Remove the Barrier, Not the Thinking

In my last post, I wrote about making space for deeper learning. I reflected on a principle that has increasingly shaped my thinking about curriculum design: do less, better. Not less ambition or lower expectations, but greater intentionality about what deserves students' time, teachers' attention and the limited cognitive space available for learning.

This week, my reading has pushed that thinking one step further. If we are going to remove things from learning, we need to be very clear about what we are removing, because there is an important difference between removing a barrier and removing the thinking.

Cognitive load has been something of a red thread woven through my work with teachers and learners since I first stepped into my current role. It has shaped conversations about curriculum breadth, lesson design, assessment, instruction, scaffolding, collaboration and the increasing number of systems students are expected to navigate. Much of our curriculum work over the past few years has, in one way or another, asked the same question: what is taking up students' cognitive capacity, and is it contributing to the learning we actually value?

This week's reading on Cognitive Load Theory returned me to that question and made me think more carefully about challenge.

Productive struggle - but what is causing the struggle?

We talk often about productive struggle. We want students to grapple with ideas, persist when the answer is not immediately obvious and work at the edge of what they can currently do independently. There are clear connections here to Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development: learning can be particularly powerful when students are working just beyond their current level of independent performance, with appropriate support enabling them to move forward.

But I think we need to be much more attentive to a deceptively simple question:

What, exactly, is causing the struggle?

One of our wonderful new colleagues wrote about this recently, and her reflection has stayed with me. She pointed out that what appears to a teacher to be a "one-step" instruction may actually contain several hidden steps for the learner:

Consider a Mathematics question that asks students to use greater-than and less-than symbols correctly. A student may understand perfectly well which number is larger. Yet before they can demonstrate that understanding, they must interpret the language of "greater than" and "less than", recall the corresponding symbols and then apply the correct notation.

If the student becomes stuck at that point, what are they actually struggling with? It may not be the mathematical relationship at all. The barrier may be the language wrapped around the mathematics.

What appears to be one step to an expert may contain several steps for a novice.

That does not mean we permanently remove disciplinary vocabulary or simplify language to the point that students never develop academic fluency. Quite the opposite. Students need explicit opportunities to learn and use the language of the discipline. But we should know when that language is part of the learning goal and when it is unintentionally preventing students from demonstrating something else.

There is a significant difference between students productively struggling with the concept we want them to learn and students struggling to access the task that was supposed to reveal that learning.

That distinction matters enormously.

Sometimes the appropriate response is to encourage persistence.

Sometimes it is to provide a prompt or scaffold.

Sometimes it is to teach a missing piece of knowledge.

And sometimes we need to recognise that what appears to be a learning problem is actually a design problem.

Before celebrating struggle simply because it is struggle, we need to ask whether students are struggling in the right place. This is also where Katie Novak's idea of small shifts with potentially significant impact feels useful. Inclusive design does not always require us to redesign an entire unit or create multiple versions of every task. Sometimes the most important move is much smaller: clarifying one instruction, removing an unnecessary step, modelling a disciplinary term, changing the sequence of information, offering a more purposeful scaffold, or creating one stronger opportunity for transfer. Small design decisions can change where students' cognitive effort is being spent.

The important question is not whether we have made the task simpler. It is about whether we have made learning more accessible while preserving, or even increasing, the quality of thinking.

Not all difficulty is productive

Some cognitive demand comes from the inherent complexity of what students are learning. Understanding a difficult mathematical relationship, evaluating competing historical interpretations, developing a sophisticated argument or transferring an idea into an unfamiliar context should require significant thinking. That difficulty may be exactly what we want.

Other demands come from the way learning has been designed. Unclear instructions, too much information presented at once, multiple platforms, unnecessarily complicated task structures, dense rubrics or hidden expectations all consume cognitive capacity. They can make a task harder, but they do not necessarily make the learning more rigorous.

This distinction matters because rigour is often treated as synonymous with difficulty.

It is not.

Rigour is actually defined as the quality of being extremely thorough, careful and precise. That is quite different from making something harder for its own sake. A rigorous task asks students to think with care, precision, and depth. It may involve analysing, evaluating, connecting, creating, justifying, applying or transferring. It does not require students to struggle unnecessarily with how the task is presented.

A task can therefore be difficult without being rigorous. Equally, a task can be extremely clear and still demand sophisticated thinking.

That feels particularly important in schools because we can sometimes equate challenge with volume. More questions. More content. More complex instructions. Longer tasks. Less support. Yet none of these automatically increases the quality of thinking.

The more useful question is: where do we want the challenge to be?

If the intended learning is evaluating the reliability of evidence, then that is where students' cognitive effort should be directed. If the intended learning is to construct a mathematical argument, the challenge should lie in the reasoning. If we want students to transfer their learning, the challenge should come from recognising when previous knowledge or strategies might be useful in a new situation.

Difficulty elsewhere may simply obscure the learning we are trying to see.

Access and challenge belong together

This connects directly to another conversation that has surfaced around access and challenge.

We often speak about Tier 1 provision in terms of access. How do we anticipate barriers? How do we ensure that students can enter the learning? How do we provide clarity, modelling, scaffolding and multiple ways to engage with important ideas?

All of that matters. But strong Tier 1 provision cannot only be about access. It must also be about challenge.

If Tier 1 represents the quality of learning every student should encounter, then it should include deliberate opportunities for students who are ready to extend, connect, generalise, and transfer their learning. Inclusion is not only about ensuring that students who find something difficult can participate. It is also about ensuring that students who are secure are not held within the learning they already have.

This is where I think the language of access and challenge becomes particularly useful. They are not two separate systems, one for students who need support and another for students who need extension. They are both design responsibilities within strong Tier 1 teaching.

A well-designed learning experience should ask two questions at the same time: what barriers might prevent students from engaging meaningfully with this learning, and what possibilities will allow students to move beyond initial competence?

That might mean reducing unnecessary complexity for one learner while increasing conceptual complexity for another. It might mean providing a model to support entry into a task while creating an unfamiliar context in which students must decide independently how to apply what they know. It might mean scaffolding early learning carefully and then deliberately removing those scaffolds as students become more secure.

In other words, access gets students into the learning. Challenge helps them continue to grow within it.

Challenge is not more of the same

This is also where transfer becomes important.

Challenge is not simply giving students more of the same. A student who can complete twenty similar questions may demonstrate fluency, but genuine challenge may require them to decide which knowledge or strategy applies when the context is unfamiliar. It may require them to make connections, justify a decision, adapt an approach, or recognise that something they learned previously is useful here.

That is a very different conception of challenge from simply increasing workload or difficulty.

It also connects strongly with the 'Rigor and Relevance Framework' I read this week. At its most sophisticated, learning moves beyond acquisition towards students using knowledge in increasingly complex and unfamiliar contexts. The challenge lies not only in knowing more, but in being able to use knowledge flexibly.

This is an important consideration for Tier 1 design. When students demonstrate secure understanding, the response does not necessarily need to be more questions, additional content or a separate extension worksheet. Sometimes the more intellectually demanding move is to change the conditions: remove the cue, alter the context, introduce ambiguity, ask the student to select the strategy, require justification, or invite them to connect their understanding to something they have not encountered before.

The question shifts from "How can I make this harder?" to "How can I make the thinking deeper?"

That is a much more useful conception of challenge.

Relevance is deeper than engagement

The third reading that stayed with me this week was Gloria Ladson-Billings' work on culturally relevant pedagogy. It adds another dimension to the idea of access and challenge because relevance is also easily misunderstood. We can reduce it to making learning engaging, relatable or connected to "real life". But Ladson-Billings' conception is much more demanding. It brings together academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness.

Relevance is therefore not simply a hook.

It asks whose knowledge, perspectives, and experiences are recognised within the learning. It asks whether students can achieve academically while maintaining cultural integrity. It asks whether learning enables students to examine and question the world around them, rather than merely participate within it.

Importantly, none of this comes at the expense of academic expectations. Quite the opposite. High expectations sit at the centre of the work.

Taken together, these readings have sharpened something I have been thinking about for some time: inclusive learning design is not about making everything easier. It is about becoming much more precise about where challenge belongs.

We want challenge in reasoning, conceptual understanding, problem-solving, evaluation, making connections, creating, decision-making, application, and transfer. We do not need challenge in deciphering instructions, navigating unnecessary systems, interpreting hidden expectations, or overcoming barriers that have little to do with the intended learning.

Designing for the right kind of struggle

This changes the questions we might ask when designing learning. Rather than simply asking whether a task is challenging, we might ask: 

• What thinking makes this challenging? Is that the thinking we actually value? 
• What prior knowledge does the task assume? 
• What hidden steps might an expert overlook? 
• Is disciplinary language part of the learning goal, or is it currently blocking access to something else? 
• Which elements are essential to the learning? 
• What might be consuming attention without contributing meaningfully to it? 
• Where might some students need greater access? 
• Where might others need greater challenge? 
• How will the design allow students to move towards greater independence and transfer?

These questions position inclusion as part of the original design rather than as something added only when difficulty becomes visible.

They also change how we interpret struggle. When a student gets stuck, the question is not immediately how we make the task easier, nor should it automatically be that they simply need to persist. First, we need to understand what the struggle is telling us.

• Is the student grappling with an important idea?
• Are they encountering the desirable difficulty of retrieving, connecting or transferring learning?
• Is there missing foundational knowledge?
• Or have we inadvertently placed an obstacle between the learner and the thinking?
• Those possibilities require different responses.

Protect the thinking

I keep returning to a simple principle: remove the barrier, not the thinking.

We should simplify where possible so students can focus on what matters. We should reduce unnecessary cognitive load, make expectations clear and design with learner variability in mind. We should break down instructions where hidden complexity is getting in the way and teach the academic language students need to become increasingly independent.

But we should be equally intentional about protecting intellectual challenge and creating opportunities for students to move beyond what they can already do.

Access without challenge can limit growth. Challenge without access can exclude learners. Strong Tier 1 design needs both.

The aim is not to make learning effortless. Productive struggle matters. But the struggle should increasingly come from the reasoning, the connections, the decisions, the application, and the transfer we want students to develop, not from barriers we could have designed away.

The goal is to ensure that students' effort is spent on learning that matters and that every learner has somewhere meaningful to go next.

Remove the noise. Remove the unnecessary complexity. Remove the barriers we have inadvertently designed into the experience.

Protect the thinking. And keep increasing what students can do with it.