Tag Archives: failure

School Ambassadors

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

“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.

—–

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?

A quick life lesson

“If I couldn’t handle not being good at something, then how can I consider myself a successful person?” ~ Gerald Hodges

Watch this story about a young man who picked a sport that was the most challenging one he could choose, to prove to himself that he can find success when challenged.

https://fb.watch/bROEBEZ6cB/

Even if he didn’t get his team to qualify for the state championships, which he did, this is the kind of attitude I want to see in my kids and the kids in my school.

If at first you don’t succeed

As the saying goes:

“If at first you don’t succeed… try, try again!”

Working with students, what you sometimes see is:

“If at first you don’t succeed… quit before someone sees you fail.” Or, “If at first you don’t succeed… avoid trying altogether.”

What the saying should say:

“If at first you don’t succeed… try, something different.” (Try a different approach, don’t just try the same thing over again in the same way.)

When things aren’t working, students seem to have two main gears: keep moving forward, because curiosity points to getting unstuck. Or ‘Park’ because it’s not worth the effort or embarrassment.

Teaching students that effort matters more than results or that a failing result can still be a learning opportunity, is to teach them to be resilient and to persevere. This doesn’t mean everyone gets a participation badge, this isn’t just about another quote, “If you did your best, that’s all that really matters.”

No, this is about creating an environment where students aren’t afraid to bite off more than they can chew… to be so ambitious about their goals that a failure to achieve them still puts students much farther than if they had set the bar too low and succeeded.

This is about creating opportunities for students to do something epic, rather than just something every other kid is doing, with a sample you share of the expected result… a cookie cutter task where students produce the same round cookies, but get to decide where the pretty sprinkles go to make their cookie look a little different than everyone else’s.

If you want students to really succeed, well then they have to start a task with the real potential for failure. They have to struggle with uncertainty of success. They have to learn that not reaching a perfectly successful goal can be an opportunity to learn more and different things. Because without authentic struggle, learning is shallow and fleeting.

“If at first you do succeed… the task probably wasn’t hard enough to truly learn something new.”

Iterate doesn’t just mean “do it again”

I’ve written a fair bit about Learning and Failure. One of the things that turns a failure into learning is not giving up and iterating. But I’m not sure that’s the correct term? To iterate is ‘to perform or utter repeatedly’, but that’s not really what I mean. The general point of iteration when you meet a roadblock, or fail in an attempt, is not to try to perform the same task or procedure in the same way, but rather to attempt a different version of the same thing.

It’s not just about applying the same process over and over again, but rather it’s about recognizing what caused the failure and attempting to circumvent it, trying to achieve results by trying something untried, unique, or divergent from the failed attempt. This is what can transform a failed attempt into a success. Core to this idea is not seeing a failure as a failure, but rather as an invitation to learn by trying again. It’s not a failure until you give up.

But sometimes you don’t get another attempt. The question is why not? Did you run out of time? Do you lack the resources, support, or effort? Is it a high pressure test that you can only do once?

Ran out of time? Ask: What would your next step be if you had time? What did you learn along the way? Who is an expert you can follow up with to help you understand what went wrong? You can learn by reflection as well as by repeated attempts.

Lack resources or support? Who can help? What do you really need versus what would be nice to have? Who is an expert you can follow up with to help you understand what went wrong?

Lack of effort? Whose fault is that? What help do you need? What are you willing to do to move forward? What’s stopping you?

Is it a high pressure test that you only get one attempt on? This is often a fallacy. This is often more arbitrary than you think. The reality is that most tests that really matter can be done again, just not in the timeline you hoped for. Tests like the LSAT are high stakes, but many people attempt it more than once. To me it’s interesting to see so many teachers not give students second chances on tests? Why? If a student is willing to put more effort in and actually learn the content, why not give them another try? Is the mark on the first attempt the important thing or is the understanding of the content more important?

That said, to iterate doesn’t just mean ‘do it again’. What makes the second (or third or fourth) attempt different? What new information, effort, or resources are available? What other ways can learning be demonstrated? What else can be done to show learning, to achieve learning, to discover learning that wasn’t done before?

Iterate, don’t repeat failure. Don’t do the same thing over again and expect the same result.

Obstacles become the way

When I wrote Learning and Failure I struggled with the word failure. Setbacks and obstacles that some see as failures can often become the impetus for far greater learning than if the roadblock never needed to be faced.

Here is the end of the post:

“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.”

One of our students at Inquiry Hub is working on developing an artificial intelligence (AI) program that can listen to a song and determine the key of that song. The workings of this are far beyond my understanding, but in his reflection about his learning so far, (after doing a great job explaining the process), he shared this in his ‘Log of Milestones’:

– Made a python script to automatically take a mp3 file, and find its music key by making a query to Tunebat. I got blocked by Tunebat, because they identified my automated queries as an “attack” on their server.

– Wrote a Firefox web extension using javascript to make the queries to Tunebat not seem automated, and therefore not rejected. Managed to work.

And then later:

– I found there was a way on Python to fake a web request to Tunebat without getting blocked.

I love seeing this creativity and resiliency. The obstacle becomes the way. He sends hundreds of automated requests to a website, essential to give him the large amounts of data he needs to train his AI; the website sees these automated requests as an attack on their server (this is known as a DOS attack); So he writes first a web browser extension, then later a python program, that tricks the website into answering his thousands of requests without seeing them as an attack.

The roadblock or failure isn’t a failure, it’s an opportunity to adapt, be creative, and learn new skills.

F ailure

A lways

I nvites

L earning

The invitation is always there, the opportunity to overcome can become the place where amazing learning happens. A potential failure can become the impetus to build resilience and to create new and unforeseen challenges to overcome. It can become the thing that makes the learning experience a worthy experience to remember… more memorable than the easy ‘A’ on a cookie-cutter style learning experience where the outcome is uniform for all the students who jump through the same hoops to get that ‘A’.

The obstacle can be the failure point where people give up, or it can be the opportunity to overcome. The learning invitation is there, as long as the drive, resilience, and effort are there to push a student.

Sure in this example he might not have been able to fool the website, and maybe his efforts could have come up short, but I don’t think that would have stopped him anyway. His attempts at a workaround could still have provided a lot of learning that he never would have had otherwise. The obstacle became the way, and while the positive outcome this time was rewarding, so too could have been a so-called ‘failure’. There is nothing artificial about this kind of learning.