to struggle. Not the crushing, fruitless kind I had known before, but a purposeful, structured, and progressive kind that engaged my brain’s neuroplastic potential. The work was difficult, sometimes intensely so, but it yielded visible, measurable change. My capacity grew. My confidence followed.
By incrementally increasing the challenge, my struggle was both challenging and constructive. It was also literally changing my brain. It was this insight that guided the creation of targeted neuroplastic exercises to strengthen a range of cognitive functions underlying learning. I recognized that at every step of engagement, there must be effortful processing. Tasks must demand attention, effort, and the engagement of the specific cognitive function that needed strengthening. In this way, the struggle becomes not a source of frustration, but a pathway to measurable growth, reinforcing both competency and confidence.
Productive Struggle: The Right Kind of Challenge
When I developed the Arrowsmith Program, I set out to create exercises that progressively increased in complexity, intentionally inviting learners into a zone where success is possible but never effortless. The goal was simple yet profound: to strengthen the brain itself, giving learners the deeply human experience of mastering something they once thought impossible.
Cognitive improvements happen as learners repeatedly engage specific mental functions. A child who once forgot sequences of numbers can learn to hold and manipulate them with confidence. A student who struggled with reading comprehension can finally follow ideas and extract meaning from text. These are not small victories — they represent the brain performing better, processing more efficiently, and transferring skills to everyday learning.
At the same time, structural changes occur beneath the surface. Neural pathways strengthen in connectivity and cognitive abilities increase. I’ve watched students who once froze at even modest challenges approach challenging tasks with strategy and focus.
Functionally, these changes translate into tangibles: faster processing, greater attentional control, improved cognitive stamina. Tasks that once led to fatigue or frustration become opportunities for engagement and growth. The impact spills beyond academics —the ability to organize complex information, solve problems under pressure, and persist when faced with obstacles in everyday life.
In my 45+ years of witnessing change in both children and adults, perhaps most striking is their psychological transformation. Productive struggle leads to a growth mindset of self-efficacy building an internal locus of control. I have seen the look of pride in a student who recognizes their masteries were entirely a consequence of their effort, their courage, their brains.
“I did it, and I did it myself.”
These moments are not just achievements. They are a shift in the learner’s insight into themselves, their trust in their effort and new capabilities. As a byproduct of gains in specific cognitive functions, these experiences also build resilience and a readiness to embrace challenges rather than fear them. A curiosity for life and learning that never existed is fostered.
It is living proof of the mind’s capacity to redefine its own potential, and it never fails to fill me with awe. Educators trained in my methodology report the same: witnessing the profundity of cognitive improvement in students who once failed to thrive, deeply fulfills them. In part because of their own role in the transformation, and in wonder at the endless potential of the human brain and mind.
What You Put In Is What You Get Out
I believe the distinction between productive and unproductive struggle has always mattered. But it is especially urgent today. Our culture prizes speed and ease. AI tempts us to outsource effort. But without deliberate effort to incorporate and design for productive struggle, we will raise a generation with diminished cognitive stamina, shallow problem-solving skills, and little tolerance for frustration.
We stand in a moment of extraordinary opportunity. We now understand how the brain changes, and we have the tools to create environments that incorporate intentional, neuroplastic challenge which cultivate resilience, enhance cognitive capacity, and foster self-confidence based on competence.
To embrace this is to redefine what kindness in education means. Not removing the struggle, but ensuring that the struggle a learner experiences is the kind that changes their brain, and changes their life.