{"id":421,"date":"2013-04-01T02:42:24","date_gmt":"2013-04-01T02:42:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/wp\/?p=421"},"modified":"2013-04-01T15:46:34","modified_gmt":"2013-04-01T15:46:34","slug":"defying-gravity-as-a-means-to-learning-from-mistakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/2013\/04\/01\/defying-gravity-as-a-means-to-learning-from-mistakes\/","title":{"rendered":"Defying Gravity as a Means to Learning from Mistakes"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a lot of blogging, writing and research (and anecdotal stories) out there these days about trying to foster the value in students for the appreciation in failing.\u00a0\u00a0 I even wrote a blog entry two years ago entitled \u201cmodeling proper mistake-making\u201d<\/a> way before I read anything or watched any videos on the Internet.\u00a0 From teaching with PBL for over 17 years, I am a pro at making mistakes and watching students struggle with the concept of accepting the idea of learning from their mistakes.\u00a0 This is so much easier said than done, but it is clearly something that grow to love even if only for a short time.<\/p>\n

Last April, I had the pleasure of hearing Ed Burger at the NCTM national conference where he spoke about having students in his college-level classes required to fail before they could earn an A in his class.\u00a0 In his August 2012 essay \u201cTeaching to Fail\u201d<\/a> from Inside Higher Ed (posted at 3:00 am, which I thought was kind of funny), he talks about attempting to make a rubric for the \u201cquality of failure\u201d on how well a student had failed at a task.\u00a0 I thought this was an interesting concept.\u00a0 I mean, in order to fail well, can\u2019t you just really screw up, like not do it at all?\u00a0 Prof. Burger states that allowing students to freely reflect on their \u201cfalse starts and fruitful iterations\u201d as well as how their understanding \u201cevolved through the failures\u201d can be extremely beneficial.\u00a0 He also states:<\/p>\n

\u201cTo my skeptical colleagues who wonder if this grading scheme can be exploited as a loophole to reward unprepared students, I remind them that we should not create policies in the academy that police students, instead we should create policies that add pedagogical value and create educational opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last year for the first time, I tried a similar experiment wherein I gave students an assignment to write a paper in my honors geometry class.\u00a0 They had to choose from three theorems that we were not going to prove in class.\u00a0 However, it was clear that they could obviously just look up the proof on the Internet or in a textbook or somewhere, since they clearly have been proven before.\u00a0 The proof was only 10 or 20% of their grade.\u00a0 The majority of the paper\u2019s grade was writing up the trials and failures in writing the proof themselves.\u00a0 This proved to be one of the most exciting projects of the year and the students ate it up.\u00a0 I even told them that I didn\u2019t care if they looked up the proof as long as they cited it, but I still had kids coming to me to show my how they were failing because they wanted a hint in order to figure it out themselves.\u00a0 It was amazing.<\/p>\n

This past week I showed my classes Kathryn Schultz’ TED talk entitled \u201cOn Being Wrong\u201d<\/a> in which she talked about the ever popular dilemma of the Coyote who chases the Road Runner, usually off a cliff.<\/p>\n