I Fail, You Fail, We All Learn. This is the second post in the “Innovative Teaching Challenge” series.
To get every challenge sent to your inbox, sign up here. Ahh, the sweet smell of failure. As students we were taught that failure was a bad thing, and as adults we are cautioned against “trying” anything that might lead to failure. Yet, as I look at my own life (and probably when you look at your life), failure has played a huge role in who I am today…and how I got here. I Fail… One of my biggest failures ever was as a college student. In the middle of my sophomore year I had a 1.6 GPA and something had to change. Then in the midst of all this “failure” something clicked. There weren’t too many classes in my entire educational journey that I ever cared about. However, this made me finally realize that “playing the game” was really making it work for you. We Fail… This is what upsets me about much of our current educational system. And the cycle continues to spin. I know we can do better.
We All Learn. Take a Risk. What if you are wrong?
What if it’s Sharpie and you. can’t. erase? What if nobody else agrees? What if people speak out against your idea? What if your idea just doesn’t work? Yikes. It could be bad to be wrong. But, is being wrong worse than doing nothing? 2nd (and 3rd, and 4th) chances are vital. Fun Failure: How to Make Learning Irresistible. Culture Bao Tri Photography By Anne Collier Failure is a positive act of creativity,” Katie Salen said.
Scientists, artists, engineers, and even entrepreneurs know this as adults. But in schools, the notion of failure is complicated. Salen, executive director of the Institute of Play and founder of Quest to Learn, the first public school based on the principles of game design in the U.S., explained how failure can be a motivating agent for learning in her presentation at SXSW. Any practice – athletic, artistic, even social – involves repeatedly failing till one gets the experience or activity right.
Game designer Jane McGonigal makes a similar point. But the opposite is true in school, Salen said. Over the past year, Salen went on a “listening tour,” interviewing game designers at Media Molecule, Valve, and Blizzard Entertainment. Don’t shoot the player while she’s learning. A version of this post appeared on NetFamilyNews. Related. Want Students to Succeed? Let Them Fail - Education. How many times have you heard the mantra "failure is not an option"?
The need to succeed whatever the cost permeates our society, and schools are no exception. But new research in the American Psychological Association's Journal of Experimental Psychology: General concludes kids might perform better in school if teachers and parents sent the message that failing is a normal part of learning. Researchers from France's University of Poitiers conducted several experiments with three groups of 6th graders, giving them difficult anagram problems to solve. They told the first group that "learning is difficult and failure is common, but practice will help, just like learning how to ride a bicycle. " The second group received no encouragement but was asked to describe how they tried to solve the problems.
On a subsequent test, the students who had been told that it was normal to have a tough time with these kinds of problems significantly outperformed the two other groups.