The Importance of Support and Challenge in the Classroom

January 30, 2025

In the field of sport psychology (my area of study), researchers explore ways to help athletes develop the skill of robust resilience. While there are multiple factors that influence this resilience, one key factor involves the coach creating a facilitative environment underpinned by high support combined with high challenge. Although we are not all coaches, as educators, we likely want to encourage students to embrace challenges and support them in achieving academic success. Fortunately, some of the key principles, identified in sport psychology work, have also been studied by educational researchers and practitioners.

One educational example that’s akin to developing a facilitative environment is warm demander pedagogy, which was first described by Judith Kleinfeld (1972). A warm demander is a teacher who creates an inviting and supportive environment and who actively demands students to meet expectations for success. Therefore, teachers start from a place of care in wanting to ensure that each student achieves success (personal warmth). Then teachers send messages that communicate the belief that each student can achieve this success and insist they meet this expectation with guided support (active demandingness). As Lisa Delpit (2012) highlighted, warm demanders “expect a great deal of their students, convince them of their own brilliance, and help them to reach their potential in a disciplined and structured environment” (77). 

While warm demander pedagogy research has often focused on the K-12 environment, similar pedagogical concepts have emerged in higher education. One example is the heads and hearts hypothesis. Elli Theobold and colleagues (2020) proposed the use of active learning strategies in the classroom offered opportunities for deliberate practice (head) followed by support and encouragement for task completion by instructors (heart). Instructors challenge students with many opportunities to actively engage in tasks to support their learning AND provide guided support, praise, encouragement, and clear messages that students are capable of achieving the task.

All of these examples from the literature point to instructors providing a safe and supportive place to learn where students are encouraged to lean into productive struggle. Below are a few strategies and resources for creating this high support and high challenge environment in the classroom.

Develop a Social Connection: Feeling Safe and Supported

The first part of developing high support in the classroom is for students to feel safe, valued for their contributions, and supported in their learning. This begins by getting to know them, showing interest in them, honoring their contributions, and demonstrating an earnest desire to support their learning. Here are some resources:

• Kimberly Tanner (2011) offered a variety of strategies used in a 300 student biology course, including learning names by using name cards (check out the article for use of a schedule on the back of the name cards to reinforce class concepts), having students complete a get-to-know-me survey (or pre-course questionnaire), checking in with several students at the beginning of each class, assigning students to come to “student hours” (a.k.a. office hours) for just 10 minutes, treating them like professional colleagues, and using periodic surveys to see how things can be improved for their learning.
• The University of Iowa Student Wellness team developed a Promoting Well-Being in the Classroom guide, which encourages faculty to consider creating welcome rituals, encouraging a growth mindset, acknowledging stress felt during certain times of the semester, etc.

Engage in Active Demandingness

With social connections in place, instructors can engage in active demandingness. Greg Kaminski (2022) described this as when instructors help students lean into productive struggle, encourage and celebrate when they do lean in, and believe in their capability while acknowledging they can do better with resources and guidance provided by instructors. Some examples of this include the following:

• Elizabeth Bondy and Dorene Ross (2008) suggested communicating an expectation of success and moving beyond believing to insisting that students achieve by providing learning supports (e.g., scaffolding), supporting positive behavior (e.g., when they lean into struggle), and sending messages that problems are normal (even instructors encounter them!) and that they are capable of improving.
• Instructors can provide flexibility with guardrails for when the unexpected happens for students but still demands their engagement in the learning process. Examples include dropping the lowest quiz, offering oops tokens, allowing short extensions on assignments, having an attendance policy that has a few free absences, and more. 
• Kimberly Tanner (2011) described additional strategies that link with the concept of active demandingness, for example, creating active learning activities that mimic high-stakes assignments to encourage students to lean into struggle during class. This provides instructors opportunities 1) to help students develop habits of mind (metacognition), 2) to model how to engage in productive struggle, 3) to give reinforcing feedback and focus on what they are learning rather than just letting them assume this is just about a grade, and 4) to remind students how struggle and failure on low stakes assignments help their learning (e.g., corrects misconceptions, teaches them what works and what does not, helps clarify what to do and not to do).

So, like sport coaches, instructors can work towards creating a facilitative environment to help students “perform” (i.e., engage in their own learning to meet learning goals). This is not easy work for instructors or students. However, maybe taking one or two small, manageable actions toward building social connections and developing support systems to actively demand students lean into productive academic struggles and embrace challenges will reduce the frustrations we all feel when grading work where we wished for additional learning to have taken place.