The guiding term this week is failure (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLYECIjmnQs). Failure is something
that is greatly ingrained in our society as Americans and one that can be found
in everyone and everywhere. I have experienced failure on many different levels
both personally and professionally. In my life, as a senior in high school, I
was cut from the varsity basketball team after making it the year before. This
was clearly very hard to swallow and the idea of failure was very much present
in my mind. I have failed in my learning, receiving low grades in high school
and bombing a mid-term in college just to name a few. I have also experienced
failure in teaching, with lessons that did not go well, dealing with parents, and
dealing with students who struggle with their behavior. To me, the question of
whether or not I will fail is not a question that I grapple with. I fully
understand that my life will be full of failures both personally and
professionally. My life experiences up until now have led me to that idea. I am
ok with that. What I have learned is how to turn those failures into successes.
I believe that throughout my experiences and the readings for this week the
underlying factor in dealing with failure is the idea of persistence (http://www.successconsciousness.com/blog/inner-strength/achieving-success-requires-patience-and-persistence/). Whether
you have it or not, whether you know how to use it or not, will determine the
aftermaths of failures.
I fully understand that failure is an idea that is very
complex and gets even more complex in schools. In the business world, if you
fail, you lose your business and money and then are left to choices after that.
However, in schools, students come to the table with many different factors
that lead them to different outcomes after their failures. I fully agree that
there needs to be an integration of teaching character traits into our schools
and academic study (Tought, 2011, September 14 NYT). I am curious though how to
balance this idea of teaching persistence to our students through experience of
failure while also fostering the idea of creating successes in our students
that instill the love of learning? This paradox is complex to me because in a
class we have 26 different students with different backgrounds and different experiences
with failure in their lives. While you might be instilling the idea of
persistence after failure in one student, you might be further supplanting the
idea that failure is common and there is no way around it in another student. This
idea of overcoming a students’ history (whether of personal experience or
racial identity experience) and how this affects their ability to persistent
and succeed (Ogbu, 1992) is an idea that I think schools and the school system
in general struggles with overcoming.
I think that to start to answer these questions and paradoxes
with failure in education and in our students, we first have to not run away
from this idea but to meet in head on and confront it (McDermott, 1987). I
think as teachers we need to start integrating lessons such as how to be
persistent into our daily lessons and expect our students to learn these traits
and display these traits. Students who show persistence are students who” were
the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better
next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge
to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors
to give them extra help after class” (Tough, p.2) When looking back on my
failures, one huge thing that allowed me to be persistent and turn my failures
into successes was the support that I had from friends, family and teachers (http://www.livestrong.com/article/14702-overcoming-perfectionism/). We
need to instill in our students that they are not alone in their failures but
when they work together and seek support they will turn those failures into
successes. This idea of working together coupled with the idea giving choice
and control after a failure will lead to success as Sugata Mitra pointed out in
his experiments in India with poverty stricken students. Even though these kids
have experienced failure in some way or another, they were able to learn
complex concepts with choice, control and cooperation. Overall, I think the one
way that we can resolve the idea of failure in the classroom is to situate our
students in an environment that is safe and allows our students to explore freely.
This is not to say to be ignorant of the idea of failure, but to accept it and
learn how to turn it into a success. When students are able to work together
and feel supported, they will not fear failure, they will be able to overcome
it and become risk takers and explorers. To me, this is what our schools need
more of.
Hi Andrew,
ReplyDeleteI think we’ve had a class together online before. I remember working with you editing each other’s papers. I think TE808? Maybe?
I think everyone has a different way to grapple with failure. I think you touched on an important topic when you said that it is how we react to our failures and turn them into successes. If we learn from our failures, are they still a “failure”? I liked the line when you said, “Whether you have it or not, whether you know how to use it or not, will determine the aftermaths of failures.” I think that is so true. What we do with our knowledge after our failures can have a huge impact on the future. On that note, I have definitely felt the “failure in the classroom.” I have had my fair share of lessons that did not go as planned. I guess that’s just another perk of teaching. However, with that knowledge I can reflect and revamp my lessons and make them better. Would I have done that if I didn’t fail the first time?
As for businesses and schools, I think a huge difference is that businesses can often times choose who comes in. Companies have a lot of control over clients etc. With schools (well, I suppose charter / private schools is a bit different), we let anyone in. It makes for a tougher scenario to control. Your second paragraph was very interesting. I think the best we can do is to use those experiences that the students (with their history, with their failure) and create situations where they can be successful -an interesting paradox, indeed. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said we need to MODEL persistence and how to learn from failure. When things do not go well in the classroom or something happens, I think being upfront with students is important. They can learn that everyone fails and that dealing with that failure is what’s important.
How do you think you could incorporate the learning’s from Sugata Mitra in your teaching? Do you allow your students quite a bit of control after a failure? Too much could be a bad thing too, right? I totally agree with your last thoughts on building a safe community- I just finished the readings for cycle 2 and that’s what the majority of the readings are about. Creating a community where students feel that it is okay to fail as long as they learn from it is tough. How can we ensure that happens? It’s such a tricky thing depending on the students and their backgrounds. Like you said you have 26 students with all different backgrounds and experiences. While taking into account their individual needs, creating a safe culture, we also have to teach a curriculum. Phew! It’s exhausting just thinking about—and then makes me think about failure in the teacher’s hands. A full circle of failure!
Thanks for your interesting thoughts, Andrew.
-Faye
Hi Andy,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your post.
I have to admit I was really captured by your youtube video to start--the history of failure among the very successful. It definitely makes you think. Like you, I was cut from my high school baseball team. I often think about what a defining moment it was for me, and how much support I needed from my family and friends to survive that (I just think of all the hours spent playing as a kid, my love of the game, and how much of my peer identity was all tied up with that game, and how hard it was to have that all taken away).
So, failure opens up all these new doors if we can help people survive. And the surviving is so hard. As you rightly point out with the Ogbu article, all this talk about character and the virtues of failure are beside the point when a whole group of people view "success" in an institution as a form of cultural suicide ("education" = "acting white").
So the question seems to come down to how we build those networks of support so that people can navigate and learn when "life happens." Come to think of it, the problem with the youtube video is we never hear about Steve Jobs's friends or wife, or Michael Jordon's parents, or whatever. We don't just pick ourselves up by our own bootstraps, all alone, through an act of will power. That is where schools and teachers can be so important. Collective working through failure is important, and classrooms can be very important places to learn how to do that.
Thanks again for your post--it's a good one!
Kyle