Recently, I thought it would be fun and useful to learn Spanish. I signed up for an online app that featured cute characters and gamified lessons with rewards, badges, and lots of fun activities. I did lessons on the app for a few minutes per day, and soon my “streak” was in the hundreds of days. Did I learn Spanish? Well, the data looked good. I had learned lots of words. I could understand much more than when I started. My pronunciation was improving. Was it useful? Hell no. I should have known better. What was the problem? Learning enough to make Spanish a useful skill would take hundreds, probably thousands of hours of work. That’s hard. At the rate of a few minutes a day, by some estimates, it would take around 20 years for Spanish to become a useful skill. That’s assuming there weren’t any lessons with teaching activities that required longer than a few minutes. That’s probably not true.
The app was fun and engaging. Maybe even useful as a supplemental learning activity. But I was unlikely to ever learn Spanish only using the app. Am I willing to commit the time and energy required to make Spanish a useful skill? I thought it through, and I decided the answer was no. I have too many other items on my agenda right now.
Most people who work in any form of education, from preschool through graduate level, love activities that make learning fun. Teaching concepts using singing characters, gamified apps, problems modeled on real-life examples, or thousands of other creative ideas, that’s much better than slogging through long, boring practice sessions.
Popular culture reinforces the idea that this is what great teachers do. I still remember my science teacher trying to replicate this lesson from WKRP in Cincinnati. Dead Poets Society is filled with Mr. Keating’s memorable lessons about conformity, and, of course, the rip-it-out scene. The movie Stand and Deliver contains lots of examples such as the apple scene and the gigolo problem. Despite the obviously inappropriate nature of some of this, real-world teachers have actually used questionable content, and gotten in trouble for it. The allure of the fun, creative teacher is strong.
No one likes this type of teaching more than the people who work with children with autism and other developmental disabilities. I see great, creative examples of the “make it fun” hypothesis almost daily. The “make it fun” approach often leads to faster progress. The child increases their motivation, stays on task longer, and generally prefers fun activities to boring, difficult ones. That sounds great! If we use good judgment and avoid obviously inappropriate content, why not have fun? Including some fun lessons is fine. But you can have too much of a good thing.
Fun lessons can backfire. When you try to insert teaching activities into something fun, the child sometimes becomes annoyed–you are spoiling their good time. Even when the learner is having a great time, trying to make everything fun can have negative effects on both the learner and the teacher. The learner believes they never have to be bored or struggle to learn an important skill. And the teacher tends to evaluate how well they are doing based on whether the learner is happy and excited at the moment.
Often, it is relatively easy to make some progress at the beginning of learning a skill—but then the hard part comes. Learning the hard part may require struggle and, yes, boring practice. Learners who have only experienced the “make it fun” approach may not make it through the hard part. Teachers may be discouraged that the kids don’t look happy. Observers may think bored-looking kids mean the teaching must be terrible.
Usually, the critical thing that predicts how useful a skill will be is how good you are at the skill. If you don’t overcome the hard part, you may never use the skill in real life. Learning to sing along with the cute preschool letter videos is fun. Reading connected text can be hard. Riding a bike with training wheels is easy. Balancing yourself on the bike can be scary and difficult.
Making lessons fun is a wonderful instructional strategy. Just don’t delude yourself that every lesson can be like that. And don’t teach learners that every lesson will be fun and games. Learners sometimes must do difficult things that aren’t fun. Until you’ve mastered the hard part, the skill isn’t useful. Don’t waste time learning new skills if you aren’t going to put in the time and energy to get through the hard part. If you aren’t prepared to do the hard part, it’s better not to start.
On the other hand, if you are a teacher and are being evaluated, I’d definitely pull out the fun lessons. The evaluators go to the movies and watch TV too. They know the stereotype of what good teaching looks like.