Tag Archives: failure

Thinking Requires Effort

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I recently read a great article by Alec Couros, The Radical Act of Thinking. In it he said, “The challenge isn’t finding the tool anymore. The challenge is avoiding it. We’ve reached the point where AI is the path of least resistance for almost every task.”

And then he concluded with this:

“To succeed, we need to fundamentally reframe “effort.” We have to stop viewing the struggle of thinking as an inefficiency to be solved, and start protecting it as the very thing that helps us grow.”

Here are a few ways that I see teachers doing this at Inquiry Hub:

  1. Community video or podcast challenges. Part of the challenge might include creating the video in a specific genre, or a meta part of the presentation where students explicitly describe what they have learned.
  2. Personalized inquiry projects. This is offered through a course designed around the process of learning, not content. So it doesn’t matter if a student is learning to code, designing a website, publishing a book, learning a specific skill in art, composing a song, starting a business, or even learning to crochet… the inquiry is designed around students learning skills they want to learn.
  3. Solving problems in class. I’ve questioned the value of homework for over 15 years now. Watching our senior math teacher teach Math & Physics, I see him focusing on the why of questions. I see his students working in pairs and groups to solve problems together on white boards. I see students actively struggling and learning in class, where they have access to support, and the focus is on the struggle and understanding the problem.

Something else that we do is to be careful not to add things to students loads unnecessarily. I can’t tell you the countless times I hear well-intentioned educators say, “You know what would be a good project for your students to do?” Followed by a legitimately good idea. But we are not an alternate school, we are a regular school with an alternative approach. Our students still need to fulfill the entire regular curriculum on top of the inquiries they do for credit. As good as other ideas may be, they become make-work activities that not all students are interested in, and this just invites students to use AI or to feel like the work is just busywork.

Will Richardson asks, “Every time you’re about to implement a new program or pedagogy or technology or initiative or building project or anything else, ask and answer this simple question: “In service of what?””

When we add anything to our schedule, it’s to serve one of two purposes:

1. Integrate curriculum or make the curriculum more engaging. Our students go on to universities, colleges, and technical institutes, and they need the required courses to get there and do well. But the required curriculum doesn’t need to be taught in a linear, boring fashion. When a project is added in class, the intent is to meaningfully cover more curriculum in less time.

2. We add things in service of students. A recent example: For the last 10 years our PAC has fundraised to provide students with FoodSafe every 2nd year. So all our students learn life skills around preparing and serving food. This year our PAC is also providing our seniors with first aid training. The plan is that they will alternate years between FoodSafe and first aid so that every student who goes through Inquiry Hub will have these life skills when they leave the school. Carving out 8 hours of training time over 2 days involves our senior teachers reworking their schedule… in the service of giving our students a life skill.

I won’t pretend that everything we do is AI proof, and that there aren’t lessons and activities where students could avoid thinking using a tool that does the work for them. I also won’t pretend that every assignment and project is ‘in service’ of authentic learning for students. But I will say that we’ve worked hard to make the learning meaningful for students. We provide them with opportunities to work in our community towards common goals, and we provide them with opportunities to pursue projects meaningful to them, focusing on the process of learning… on the struggle, with a perspective that failure and struggle are a path to real learning, not a barrier.

I’ve said before,

“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.”

This fits with what Alec said above,

“To succeed, we need to fundamentally reframe “effort.” We have to stop viewing the struggle of thinking as an inefficiency to be solved, and start protecting it as the very thing that helps us grow.”

The secret sauce is in providing the space and time for students to struggle out in the open, facing challenges or learning life skills that they will use. However, you don’t create these opportunities by continually adding things to a student’s plate. Adding more to their plates only invites them to find tools to do the work for them.

Thinking requires effort, and providing students with opportunities to demonstrate that effort in meaningful ways is, in my mind, the project of schools. Reducing busywork, and maximizing the problem-solving time, in a community of learners who find benefit from working together, is what schools should be in service of.

Iterate, iterate, iterate

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We’ve all heard the phrase, “If at first you don’t succeed… try, try again.”

That’s the right idea but the wrong language. It should be, “If at first you don’t succeed… iterate, iterate again.”

Because we all know another saying too, “Do you know what the definition of insanity is? Doing the same thing again and again, and expecting a different result.”

We don’t need to try again, we need to iterate, again and again… Tweak, adapt, adjust, fine-tune, modify, tailor, refine, reshape, alter, and/or calibrate. And to do all this we need to embrace failure as learning.

Trying the same thing again just won’t do.

Celebrating challenges

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I watched a few student presentations yesterday. Each one was excellent in their own way. But my favourite moment came when one student presenting on her Independent Directed Study put up a slide with the single word, ‘Challenges’ on it. She got excited and started with, “OK, I’ve been waiting to share this with you!”

I love the way our students perceive challenges and failures. They recognize that this is part of the learning journey. They celebrate the discoveries they make and the effort and perseverance it takes to overcome unexpected challenges along the way.

Here is a student that has done an amazing project, with a great outcome, and she can’t wait to share her challenges that lead to success. This happens because we embed the expectation that students will find challenges along the way. We expect them to share those challenges as part of their learning journey. As a result, the challenges become a big part of the learning, they become the focal point of where real learning begins.

An ‘A’ student that breezes through problems as if they were not problems doesn’t learn as much as another student who stumbled along the way and got to the same results. The journey is less memorable, less rewarding. It’s overcoming challenges that make a learning experience valuable, and seeing our students celebrate the challenges they met on there learning journey is extremely rewarding.

Outward appearances

I remember looking at a house that was for sale. At first glance it looked like a nicely remodelled home. But upon closer inspection, it was a house being flipped with shoddy workmanship everywhere. It was missing baseboards behind the toilet. Hardwood was placed on top of the old floor and ended at the entrance to the closets. Electrical sockets didn’t match. And, the kitchen cabinets were dated and looked liked they were painted over with wall paint.

It didn’t take long to realize the house was rushed to market and would take considerable amounts of money to remodel after purchase. In an attempt to look good, a lot of the goodness was compromised, and the seller would have been better off selling it as-is rather than poorly attempting to update the cosmetics, without really addressing the challenges.

I often wonder about people who only worry about looking good. The question arises, what are they trying to hide? What are they sacrificing in order to worry about appearances? What are they losing out on because change is risky?

Are they learning from their mistakes or hiding them? Are they growing or are they stagnating at a point that looked good? Organizations can be the same. There are countless stories about companies not seeing the opportunities of the future because they are stuck in the past. Like Blockbuster not buying Netflix when they had the chance.

What would people say? That’s not what we do? What if the change reflects poorly on us?

How many opportunities are lost because it was more important to keep up appearances, to look good, rather than to make a few mistakes along the way of finding a new and better path?

AI Image Fails

I use AI images to accompany roughly 18 to 19 out of 20 Daily-Ink posts. My general rule is that I’ll try one or two requests and pick from those. I don’t want to spend 10 or 15 minutes of my precious morning schedule to search for images, they are the side quest, my writing is the adventure.

However, it being the weekend, yesterday I had time to play… and yet I failed.

Here was my original request for my last blog post:

When that didn’t work, I got more and more detailed, even pausing the requests to ask Copilot (which uses DALL•E 3 to create images) if it knew what a waterpolo cap looked like. It described it perfectly… then I got it to reiterate my request before continuing. This is what I got:

But the caps still came out with helmet masks and at no point was the shooter facing the net. I finally gave up and cropped an image. Here is what I used, and then the full image:

Below are many of the fails. I recognize these are not common requests, and the images have some redeeming qualities, but there is still a way to go when it comes to AI text-to-image requests. So, when you see a less-than-perfect image added to my Daily-Ink posts, please recognize that I’m trying, but I’m not wasting time trying to get everything just right… I’d rather use that time to write, meditate, or exercise.

Wipeouts and learning

I haven’t done a lot of board sports. The last time I stood on a surfboard I was 9, and I was not very good. I didn’t skateboard and I don’t snowboard. I do ski, and I’ve been on water skis a few times, but it has been 3 years since I skied on snow and over 2 decades since I skied on water. So I didn’t expect wake surfing to come naturally to me… and it didn’t.

The one time I actually got up, I was behind the wake, and instead of taking my time to gain some confidence, I raced forward to the front of the wake, and kept going for a nice wipeout.

After about 7 or 8 attempts, I’d had enough and then a few others took turns. Then my friend Mark suggested I try again with a start off of the back of the boat… and I found success.

I had a full 3 and a half minute run, trying my best to put myself in a position where I could actually surf the wave with slack on the rope, with the wave pushing me forward. Although I couldn’t get the knack of it, I had a few near falls trying, and was able to recover and keep trying. A few things helped:

1. Good coaching. Mark was amazing. He was calm, with clear instructions, and good space between coaching to just let me try.

2. Positive cheerleading. Everyone on the boat was rooting for me, and every wipeout was met with encouragement.

3. Watching others. Seeing others both struggle and find success made the task seem like it was something I could accomplish.

4. A willingness to fail. I knew that I wasn’t coming into this with a lot of similar skills, and so a wipeout wasn’t really a failure but a learning opportunity.

But of all these, good coaching was the most critical. A good teacher is a gift.

Empowering students

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

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…

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

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.