Controlled floundering is a term that I latched onto years ago because it conjures for me the image of students grappling with a new concept or skill that doesn’t come naturally for them. Well, this past week I was reminded of what floundering means as I began a new semester with what seemed like error upon error causing me to dream of a reset button. Now, for readers that are new to this terminology, let me attempt to offer an accurate example from my life of controlled floundering.

Agreeing to make an early switch to the new learning management system on our campus this summer, my first course went relatively smoothly with just a few hiccups such as the need to rearrange how items were displayed in the online course and some slight problems transferring video presentations. Moving into the fall semester is another story. Two weeks in and students are still bringing issues to my attention. Some of the issues are of my own doing as the content for all six courses begins to blend together or there is an interruption in the process of updating every deadline in the course; however, some issues were outside my control, thus one could find me floundering in my office for what needed my attention most. Luckily, this flounderer had assistance from amazing staff and the ever-present Google searches so that this experience was somewhat controlled and did not advance to the end of the continuum known as failure.

For parents, this concept entitled controlled floundering or as Eng describes in Teaching College, expectation failure, is practiced early and often in the process of raising children. Consider the chubby-legged one-year-old determined to take those first steps as a parent sticks close by with the ever-present hands out, not touching, but at the same time prepared to catch the anticipated fall. Move ahead in time a few years and picture a young tow-headed boy attempting to balance a two-wheel bike for the first time. Now, you have some visual representations of what controlled floundering is and how beneficial it is to the learning process. Returning to the LMS issue for me, I had to flounder, or grapple, with a new program before I was even aware of questions to ask. Come back at the end of the academic year and I may be flourishing in my experience, but for now, I will continue to flounder knowing that the experts around me will fill in the gaps in my education.

Struggle is a word that generally evokes an emotion as something we desire to avoid in our lives, but in future posts, we will delve a little deeper into the importance of struggling in order to grow or learn. My perspective tends to view life and our experiences that become a part of us on a continuum that ranges from flourishing to floundering to failure. Most of life will be a range of experiences which will move across the continuum in different seasons of life. Even a single occurrence in life may traverse the continuum in a single day. Ask me about importing content from one course to the other – flourishing! Adjusting the deadlines so they don’t say 2015 – floundering! Loading sport communication content to a sport behavior class – failure!

Recognizing that there will be days where we will flourish, we should delight in those moments, but also realizing that there are days when we will fail and much of life is probably spent somewhere in the middle, floundering until we figure it out. Social media has a tendency to offer the appearance that everyone else in this world is flourishing while we are over here hiding our failures, but that is a mirage created by photo editing and filters. Sometimes life is just an average Tuesday where you go through your daily routine without any highs or lows and you might not choose any of the three words on the continuum to describe it. Offering a perspective on the mundane in a future post, I still want to offer the challenge here that we learn to be faithful to what God has called us to do even on an average Tuesday. You might be surprised to hear one day that an investment you made in relational equity on that average Tuesday allowed someone else to flourish!

“The process of knowing how to learn is founded upon experiences that often involve trial and error. It may seem a paradox, but the best teachers practice a ‘controlled floundering’ where students are allowed to explore and discover but also to succeed and fail within a supportive, caring classroom environment.” Transformational Teaching by Rosebrough & Leverett

Can you remember a moment when controlled floundering allowed you to learn and grow? How can we mentor others, allowing a little floundering yet protecting from failure, with the desired outcome of a time of flourishing to be experienced in the future?