"As teachers, allowing students to see failure as a negative experience is one of the worst things we can do.
Granted, this isn’t unique to education. The idea of risk-taking, failing, looking, leaping, try-try-again is ingrained in our cultural DNA. But in education, we certainly have made it dramatic. In fact, we don’t even need the whole word anymore. Failure erodes to fail, which itself erodes to simply F..."
Beth Dichter's insight:
In education we many students are told they have "failed" yet as teachers we know that making mistakes is the norm. Engineers look at failures as a way to learn. What can we do in education?
This post explores:
* What does it mean to "fail"?
* The role of failure in learning
* Helping Students Fail: A Frameworkwhich has four sections, each of which provides "the idea" and guiding questions.
Where can you start as a teacher?
* By clarifying the meaning
* By providing context
* By designing transparent processes
* By illuminating progress
Students need to learn that a "failure" is not the end of the road, but a stop on a journey. As teachers this post provides a number of suggestions that may help us better meet the needs of our students and help them see failure in a different light.
Traditional education focuses on assessment, giving students one chance to get their homework right. Games can provide immediate feedback and teach core prob...
Beth Dichter's insight:
This is the first of a series of videos being produced by ExtraCredit this month that explores why games can create changes in education. This one focuses on homework and how games allow you to fail and try again...and we know that students do try again...and again...and again. The second video in this series is called How Games Can Help People (by giving instantaneous feedback amongst other things). The link to that video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzmdx7ZL8OM.
I think this video is a good resource because first it starts talking about homework cons, but then it starts giving solutions and ideas about overcoming the fear of doing homework. Also it isn't long and it is not boring so people that see it will learn in a fun way. Last but not least it will give you a lot of ideas and examples you can put in your persuasive essay.
This source is useful cause it gives a reason to make homework a better opportunity to like it. And in the way it gives a why take it out and to still keep it. It also has a lot of star statements. That's what makes it a convincing video.
"Like cheating on a test, ignoring a friend’s phone call, wallowing in self-pity, or eating a pint of ice cream in one sitting, being wrong feels the worst when someone else is around to witness it. Unlike these things, being wrong is unjustly stigmatized as unacceptable. Everyone answers a question incorrectly now and then, but it’s the shame associated with being wrong, especially in front of others, that harms us more than the fault itself."
Beth Dichter's insight:
Many students are afraid to fail. Therefore they may be afraid to try new things or to ask questions. Too often we may hear the words "I don't know" because the student may feel embarrassed if the give an incorrect answer. This post discusses this topic in some detail before it provides 20 suggestions on ways to work with students to help them overcome the fear of being wrong. Five of the suggestions are below. Additional information on each is in the post as well as fifteen additional suggestions.
* Learning has two definitions and one is failure.
* Always respond to an answer with more than No."
* Turn wrong answers into a learning experience for all.
* The "wrong" answer is often more educational than the "right" answer.
We will never grow if we don't make mistakes and then learn from them. I am sure Bill Gates and James Dyson would agree. Look up any interview with them as they talk about their products.
Game designers have mastered certain tricks that make games so addictive that people can’t stop playing them. Here are the top five secrets that game designers know, and some tips on how you can use these same game dynamics to make learning in your classroom as addictive as gaming.
Beth Dichter's insight:
As teachers what can we do to make our classes more exciting for students? We know that many will sit in front of a computer or game console and play for hours, and when they do not succeed the first time, or the tenth time or the fiftieth time they keep trying. How do we get them to perservere in the classroom when they are not successful? This post explores this, providing five "secrets of game design" that might make a difference in your classroom. The five secrets are listed below but click through to the post to learn more about them.
* The Appointment Dynamic: Be Here At This Time, Get a Prize
* The Failure Dynamic: Fail Early, Fail Often
* The Flexibility Dynamic: Provide Multiple Paths to Success
* The Progression Dynamic: Scaffold and Recognize Progress
* The Construction Dynamic: Build Something That Matters
"What if, when students failed, teachers praised them? In the business world, the world of entrepreneurship, failure remains inevitable but so does success if you keep plugging away at your goal.
Embracing this in education teaches students to learn that mistakes lead to success. Science teachers probably understand this concept better than most teachers. They just happen to call it hypothesis or refer to it as an experiment instead of failure."
Beth Dichter's insight:
What would happen if we taught our students (or learners) that failure is a gift, that we learn lessons when we fail. This post provides 50 tips to use with students to help them "fail well." Five are below. Find the forty-five in the post, as well as additional information on each.
* Point out their mistakes
* Praise them immediately
* Experiment with them
* Expose them to the unknown
* Teach them to start over
Use these tips to shift communication around failure. Help your students see failure as an opportunity to learn, to grow.
This post looks at 20 learning principles that teachers should know. Five are listed below. When you click through to the post you fill find additional information on each of the 20 principles.
* Students learn differently
* Make it relevant
* Failure is a fabulous teacher
* Brief and organized "bites"
* Feedback: Not just what, but when
This is great information as a new school year approaches in many areas!
"Educators are always striving to find ways to make curriculum relevant in students’ everyday lives. More and more teachers are using social media around lessons, allowing students to use their cell phones to do research and participate in class, and developing their curriculum around projects to ground learning around an activity. These strategies are all part of a larger goal to help students connect to social and cultural spaces."
Beth Dichter's insight:
A look at Henry Jenkins work on participatory learning and PLAY (Participatory Learning and You). So what is PLAY? "...'a mode of experimentation, of testing materials, trying out new solutions, exploring new horizons,' Jenkins said. It’s how kids interact with games – throwing themselves in without reading the rules, testing the limits and feeling free to try and fail."
This post provides a number of examples, discusses assesement and play, and provides links to additional articles on the subject.
Failure has been a trending topic on Education Unbound recently, particularly in regards to the disconnect between educational objectives and game-based learning (GBL).
We know that many games "depend on players failing multiple times as the primary means of learning how to overcome obstacles." How does this compare to education, where the "notion of failure is bad"? This post by Justin Marquis explores this issue in this first of a two part series.
The article includes the following sections:
* Teach that Learning is a Process
* Make Learning the Goal
* Support Second Chances
* A Change in Mindset
The second part of this article, 'Learning to Learn from Failure', is also available at http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2012/10/learning-learn-failure/. Topics explored include: Learning From Your Mistakes, Embrace Metacognition, Ask for Help, Explore Alternative Paths to Success, and Failing to Learn is the Only Real Failure.
If you’re like me, you discovered design as a career option later in life--in college, or even after graduating and working in another field. By that point, most of us had already lost the mindset most beneficial for creative design.
What happens when a design firm partners with a high school, and works with a hands-on, project-based learning model, to teach the freshman class about product design?" Add on taking a freshman physics class and a class on social-change poetry, and ask the students to think about questions such as: "What would headphones look like if they were intended to appear to a certain target audience, so they could deliver their message to the right set of ears?"
Read on for more details and to learn about values of risk-taking!
"How can schools teach students to be more innovative? Offer hands-on classes and don't penalize failure. Tony Wagner on preparing students for the 21st-century economy.
In most high-school and college classes, failure is penalized. But without trial and error, there is no innovation. Amanda Alonzo, a 32-year-old teacher at Lynbrook High School in San Jose, Calif., who has mentored two Intel Science Prize finalists and 10 semifinalists in the last two years—more than any other public school science teacher in the U.S.—told me, "One of the most important things I have to teach my students is that when you fail, you are learning." Students gain lasting self-confidence not by being protected from failure but by learning that they can survive it..."
Failure is hot. The Harvard Business Review devoted an entire issue to the power of failure last year. Noted economist Tim Harford wrote a fabulous book about it – "Adapt: Why Success Always Comes from Failure." And tens of millions of children (and adults) happily subject themselves to it everyday. They play video games.
Got failure in your classroom? It’s not a bad thing. Unless failure is the end of the road and it stops there. Failure is opportunity. To fail is to learn.
The importance of positive language within how society conceptualizes learning is evident for the growth of student potential and learning.
Beth Dichter's insight:
In education failure is a negative word, but talk with engineers that they will tell you that they learn from failure. In this post there is a quote from Alfie Kohn "Although there are exceptions, the most likely consequence of having failed at something is that a child will come to see himself as lacking competence. And the result of that belief is apt to be more failure."
The post continues with a discussion on a study that took place in Finland where faculty in a middle school chose to implement "a final project where each student would produce a concrete artifact to denote their learning." This process discuss the learning journey of their students, which led them to discover that they were often using negative terms to describe students, which led them to discuss assumptions that were being made by them about their students. Click through to the post to learn what was learned and how you might choose to change your language in your classroom.
In education failure is a negative word, but talk with engineers that they will tell you that they learn from failure. In this post there is a quote from Alfie Kohn "Although there are exceptions, the most likely consequence of having failed at something is that a child will come to see himself as lacking competence. And the result of that belief is apt to be more failure."
The post continues with a discussion on a study that took place in Finland where faculty in a middle school chose to implement "a final project where each student would produce a concrete artifact to denote their learning." This process discuss the learning journey of their students, which led them to discover that they were often using negative terms to describe students, which led them to discuss assumptions that were being made by them about their students. Click through to the post to learn what was learned and how you might choose to change your language in your classroom.
Education circles are abuzz with a new concept: that resilience and persistence are just as important as intelligence to predicting student success and achievement. But can "grit" actually be taught?
Beth Dichter's insight:
Grit, persistence, determination, growth mindset...there are many buzzwords in education today that focus on similar ideas. This post is actually from NPR. (You could hear the interview on their website. The link is at the end of this post.)
It explores the concept of grit and how the term has come to enter the field of education.
Do you think grit "a better predictor of success than IQ or other measures"? Can "grit" be taught? Can you develop a school around the concept of grit? Will teaching students about growth mindset change make a difference in their education? These and many other ideas are addressed in this post.
Allowing learners to struggle will actually help them learn better, according to research on “productive failure” conducted by Manu Kapur, a researcher at the Learning Sciences Lab at the National Institute of Education of Singapore.
Beth Dichter's insight:
We often walk students through the process of learning new concepts and ideas, providing scaffolding and guidance. This post says that new research show that this may not be the best way to learn...that the struggle in learning how to solve a problem. Although they may not successfully solve the problem they may score better when they are tested later on.
Yes i totally agree with the author. Allowing kids to strugggle as they learn will make them understand and solve the problem better.
I think that the education system will change, as now of days, the teachers usually guide the students on how to solve the problem. But now after it is proven that allowing the students to struggle will let the students learn better. The school should adapt and instead of guiding the students,they should only explain the problem and allow the students to solve it themselves.
Some of the bad influence will be that the student will find the problems to hard and give up more easily or start to hate school.
Some good influence are that the student may learn better and will very much help in their futures.
Everyone benifits from it as the students will learn better and also learn more values like not giving up easily. Besides the students the economy will also benifit as when the student start working, it would be easier for him to understand and adapt and Singapore economy could improve faster.
No it is not foolproof as everychild is different. So diffferent students may take different time to understand or they may not even understand at all.
I know a teacher—a great one, actually—who, in private, refers to his students as “bricks.” As in, “dumb as a brick.” You almost never hear that level of candor among teachers, and not just because every parent’s got a lawyer on retainer.
Beth Dichter's insight:
We know words make a difference and this post explores how our words as a teacher may impact our students, how words we use for students whom are "failing" are described. Ben Orlin asks "So how do teachers frame failure for their students? What words do they use?
He continues to explore the words slow, weak, behind, low, struggling and unintelligent, writing about how each "embodies different assumptions about the engines of success, the nature of failure, and how students’ minds operate. Each word is a bite-sized piece of educational ideology."
Although he explores this issue through the lens of math the concepts apply across all curriculum.
With the Common Core we are being asked to personalize education for our students and to make sure that all hit standards based on grade...a task we know more challenging for some students. If we have a student whom has been labeled at some point in their journey we also have to address the issue of mindset, and help that student move towards a growth mindset. The issue of language, and how we use specific words, is a component of this, and this post highlights some issues in a format that is easy to understand.
Check out the notes from the talk above, consider watching the video embedded within the post and think about new ways to work with your students this year about the concept of failure. If you are an engineer failure you understand that failure is a teaching tool, allowing you to improve the project, but in education most students consider failure just that...they have failed. A couple of quotes found in this visalization are below. What are your thoughts as you read them?
* Have courage. It's not easy to do new things!
* No failure means no risk which means nothing new.
Progressive school admins understand teachers need room to explore and experiment to uncover ways to use technology in creating a culture of innovation.
Beth Dichter's insight:
What if we taught our students that failure is mandatory, a part of our lives, that we can learn from our failures and move forward? This post states "We understand that failure is crucially instructive and necessary on the road to success and learning." We might ask ourselves (as teachers) if we embrace failure or if we are fearful of the possible outcomes.
The post provides some foundational material, such as a graphic that looks at a "cycle of experiment and experience" as well as suggesting four strategies:
* Remove the fear of failure
* Create skunkworks
* Promote success
* Align IT and curriculum
And last but not least, that our schools should be cultures of innovation. Additional material is provided on each of the four strategies in the post.
Failures may hurt, but they can actually have some positive effects on your life and mind.
Beth Dichter's insight:
How do failures improve us? This post explores 8 ways that failures teach us lessons, including building empathy, humility, flexibility and creativity. Engineers understand that failure is a part of the learning process, yet in school we tend to look at failure as a negative component of learning. Is it possible for us to look at our practice and provide opportunities for our students to learn from their failures?
"Can creativity be taught? If innovation is truly the key to this country’s success, then it’s time to think strategically about engendering creativity into our education system."
It reviews a new book, 'Ingenius: A Crash Course in Creativity.' The author, Tina Seelig, discusses her 'celebrated Innovation Engine' which consists of 'three internal human factors and three external influences.
The three interal human factors are:
* Knowledge which provides fuel for your imagination
* Imagination which is the catalyst for transforming knowledge into ideas
* Attitude - the spark that set the Innovation Engine in motion
For information on the three external influences as well as using failure to learn click through to the article.
"Not every teenager sits around, texting endlessly and at all the wrong times, causing their parents to worry about a possible addiction to technology. Some of them give TED talks in their spare time.
How will we talk about feminism? What does it mean to "fail," and why shouldn't we fail better? What is love? Why isn't America investing in young black men? And are the people who create change the silent supporters rather than the vocal leaders? In this curated selection of TEDxTeen Talks, the adolescent version of the adult TED Talks, five teens discuss these ideas and how they collide with their own stories."
"One of the problems I think we have in schools is that we train students to fear failure, to avoid it at all costs. Now, to be clear, I'm not suggesting you go out and fail all your classes. But I am suggesting that you should take some risks in your learning. That instead of avoiding things that are hard (because you might fail), you challenge yourself to step up and take on things that are difficult."
This also includes a TEDtalk by Myshkin Ingawale. The site states "The important point to realize is that he built this device - and it failed. So then he built it 32 more times until it worked."
Yesterday, we heard from Chris Cannon, a 2011-2012 Teacher of the Year recipient and economics teacher at Sandy Creek High School in Tyrone, GA. He shared with us his work on test corrections,...
Elementary school Principal Peter DeWitt writes about students' social and emotional health, and how educators can help young people find common ground. He can be found at www.petermdewitt.com.
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In education we many students are told they have "failed" yet as teachers we know that making mistakes is the norm. Engineers look at failures as a way to learn. What can we do in education?
This post explores:
* What does it mean to "fail"?
* The role of failure in learning
* Helping Students Fail: A Framework which has four sections, each of which provides "the idea" and guiding questions.
Where can you start as a teacher?
* By clarifying the meaning
* By providing context
* By designing transparent processes
* By illuminating progress
Students need to learn that a "failure" is not the end of the road, but a stop on a journey. As teachers this post provides a number of suggestions that may help us better meet the needs of our students and help them see failure in a different light.