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Failure Should Always
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If we are honest with ourselves, we all must admit that we have made many mistakes while learning the things we have learned. As teachers we often say that learning from our mistakes is the best way to learn. However, we have created an educational system which punishes failure. By the time they reach college, most students are so reluctant to risk failure, that they have become passive in their learning. Students have learned that it's safer to wait to be taught, rather than actively trying to learn. The reason may be that teachers have a need to quantify everything - to assign a score, to determine a ranking, to calculate an average. Although assigning grades helps us evaluate our teaching, ranking promotes a feeling of competition and competition always has winners and losers. If we resist the temptation to assign a number to everything, we can go a long way toward removing the stigma of failure, and encouraging students to become more active in their learning. As an example, in computer games a certain amount of failure is expected. A game that is too easy to win is boring. The player of the game does need to know if they are succeeding or not, but this is done without resorting to numbers - charts, icons, and color cues tell the user how they are doing. In this way players are encouraged to think in terms of "haven't won yet" instead of thinking about "failure." Mistakes in computer games are not always immediately apparent. The player eventually realizes that they are not making progress, unless they arrive at a "Game Over" screen, and are forced to evaluate and correct their actions in order to continue the game. Even when they "lose" the game, they simply start over and try not to make the same mistakes. This is exactly the behavior we would like to see in the classroom. In computer games, mistakes are always correctable. In most cases, making a mistake and recovering from it has no effect on the final outcome; you either finish the game or you don't, and all "winners" have the same winning experience. The only difference is the amount of time spent playing the game. We may not be able to change the entire educational system, but as teachers we can at least introduce some activities which encourage, but do not punish failure. In fact, some interactive learning materials will not be effective unless failure is a possibility. A simulation which informs the user as soon as they make a mistake will not teach the user about the consequences of that mistake, nor will it teach them how to recover from a mistake in the real world. In this case, a certain amount of failure will actually lead to deeper levels of learning. Learning how to learn from mistakes, and learning how to recover from failure is an important life skill which, unfortunately, is not taught in school. As developers of learning materials, it is important to teach students that failure can be an acceptable way to learn. ©2004, Stephen Wroble Last updated August 2005 |
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