Point-Counterpoint: Choosing NOT to Provide Examples

I am an Enneagram 2, and a Myers-Briggs NF. I care, to a fault, about other people's feelings, their sense of belonging in the moment.

In the words of my dissertation advisor, Lalitha Vasudevan, "Kyle likes to make sure he's bringing everyone along." Not a bad core commitment for a pastor, of course (though not without its perils—a post for another day).

So it's no surprise that my go-to position in this point-counterpoint is to err on the side of over-supplying samples when assigning learners some creative prompt.

Lalitha consistently cautioned me to pull back a bit from this tendency when I was her TA in Culture, Media, and Education, to scaffold a little less than I was inclined, and in particular ways.

It was good advice. Here's some of why I think we should think twice before providing examples:

Learners need to be challenged – There are good evolutionary reasons why we tend to seek the path of least resistance. It's not because we're lazy—our species has just learned the hard way over untold generations that we should conserve our energy, both physical and mental. But rich learning requires us to stretch ourselves, to expend significant effort, to embrace tasks that are currently just a bit too difficult for us, or least seem so at the outset.

(Side note: This is why I think it's so compelling when Stuart Brown points out that animals in the wild often stop playing when they can safely stop learning—because play is fruitful but energy-intensive.)

You may have heard of Lev Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (ZPD), the space "between learners ability to complete a task with guidance or collaboration and ability to solve it alone." Vygotsky says this zone is where learning happens. Well, there are dangers in both directions when trying to place students there. Sometimes providing examples gives students a more obvious path from point A to point B, whereas the more difficult path would have provided much more opportunity to learn.

Sample submissions emphasize product over process – This might be the big one. If we're trying to form lifelong learners, and especially lifelong practitioners of a particular craft, then it may be the case that the best thing we can do is teach students to attend to their own process.

It's beyond cliché to point out that mosts artists have learned to care more about process than product, but the overuse of the point emerges from the fact that it is both somewhat counterintuitive and deeply important. So a proponent of providing no examples (or at least fewer or more partial examples) would say that we should spend our energy as instructors (and encourage our students to spend their energy as learners) focused on exploring what it means to find their way to a solution right now, and how they might do so again in the future.

Truth be told, this is now where I start with a creative assignment these days. I provide detailed guidance about possible steps to take, and I hold back on providing full-fledged sample submissions unless I get feedback that students are really struggling.

Providing examples can stifle creativity – The most damning actual experience of having provided many an example as a teacher is that I've tended to get a LOT of submissions that looked like the example. In addition to possibly making the assignment less generatively difficult (see above), providing examples can discourage the kind of divergent thinking that is so valuable in identifying effective but unexpected approaches to problems.

Here again, there are ways to address this issue. In both process- and product-oriented guidance, a teacher can "demo divergence" by articulating a wide range of possible ways to get started or possible final forms to shoot for. Ironically, providing just one example might stifle creativity, but providing two or three might encourage it rather than stifling it further, because it helps students see the broad range of (some of) the available options. (There are diminishing returns, however. You definitely want to avoid overwhelm by keeping your lists of suggestions and examples manageable: I like 2–5 as an overly general guideline.)

**

If it seems like I'm hedging a bit as I take this side of the argument, it's not because I don't want to give either position in this point/counterpoint in this little exercise a fair shake. It is, of course, because I think a synthesis of the two positions is actually the most effective, but I'm leaving for vacation tomorrow and won't be able to write a third post.

So I hope reading this piece in tandem with yesterday's helps carve out the territory in a bit more detail than you've perhaps considered previously and gives you ideas for perhaps nudging yourself in one direction or the other depending on what you think the needs of your learners might be, as well as what you know of your own tendencies-that-may-be-biases as well.