Nine Tenets of Passion-Based Learning

The Social Power of Sharing Mistakes Much of the research about learning and the brain could be distilled into a few simple words: Mistakes are good. Struggle makes you smarter. When it comes to applying this lesson to our lives, the problem is not with the science, but rather with our powerful natural aversion to mistakes and struggle. Try as we might to convince ourselves otherwise, mistakes feel crummy; struggle feels like a verdict. The question is, how to fix that? One good answer: do it as a group. Last week I heard of a nice strategy from the headmaster of a private high school in Utah. Backstory: A new assistant headmaster (let’s call him Ernest) had been asked to speak to one of the school’s biggest donors about an upcoming project. But for some strange reason Ernest didn’t. The Mistake Club was born. The benefits, of course, go far beyond the pleasure of the joke. Here are few other ways to do that: Rate This (3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ... Share This

Failure School: Metacognitive Reframing Boosts Working Memory What's a quick way to boost a student's working memory? Tell them that learning is difficult and failure is common. At least that's a conclusion from a French research study that tested 111 6th graders with a series of difficult anagram puzzles. "... a researcher talked to the students about the difficulty of the problems. The researchers also went on to test reading comprehension, and the students who had heard that learning is difficult and often accompanied by failure scored higher than all the other groups."