More Thinking about "Failure"

Two weeks ago I wrote a blog titled “The Importance of Failure.” In it I shared my experience with my daughter to illustrate how important it is for kids to be able to get things wrong so that they eventually learn how to get things right. Starting this past Sunday, the New York Times continued this conversation with four interesting pieces which I have shared on Facebook and Twitter:

• What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?
• My Family’s Experiment in Extreme Schooling
• Motherload Blog - Teaching Kids to Fail
• What Do Test Scores Tell Us?

As many of you know, I have been thinking about the role of failure for a long time. I believe that students need to struggle (struggle actually being a good thing!) in order to actually learn something new. I borrow heavily from the work of Eleanor Duckworth when I wrote in the Lesson Planning Handbook:

This is perhaps the biggest lesson I have learned in my teaching. It has been my experience that when we are confronted with challenges in life, it is not how much we know that helps us address our challenges, it is our creativity, mixed with lots of trial and error (in other words, our ability to think and learn), that helps us solve our most difficult problems. In fact, most of the problems we face in our work and in our personal lives have no clear “right answer.” There are typically many paths we can take to solve them. Our challenge is to find the solution that works best given the conditions we are working under. Though we know this to be true, unfortunately, in many of our classrooms the “right answer” is often more valued than the process students used to come up with those answers. (pp. 73–74)

When we value and embrace the struggle that students embark on when they encounter unfamiliar or difficult information, we change how we teach and how we assess. Our picture of what is happening becomes richer. It tranfsorms from the one-dimensional assessment of answers to a three-dimensional picture of student thinking and engagement.

As our leaders debate the future of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), we hope they are listening.