Tag Archives: learning

Failure is a frame of mind, not an outcome

I’ve written a lot about learning and failure. In a post titled, Learning Through Failure vs Failing to Learn, I said,

“When we talk about learning from failure, we are not actually talking about failure, we are talking about perseverance, and resilience, and tenacity. We are talking about coming up to resistance and unplanned outcomes and working through them to achieve a goal. We are talking about students learning significantly more than if everything went their way.“

Listening to many students at Inquiry Hub, you hear them talk about this in an amazing way. They share the very ethos behind this idea:

For anyone that didn’t bother to watch these two short clips, here is what Thia said in the second one,

“Inquiry projects aren’t about always being successful. It’s about trying something new, learning new skills, creating something. It isn’t always about being the best at it, or succeeding in it. You might have a failed inquiry, and that’s completely ok. It doesn’t always have to be a success for it to be a good quality project. It’s all about the process.”

What’s interesting is that if you don’t understand this idea, it sounds like accepting failure is ‘OK’. If you don’t recognize that students are talking about putting themselves ‘out there’ and trying something beyond their comfort zone, then it sounds like they are giving themselves a participation badge for just showing up. But if you truly understand and embrace the idea of learning through failure, you aren’t talking about failure at all.

Elon Musk just had a rocket explode upon landing and called it a success because of the data they collected.


I’m sure there are people who get this. I’m also sure there are people who laugh, “Ha, you call that a success? What a loser.”

A real loser is one who doesn’t try. A real loser is one who gets an outcome they don’t want and quits. A real loser is someone that makes excuses rather than steps up to make things right.

People who do epic things, and people who try epic things and don’t succeed, understand that failure is a frame of mind, not an outcome. They understand that learning is a journey, not a destination.

The future of conferences

In the past few weeks I’ve participated in Microsoft Teams and Zoom meetings with Jeff Borden and Dean Shareski. Both of them did a great job, but I look forward to doing face-to-face conferences again. Dean recently wrote, ‘The Future of Professional Learning Part 1‘,

“I do wonder if we’ll be more intentional about what constitutes and justifies a great face to face experience and what can be highly effective as a virtual option?”

This got be thinking about where we go with conferences post-pandemic? In response to a tweet about his post, I said,  “I was tiring of regular conferences, now I miss them. I think they will evolve to be more engaging (why travel somewhere for a PowerPoint that could be on Zoom) and I also think we might see more (online) pre/post conference engagement and learning.”

To expand on this idea, I don’t see things like pre-presentations or assignments and tasks being given before a conference (read as ‘not homework’), but I do see opportunities for conversation, interaction with the presenter, and with other conference attendees. I see icebreakers and teasers.  I see feedback to the presenter about what the attendees want. I see presenters providing clear learning intentions and a framework for their talk. I see presenters providing a personal introduction so that instead of the first 5-10 minutes of a 1 hour presentation slot being “This is who I am”, the presentation starts with an activity, engaging people with other people who have already connected online. I see interactive presentations that rely on participants being involved and engaged with the material.

Think about it. Why spend hundreds of dollars in flights, hotels, and food, to go to a room and get a PowerPoint and ‘talking head’ that could easily have been delivered to you at home? When I went to ISTE, my favourite memories are the blogger’s cafe, and meeting friends to do podcasts with (Shelly Sanchez Terrell and Kathleen McClaskey), and the people I went to ISTE with from my district. When I went to SXSW EDU, the people I went with and the podcasts that I did are the only things I remember (David Jakes, Jeff Richardson, and after the conference Miguel Guhlin). The future of conferences will need to be much more about creating experiences and making connections and less about presentations… this was already happening, but now that we have created digital experiences that will compete, the pull of conferences needs to be about enriching the experience and making it worth the effort to travel.

When students own the learning

Last night was Inquiry Hub’s open house. I shared a post about our open house last year: A Place to Dream, Create, and Learn. A year ago we packed around 200 people into our gym and had a great night of presentations:

But with Covid-19 this year the event had to go digital. We held a YouTube Live event. Show starts 26 minutes in or you can watch topic-based sections here: InquiryHub.org/open2020

It is such a privilege producing something like this with these students. They worked so hard preparing the event. They created scripts, videos, music, and designed posters, (like the 16 individual posters that fit together to create a single poster below, used as one of our backdrops). And students learned how to use all the equipment along the way. We had 3 cameras and a slideshow presentation, and while transitions could have been a bit tighter, I’m so impressed with how this student-organized event went.

One neat thing that we did was that we had a question submission form that we advertised before and during the show, where viewers could ask questions. Then we answered them live, throughout the show. Our student producer fed the questions to our student MC, and she directed them to our student and teacher panel depending on who she thought should answer. This is a challenging thing to do well in a live show… especially having never done it before. Of all the questions asked, I think I offered one of the weakest answers (because I rambled a bit on what should have been a 10 second answer). Beyond that flub, we didn’t need to have an answer clarified by someone else.

We had over 180 live viewers at the start of the show and still had over 170 viewers 40 minutes in. To keep that many people watching for that long is a testament to how smoothly things went.

Through the night, one thing was clear: when students take pride in their school, when they feel they own the learning, they will step up and deliver a great product when called upon to do so. Students thrive when they own the learning.

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(Just dug up another similar post I wrote about one of our previous open houses, prompted by a Facebook memory,)

 

Logo Composite Design by Maddison D, Grade 10

The speed of change

Yesterday I was having a conversation with my colleague, Dave Sands, Principal of Technology Implementation in our district. He shared some good news that our 14th and final middle school in the district is becoming a BYOD – Bring Your Own Device school. This is a great accomplishment for our district. It starts with ensuring the infrastructure is in place. Next, teacher technology, capacity, and readiness are essential, and finally there needs to be support for families that can not afford their own technology. This takes time.

In the conversation I remembered a presentation that I did in 2009 at the Building Learning Communities conference in Boston titled “The POD’s are Coming!”

In the presentation I said, the seed of this presentation started with a conversation and a blog post. Here is what I said in an October 2008 post:

“PODs. We are about 5 years away from most of our students bringing PODs to school, Personally Owned Devices. I’m talking about pervasive access to laptops and iPhone-like devices in our schools. Every kid coming to school with more capability in their pockets and hands than most teachers have on their desk right now.

So in the presentation in July 2009, 9 months later, I said that we were 4 years away from this happening. I was wrong. It took 7 years longer than I thought.

When I look back now, I can see that we weren’t ready for this in 2013. The infrastructure was barely there, there was a lot of fear around the use of technology in the classroom because of the distraction (and disruption) technology causes, and teachers were not ready to lead the charge.

I know many other districts aren’t where we are, and yet we were 7 years slower than what I imagined was possible. Progress and change happen slower than we expect in schools. However, in the world we live in now, 7 years is an eternity to be behind doing what’s possible.

We will need schools to be far more agile in the future.

What students remember

What students forget:

  • The Krebs cycle
  • Historical facts
  • How to solve quadratic equations
  • The homework they did
  • Answers on tests
  • Worksheets
  • Teachers who will forget them

What students remember:

  • Teachers who will remember them
  • Teachers who listened
  • Teachers that made them laugh
  • Teachers who were passionate about teaching
  • Teachers who didn’t give up on them
  • Friends
  • Engaging projects
  • Sports and clubs

These lists are not extensive… but they are the inspiration for a question: What will students remember about school during the 2020-2021 pandemic?

Teachers have it tough right now. Students too. More than ever teachers need to focus on teaching students, not subjects.

Yesterday I saw an article with a title like, ‘Study shows students are months behind in reading skills due to remote learning.’ Squeezing one more book into the year won’t change that. Showing students a passion for reading will.

Focus on students… and they will remember you, and what you taught them, for all the right reasons.

Voice and choice

This was my Facebook memory from 3 years ago:

Spent well over 15hrs at work today and came home totally pumped! Students rocked their presentations at our open house tonight.

The whole event exceeded my expectations, starting with about 240 people coming (more than I had reservations or seats for), and ending with students interviewing each other with questions from the audience.

It is simply amazing what student’s can do when they are given voice & choice, and they are provided with time to explore their passions and publicly share them.

Congratulations to our Inquiry Hub students, you were amazing school ambassadors today!

I’ve been thinking and writing about giving students choice, voice, and an authentic audience for over a decade now. And, I’ll always remember this night as the night I really saw it fully come to life.

Everything about this open house went amazing. The only challenges where parking, and adding more seats to the gym. The students did 90% of the planning and executed a seamless event with perfect sound and incredible presentations that opened people’s eyes to what’s possible when students feel empowered in a school.

The best part of the night was watching students interviewing students about their inquiry projects. Our students got to share what kinds of projects they do, designed by them, to follow their passions and interests as part of their school day. This is the real strength of what we do at Inquiry Hub.

There are students just like ours in every school. The difference is, in many other schools, students spend their days following a pattern of going class to class and doing what the teacher tells them to do. Yes, some of those things teachers ask them to do are amazing. But students seldom get a part of their day to choose what they want to work on. Students seldom get to design their own learning on a topic of their choice.

What we’ve learned as educators at Inquiry Hub is that to do this, students need scaffolding and support, working on progressively bigger projects. Students need assistance with time management and being self directed. And students need to try, fail, learn, and grow.

Whenever I hear a senior student at Inquiry Hub talk about their projects, they talk about being fearless learners who aren’t afraid to fail along the way. They will often do this while telling a story about something others would consider a huge success, but to them there was still more to do, or aspects of the project not yet achieved. This resilience only comes when students feel they have voice and choice in their learning, and this open house three years ago told me that we were finally achieving the kind of student empowerment we were hoping to achieve when we started the school.

Students following their passion

Last year I didn’t update the students page on the Inquiry Hub website. The past couple weeks I’ve added projects by Senn and Miró, and I’ll add more next week. One of the best things about Inquiry Hub Secondary is getting to see students work on passion projects that they decide on, and that they design their learning around.

Students projects come to life when students get to follow their passions and interests. If you’d like to learn more, we have a website for educators. Even here, you will hear student voice. Soon we will have a digital open house. Students are working on both advertising and content for this event.

We are small, and agile, (and have students working in scrums – more on this later). We have educators who are passionate about what they do and focus on supporting our students. And we have self-directed students who are still taking all the required courses for graduation, and also working on projects they want to work on.

Visit our student page or our educator page to learn more.

Parenting and teaching

This morning I read a tweet from Bill Ferriter (@plugisin):


I have two awesome kids, both currently in university, that approached K-12 school very differently. One was an overachiever who always had to do well… ‘tell me what I need to do to get the best mark’. The other is also bright and wants to do well, but is happy to find her own path there. She’s more likely to put work off, but will be disappointed if she doesn’t do as good as she could.

They both did well in school, but they both had their own struggles as all students do. One such struggle they both had was math. Neither of them enjoyed doing math and we ended up getting tutors for both of them at different times.

It’s a massive shot to my ego getting a math tutor for my daughter in Grade 9 Math when that’s a subject I taught. But I couldn’t help her without tears and frustration. I was always showing it wrong. It took all the patience I had, and that wasn’t enough.

On the flip side, I know that it wasn’t always easy for our kids to be daughters of two educators. We deal with kids all day, and sometimes when we got home, we were kinda ‘done’. We knew every trick in the book, and they didn’t always get away with much that their friends could. I could share more on this, but want to respect the privacy of my kids.

Bill’s tweet, shared above, made me think of two things. First, it’s not always easy being a parent as well as a teacher, while not letting the teacher get in the way of parenting. Secondly, being a parent and watching your child struggle can make you a better teacher… it gives you perspective on how something that you as a teacher might think is simple, can become a huge challenge for a kid at home. It can make you question the value of homework, and it can remind you that kids have struggles that you don’t see at school.

Parenting is a humbling experience, and it can be an experience that makes you a better teacher.

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Related: 7 Parenting Tips for Learning at Home ~ Available on YouTube and as a podcast.

The battle within

The battle within is greater than the battle beyond.

It is challenging to realize that our ultimate enemy is ourselves. Our vices vary. Our demons come in different sizes. But they come from within, not from outside.

In today’s Daily Calm meditation, I heard this quote worth contemplating, “You can close your eyes to the things you do not want to see but you cannot close your heart to the things you do not want to feel.”

Anger, frustration, jealousy, hurt, upset, sadness, embarrassment, pride, guilt, shame, fear, regret, anxiety… These are all things that we can not simply close our eyes to when we feel them. We rarely have complete control over how deeply we feel them. But we can decide how much we fuel them. How much we let them burn us up.

I chose my words carefully when I said, “We rarely have complete control over how deeply we feel them.” If I feel sad, I can not easily make the sadness disappear. Just like when you shut your eyes in direct sunlight, light shines through your eyelids, so too does an emotion like sadness seep in as you try to block it out.

Sometimes it’s better to feel than it is to block emotions, even if they are negative. Embrace the emotion and let it come over you. But how long do you allow this? At what point does the emotion take over? At what point does a feeling like sadness or anxiety or grief become an enemy within? At what point does it take control of you?

‘Don’t be sad.’

‘Don’t be anxious.’

There are few words that can be said with good intentions that could be worse than saying one of these phrases to a person feeling those emotions.These worlds only magnify the emotion’s hold on a person, who desperately wants to escape the overpowering feelings that are burning inside.

So if it is a battle within, how does one fight it? I’m not sure I have an answer that works for others. What works for me is to play with the ideas that bring those feelings to me. I imagine the emotion being first worse and then better. Not just worse but horrific. How much more could it hurt, how much worse could it feel. I take it to places further than it could possible go. Then I weigh how bad I really feel. Then I think about how I could feel better.

That’s how I battle. I shine the light brighter than I can look at it, then look away and the brightness seems so much less intense. I don’t try first to look away, I look more intensely, and then I choose to look away. Then it feels less like a battle to fight and more like something I have fought and moved on from. But I also don’t pretend it’s gone, I simply care less that it is there.

I don’t pretend this always works, I don’t imagine it would work for everyone, but I seldom spend time on battles I see others struggle with… and I’m sure some of my battles within are battles others could handle with ease.

I think it’s true for most everyone that the battle within is greater than the battle beyond. But I also believe that these battles need not be as big as we make them.

Listen to what they have to say

Last week I wrote, ‘Know your audience‘ and asked, “Are you trying to share your view only with people that already agree with you? Or are you trying to share your view with others who think differently?“

Yesterday I wrote ‘When you live in a democracy… VOTE‘ and quoted Thomas Jefferson, “We do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.”

Would my message actually reach anyone who chooses not to participate and change their mind? It’s possible, but unlikely.

I’m in education, it’s not that I don’t believe that we can change minds, open them to new ideas, and help people learn… it’s just that I’m guessing my audience already votes. And if they don’t, my post won’t change their pattern of behaviour. This reminds me of a quote that I often share,

“As a general rule, adults are much more likely to act their way into a new way of thinking than to think their way into a new way of acting.” ~Mark Millemann

Adults don’t tend to act differently as a result of hearing new and different ideas. They are not convinced easily, or as easily as kids. So how do we speak to them? In his comment on my ‘Know your audience‘ post, Dave Sands said,

“Perhaps share a your message in a “way” that they will hear it as well. Too often we display an emotional response to those who hold a different view and our egos emerge blocking any chance of reciprocal understanding. Staying logical and intentional with a genuine will to listen goes a long way in seeking to understand as opposed to seeking to convince.“

‘A genuine will to listen.’

Why don’t people really vote? I gave the reasons I thought, but are they the reasons people actually have?

It’s interesting that I originally titled this, ‘How do you speak to them?’ and not, ‘Listen to what they have to say’. But is listening enough? Can listening help me better understand something like a person’s choice not to vote in such a way that can then alter my argument enough to change their minds?

I can’t say that I’ve really tried. So, if you choose not to vote, tell me why? You don’t have to do this ‘out loud’, here is a contact form to share your thoughts privately, if a comment below is too public.

How can I help you act your way into a new way of thinking? Or why won’t I be able to do this?

I’m listening:)