Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Fail for success

Learning is a constant flow of problem solving experiences driven by the reality that failure is not only an option but an integral tool guiding students on their pathway to success. Why shouldn’t school be the same? 
In today's artificial world, failure in school is about the most devastating experience one can have. If you do not give the answers the textbook wants, you will fail. Regardless of thinking, the answer is the answer. Columbus discovered America right? If you lie and answer "correctly" you will succeed. If you use critical thinkng, and say it might have been Marco Polo or Leif Erickson, or others, you will fail.
A great example here is WD-40. The 40 in that lubricant refers to the 39 failures leading to the 40th success.  However, in school, those 39 failures would have put you into the streets on a cycle of poverty. Whether it is Milton Hershey, Norm Larson, Albert Einstein, Michael Jordan or anyone who achieved real success, failure was the reason why.
What if a teacher assigned the class a project for the science fair? And what if the teacher indicated the students would be assessed based on .the number of failures they had developing that project? Would the students then picked the easy project, one that had the smallest level of challenge?
Now, what if you told the students, they would receive a higher assessment based on a higher number of failires? The more failures, the better the assessment.
Just sayin' 



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