Tag Archives: failure

Empowering students

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There is an element of control that needs to be given up by teachers if they are truly empowering students. There has to be a willingness to accept a potential outcome that is less than ideal… An understanding that students won’t always hit the high standard you expect.

This isn’t about lowering standards or expectations, in fact, if you are empowering students you need to make your high expectations clear. Rather, this is the realization that students bite off more than they can chew (or rather can do), and then they end up scrambling to do less and still produce a good product or presentation. It’s an acceptance that a student’s vision doesn’t match yours but their outcome is still good, or (and this is the tough part for teachers) good enough. It’s about mistakes being honoured as learning opportunities rather than as something to penalize.

Empowering students doesn’t happen with outcomes that are exactlywhat the teacher envisioned and expected. Outcomes will vary. Results will be less predictable. But the learning will be rich, authentic, and far more meaningful and memorable for the students… As long as they feel empowered, and are given the space to have autonomy, lead, and learn in ways that they choose.

And while that won’t always end with results that the teacher envisioned or expected, it will always end with learners feeling like they owned their own learning. Shouldn’t that be the essence of a great learning experience?

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Related: Teacher as Compass

Ego in the way

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This is one of the most enjoyable graduation addresses that I’ve ever heard. Rick Rigsby’s “Lessons from a third grade dropout” shares some wonderful insights with a delivery that leaves you wanting more.

Two ‘truth bombs’ that he delivers are the following quotes:

“Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity.”

And,

“Pride is the burden of a foolish person.”

I see it more and more, people’s egos and their pride get in the way of many things ranging from being a lifelong learner, to being a decent human being. Rick got to experience the wisdom of a 3rd grade dropout who was one of the smartest people he knew. That’s a gift, an opportunity for insight.

We often see social media posts where someone mistreats or underestimates a person with lower social stature, and then learns the errors of their ways when this person is smarter or more helpful than expected… or that ‘lowly’ person outwits the more affluent or pompous person.

This ‘underdog as hero’ message is prevalent in movies too.

The other message in these stories is ‘don’t be a jerk’.

Despite all these social media and movie ‘lessons’ we see shared, there seems to be no shortage of egotistical and pride filled people in the world. In fact many people think you need this to be great. Where would some of the most noted (and notorious) athletes, movie stars, and politicians be without there inflated egos? You don’t get attention when you are selfless. Maybe you can, and maybe if more people did, this would trend more, and the big egos would get less attention. Maybe.

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But there’s a lot more to this speech than just those two quotes. There are also valuable lessons on failure.

“Wisdom will come to you from the unlikeliest of sources. A lot of times from failure. When you hit rock-bottom, remember this: while you’re struggling, rock-bottom can also be a great foundation on which to build, and on which to grow.

I’m not worried that you’ll be successful, I’m worried that you won’t fail from time to time. The person that gets up off the canvas and keeps growing, that’s the person that will continue to grow their influence.”

Truth.

Watch the video and enjoy this inspirational speech.

If I never fail…

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I’ve written a lot about failure. Just click the ‘failure‘ tag under this post and you’ll see my most recent thoughts (including this one).

But today I actually share the words of someone else. I saw a video clip of Adam Grant on LinkedIn, where he said the following:

If I never fail, it means I’m not challenging myself. I actually set a goal that I would start at least one project every year that didn’t succeed. And let’s be clear, I’m not aiming for failure. What I’m doing is creating an acceptable zone of failure to know that’s going to motivate some risk-taking and some experimentation and hopefully some growth. If you succeed on 90% of your projects, that should be a hugely successful year. If you succeed on 100%, I think you’re aiming too low.

Brilliant!

This is what I said in a post a few years back, about how even ‘A’ students should have tried at least one epic thing and failed:

Every student will encounter failures later in life, ‘in the real world’, so if we don’t challenge them in school, we have not given them the tools to face adversity later on. The question we have to ask ourselves is, “Are we challenging students enough, so that they are maximizing their learning opportunities?” 

Two sides of the same coin. But I like Adam’s framing of it a lot better than mine. I prefer to think of it as failure brings growth and inspires new experimentation rather than failure prepares you to face even greater failure in the future.

Resilience building

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I mentioned this in my post yesterday about Generation X, “for the most part this is a generation that is tough, tolerant, and resilient. Resilience is something I see a lot of younger generations struggling with.”

Here are a few ways I see a lack of resilience in students today:

• Feedback is viewed too critically. Comments on achievement or performance are taken personally, as if constructive feedback on an outcome is a personal attack on the person. “You could have done a better job with…” is interpreted as, “You are a failure”. There is little or no separation between feedback on a presentation or product and feedback on personal identity, all critical feedback feels like an attack.

In my role as a principal I recently gave some behavioural feedback to a student who later emailed me and said among other things, “I’m not a bad person.” At no time did I ever say or believe this person was bad, just making poor choices. It didn’t matter to the student that I separated the behavior out as the issue, it was still taken as a personal attack.

• Hurt feelings are not handled well. Words are treated like physical attacks. There is limited separation between minor and major harm. This can come across in many ways, but essentially the old ‘sticks and stones‘ nursery rhyme has been turned around and sounds more like, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always harm me more.”

Now I’m not a proponent of the ideas that words don’t hurt. Social bullying can be far more brutal than a physical fight which ends in 20 seconds, and taunting and continuous verbal attacks can be devastating to deal with… But when a simple moment of teasing between friends is seen as just as hurtful as a verbal assault from a bully with a power differential between the bully and the victim, then there is a problem. When words instantly hurt and the scale of impact is always high, there is a definite issue of lack of resilience.

• Self loathing. Self talk like, “I’m not good enough.” Or, “It’s too hard.” Or simply, “I can’t!” …All get in the way of effort. There seems to be a (legitimate) struggle with the mental aspect of doing hard things. I added ‘(legitimate)’ because I’m not trying to say that the person is just quitting, rather there seems to be a mental roadblock that some students face which gets in the way of successful work.

This is very hard to deal with as a teacher. It comes across as the student being lazy, or distracted, or even defiant. But it’s not so much that the students doesn’t want to, they just really don’t know how to frame the work in a way that makes it a priority. I think this is a resilience issue too. When hard things are avoided rather than faced over and over again, the work of doing something hard becomes too difficult to face, and what gets defined as hard becomes less and less difficult over time.

I can’t put my finger on the causes for the lack of resilience I’m seeing today? It can be a trifecta of parenting, technology distraction, and media influences, or maybe just cultural norms? But we need to start thinking about resilience building as a teachable outcome.

Failure is not getting a bad result, failure is accepting a bad result without learning the hard lessons about what didn’t work. Failure is not seeking out the support to do better next time. Failure is a lack of reflection and feedback about how to improve. Failure is a lack of resilience, and resilience is something that isn’t strengthened without hearing hard things, and feeling hurt, or discouraged, or disappointed, and both working though and overcoming the difficulty.

Resilience is built, it is earned, it isn’t bestowed. It’s tough to toughen up. If it was easy it wouldn’t actually build resilience.

School Ambassadors

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Last Friday six of our students presented to 34 middle school cohort student teachers from the University of British Columbia. They had prepared the presentation for two visiting Northwest Territories teachers a few weeks back but I didn’t get to see it. In preparing the presentation I had asked them not just to share some of the amazing inquiries they get to do at Inquiry Hub, but also ones that were challenging and did go as well as planned. I didn’t get to see their first presentation but I watched this second iteration.

Most of them didn’t just share a challenging inquiry, but their worst ones. They had me and their audience laughing as they described how things went epically wrong, or how what they thought would be a topic of great interest barely held their attention for 2 days. But more than that, each and every one of them eloquently expressed their learning from that epic failure.

Sitting behind the students, there were a few times I had the urge to say something, but I forced myself to stay quiet. Each time I had the urge, the students ended up helping each other fill in the blanks I thought were missing, and in several of those cases better than I would have… and allowing them to lead, without speaking up, gave more authenticity to the presentation experience than I could ever have contributed. I did come in at the second half of the Q&A and answered a few questions, but at that point the presentation was basically over.

I wrote this in an email to these students and their parents. I couldn’t be more proud of these young learners and leaders:

Greetings to our Inquiry Hub Ambassadors and their parents,

A few weeks back, I asked a few students to present to two educators from the North West Territories during our Pro-D Day. Today, those same school ambassadors provided school tours and presented to 34 Middle School Cohort Student Teachers from UBC. I didn’t get to see the presentation to the NWT teachers but I did get to watch today. I just want to say that it was an honour and a privilege to have these 6 wonderful students represent our school, and share their inquiries and learning experiences here at iHub. 

They represented our community, and their learning, extremely well and the student teachers were impressed, and I’d even say ‘blown away’ by their presentation. Their ability to respond to the Q&A questions the student teachers asked was also exceptional. 

I wanted to share this with them and their parents and to say on behalf of our school… Thank you!

Have a great weekend,

Dave

Error correction

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“When you tolerate an error, you rob yourself of learning.

When you ruminate on an error, you rob yourself of happiness.

Notice it, improve it, and move on from it.” ~ James Clear

I really like this quote. It is very insightful. We don’t learn unless we make an effort to adapt, or improve after a failure or an error. But perseverating on our errors isn’t healthy.

Notice, improve, and move on. But how many of us can easily do this?

How many of us repeat mistakes? How many of us spend too much time ruminating and don’t move on? How many of us spend more time worrying about our errors and less time celebrating our successes?

Notice, improve, and move on.

There would be far less learning if we spent more time avoiding mistakes. There would be less improvement, and less to move on from. And so while we are learning from our errors, we need to remember to feel good about the learning we’ve done, and the journey we are on.

The effort of learning

As an athlete, I didn’t have very good body awareness. My swim stroke was awful and that’s tough to deal with as a water polo player. My coaches spent a lot of time trying to fix my stroke, and they’d have me try all sorts of drills and drill strokes, but I often wouldn’t feel the difference or wouldn’t be able to get my body to do what my coaches wanted it to do.

I was also a player who has no issue being yelled at. I listened whether the coach was speaking at a regular volume or yelling at the top of his lungs. Didn’t matter if it was encouraging or angry. I heard, I tried. I tried again. And often again because listening wasn’t doing, and I had to work extra hard on the doing.

For me, learning new skills was always something I had to work at, and the idea of learning being an effort has stuck with me. Maybe it’s not true for someone who finds that skills come easy to them, but for me if there isn’t a struggle then there isn’t much learning happening. That’s why I frequently go back to the ideas I shared in ‘learning and failure‘. We should teach kids to struggle through things that are not easy and not guaranteed to work. We should have them feel the struggle of failure… even if they are solid ‘A’ students (perhaps especially if they are – see #3 here).

I think sometimes we try to make learning too easy. We forget the sense of accomplishment that comes with succeeding at something hard. We forgot that the challenge is what makes the learning stick. Learning can be fun and hard. It can be challenging and rewarding. It is seldom effortless and still processed meaningfully. The effort is what helps make the learning stick, and while it need not be painfully hard, it does (often) need to at least be uncomfortable. Easily learned skills are not nearly as rewarding as the skills that are more challenging and harder to accomplish. Real learning comes with effort.

Reexamining the term FAILURE

Six years ago in Philadelphia I ran a session at Educon on Failure. Bill Ferriter came to the session and after the interactive presentation he created this image:

This was the premise I was working from,

When is failure really a success? When we engage students in EPIC projects and challenges, the journey to success is often fraught with failures that can prove to be amazing learning opportunities. 

Do we need to reexamine the use of the term ‘Failure’?

Our present education system is built around always finding the ‘right’ answer, but when can the wrong answer be valuable? How can we provide rich, meaningful opportunities for students to make mistakes, iterate, persevere and develop alternative approaches to problems relevant to what they are learning?

4 years before this presentation I created this image:

I shared an acronym that I came up with:

F ailure
A lways
I nvites
L earning

I share in an accompanying post,

Think of this: If students (regardless of skills and abilities) have only ever met success, and accomplished every task, assignment and project they have needed to do for school, then they weren’t pushed hard enough. In this case, it is the program that is the failure, because the students were not challenged as much as they should have been.

The learning potential of failure is significant. If the work is meaningful enough, there can be more learned from an epic failure, than a marginal success, where the measure for success was set too low.

We talk a lot about ‘learning through failure’ in education, but we don’t really mean failure. Because when a student takes lessons from something not working, then it’s a learning opportunity and not actually a failure.

When you think about it, lack of knowledge is where the learning begins. If you give students the knowledge, they don’t really learn, you actually rob students of their learning. You want them to struggle and to find the learning challenging. And if the challenge is authentic, if it’s really a challenge, then it’s not something they’ll get on the first try. So hitting the ‘failure point’ is part of learning. Trying to achieve too much needs to be part of the process… and so bumping into failure is an essential part of learning.

So a failure is only a failure if the challenge lacks reflection, resources, support, or effort. If these things are provided (by the teacher and more-so by the learner) then the learner didn’t actually fail. They may not achieve their original goal, but they invited learning into the attempt… and learning is achieved. That is not a failure.

The idea of learning through failure is actually not a failure at all. It is accepting that there are opportunities for learning in not achieving the intended goal but still identifying that there was learning to be acquired and often the struggle is something that makes this kind of learning stick.

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Related: This Ignite presentation on Transforming Our Learning Metaphors:

Undershooting Your Potential

“If you’re always right, you’re not learning.

If you’re never failing, you’re not reaching.

The objective is to be right. The objective is to succeed.

But if you’re always winning, you’re undershooting your potential.” ~ James Clear

I’ve written about this as it relates to school a number of times… but I like this slant of ‘undershooting potential’. Our school system is filled with smart students who know exactly what to do to get ‘A’s. They jump the provided hoops, they strive for the 95%, rather than 88, or 90. They complain to the teacher about the 96% because they want 98. They know how to play the marks game, and yet they are nowhere near their potential.

No, I’m not saying that their potential is actually 100%… I’m saying the entire system allows them to underperform. They do a dance to earn an extra 2-3%, they read and re-read the criteria to make sure they hit all the targets, they spend an extra hour editing their work. But that work is nowhere near their potential. They are doing work that shows their answer is right. They are proving they can succeed at the task. They are winning at the good marks game, but they are undershooting their potential.

They are answering the same questions as their peers, they aren’t developing their own questions.

They are responding to questions that have a clear and definitive answer, they aren’t trying to solve complex problems with no clear answer.

They are following textbook experiments with pre-defined procedures which have been replicated thousands of times with the same results, they aren’t testing their own unknown variables.

They aren’t trying something epic and failing. Back in 2009, in a post called, Chasing the ‘A’, I quoted Bud Hunt,

“In no way am I suggesting getting good grades is a bad thing; that would be foolish. Getting good grades is not the problem. Allowing grades to dictate one’s life is.

Grades don’t guarantee success.

Passion + Determination + Positive Attitude = Success

I’ll give you an A if you transform the world.”

When you chase marks, good marks are the goal. Many students can play that game without really hitting their potential. The problem isn’t wanting good grades, these are still needed to pursue future dreams. The problem is a system where students always succeed without knowing what their potential is. I’ve said before that this is an injustice:

Every student will encounter failures later in life, ‘in the real world’, so if we don’t challenge them in school, we have not given them the tools to face adversity later on. The question we have to ask ourselves is, “Are we challenging students enough, so that they are maximizing their learning opportunities?” 

The pursuit of an extra couple percent on a cookie-cutter assignment with uniform cookie-shaped answers is a system designed to allow students to undershoot their potential.

Students need to design their own learning challenges, and learn to fail and to overcome those failures along the way.

Stuck again

I have this Murphy’s Law thing that always seems to happen to me. Whenever I am holding any kind of chord that is dragging behind me, or that I’m pulling, it will get stuck. Pulling an extension cord from behind the couch, it wedges underneath the couch leg. Pulling the vacuum into another room, the hose catches on some furniture forcing me to retreat. Holding my laptop and moving to another room, the power cord slides under the door.

It’s not an occasional thing, it happens all the time with anything from a loose thread, to a garden hose, to an article of clothing in my hands, to the dangling latch on our garbage can. If it can catch on something it will.

The thing is, I will probably always think that this happens to me more than to anyone else. In reality that may not be the case, because I don’t have a reason to remember the non-examples, the times I actually get away with pulling something that doesn’t get stuck. These non-events do not create a memorable moment. I don’t think, ‘Wow, it didn’t happen that time’, I simply don’t notice and don’t remember it not happening.

However each time it does happen it is self reinforcing:

‘See, it happened again.’

”This always happens to me.’

‘Damn it! Really? Come on.’

‘Of course.’

‘#@<&!’

My question is, is the cord or hose getting stuck again, with the universe conspiring against me to ensure it happens to me more than anyone else, or is my mind stuck focusing on these instances as if they are occurring far more often than they should?

What exactly is getting stuck?