Failure is an inevitable event in every classroom, so it is important to instill in every student the importance of these failures they experience and teach everyone to embrace them. Failures are one of life's greatest teaching moments, and important in the process of learning, but can also be a great cause of fear for students. In the TedTalk featuring Astro Teller, he talks about how people fear being laughed at for their failures, which can prevent them from attempting things in the first place. While Teller was speaking about the world of inventions, this principle is also true in the classroom. Students look away when the teacher asks a question fearing that they may have to answer it and face persecution from their peers if they are wrong, and it is this fear of attempting that hinders the process of learning. For increased learning to happen in a classroom students, as well as teachers, need to learn to embrace and celebrate failure in order to encourage students to take risks which their learning will benefit from.
I think we all know that image: The student avoiding eye contact when the teacher asks a question that he/she doesn't know how to answer. How can we make help that student feel more willing to give it a try?
ReplyDeleteI agree with you on your point that we must learn to embrace and celebrate failure in our classrooms. Astro Teller provides great examples of celebrating failure and how his company uses failure as a launching point for the next project. I wonder how we can bring this view of failure into our classrooms. I am curious to learn strategies for teaching about failure and how to incorporate these ideas into my lesson plans.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your point that students need to learn to not be afraid of failure in the classroom; however, I believe that this relies heavily on the job of teachers and less on the students- teachers need to make sure that the classroom environment is one that makes it okay to fail and ensures that children are not afraid to try new things. In order to successfully do this, I think that teachers need to focus on decreasing the pass/fail grading system that is in place in school systems everywhere and emphasize the process of learning, which should be riddled with mistakes, rather than the end result.
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