F.A.I.L.ure

Questions

• What is failure? How can failure be beneficial? How do you overcome failures?
• Are there levels of failure? Common types of failures?
• What is a smart failure?
• If you achieve an "Epic Fail," have you learned more than most people who easily succeed or succeed by following a "recipe"?
• How can we change students' connotation of failure? (Rebranding)
  • They could create new meanings for the acronym F.A.I.L. (students create a backronym)
    • First Attempt Is Learning
    • First Attempt, Iterate and Learn
    • Failure Always Invites Learning
• How does failure relate to Dweck's concept of mindset, Duckworth's idea of grit, and the design principle of iteration?
• How much failure too much, how much not enough?
• How do we know when to let students stop/quit/move on?
  • The Upside of Quitting (not appropriate for student listening)
• How do you know when to lead, when to help, and when to let the students figure it out themselves?
• Can kids benefit from failure if you don't give them time to reflect?
• Can kids benefit from failure if you don't give them time to revise?
• When is failure not an option?
  • How do we keep kids mentally and physically safe?
• “Success” comes from the Latin succedere, “to come after.” Are success and failure a yin and yang relationship?
• How does FAILure relate to student mythconceptions and constructivism?
  • How ‘Productive Failure’ For Students Can Help Lessons Stick

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Resources

• Michael Jordan "Failure" Nike Commercial
• Why Understanding These Four Types of Mistakes Can Help Us Learn
  • Fallacies
  • Curse of Knowledge
  • Cognitive Dissonance
• Struggle For Smarts? How Eastern And Western Cultures Tackle Learning (NPR)
• When Kids Start Playing to Win (NPR)
• Teaching Students to Fail Their Way to Success & Learning to Learn from Failure
• Failure Is an Option: Where would we be without it? (National Geographic)
• James Dyson: ‘Failures Are Interesting’ (Science Friday)
• Learning and Failure
• What do Students Lose by Being Perfect? Valuable Failure
• Fail, Quit, Lose: The Danger In Glorifying Failure (NPR)
• What Do Kids Really Learn from Failure?
• What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? - (New York Times)
• What the Hype Behind Embracing Failure Is Really All About
• Grit
• Problem-solving
• Questioning
• BalancEdTech's Failure links

Related Quotes

• "Tinkering is what happens when you try something you don’t quite know how to do, guided by whim, imagination, and curiosity. When you tinker, there are no instructions – but there are also no failures, no right or wrong ways of doing things. It’s about figuring out how things work and reworking them. Contraptions, machines, wildly mismatched objects working in harmony – this is the stuff of tinkering. Tinkering is, at its most basic, a process that marries play and inquiry." (Banzi, 2008)
• "Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently." (Henry Ford)
• "Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." (Scott Adams)
• "An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered." (G.K. Chesterton)
• "Success and failure. We think of them as opposites, but they're really not. They're companions -- the hero and the sidekick." (Laurence Shames)
• I think making mistakes and discovering them for yourself is of great value, but to have someone else to point out your mistakes is a shortcut of the process." (Shelby Foote)
• "It's fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure." (Bill Gates)
• "He who never made a mistake never made a discovery." (Samuel Smiles)
• "Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes." (John Dewey)
• "I can accept failure; everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying." (Michael Jordan)
• "The problem is not the problem; the problem is your attitude about the problem." (Captain Jack Sparrow)
• "Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time." (Thomas Edison)
• "Mistakes should be examined, learned from, and discarded; not dwelled upon and stored." (Tim Fargo)
• "Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body." (Seneca)
• “Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.” (Neil Gaiman)
• "The question to ask about the program is not whether it is right or wrong, but if it is fixable." (Seymour Papert) consider this small change, "fixable" to fixable/improvable"

Invent To Learn

• The current failure fetish is more sloganeering than progress. It confuses iteration with failure, when in fact any iterative design cycle is about continuous improvement, keeping what works, and dealing with what doesn’t. This is learning, not failure.
• It is certainly important to eliminate the fear of failure as a driving factor in the classroom, but it is crucial that teachers avoid the trap of thinking they have to artificially produce failure."
• When the student is given agency over the task, they can decide for themselves if something is a mistake, a detour, or maybe a new path.
• Wise teachers know when to dispense the smallest dose of information possible to ensure forward progress.

FAILure Playlist