Teachers increasingly urge students to risk failing as a route to ultimate success
By Susan Moran
2015
In this informational text, Susan Moran discusses how failing can benefit learning and the teaching methods
that are built around this idea. As you read, take notes on how failing can have a positive impact on people.
Last year, I took an improvisational1
comedy class in a
successful attempt to stretch my comfort zone and to
have fun. One of the first things our teacher, Myles
Goldin, told us to do whenever anyone made a
mistake during an exercise was to throw our hands
high in the air and yell, “Wahoo!” Within a couple of
minutes of starting our first game — essentially,
speed-catch with several invisible balls of different
colors — some student failed to catch the virtual blue
ball. Suddenly, Goldin was leading us in a round of
yelling “Wahoo!” This happened over and over each
class.
Goldin was reinforcing a central message: Mistakes
are not only okay, they’re necessary building blocks of
learning and creativity. “We should embrace and
celebrate mistakes, because we couldn’t grow and
create cool things without them,” she said. Goldin also teaches improv workshops for high school and college
instructors in and near Boulder, Colo. Her “How to Fail Brilliantly” workshops instruct teachers on how to infuse
their classroom lessons with this trial-and-error spirit.
While Goldin conveys the message through body language and humor, an increasing number of middle- and
high-school teachers are doing so by encouraging students to engage in direct experimentation. This requires a
lot of trial and error. These science and math instructors are replacing the traditional “sage on stage”2
teaching
style with “guide on the side.”3
It’s not about letting students debate the Pythagorean theorem or basic math
formulas. Instead, the point is to motivate students to discover and explore theories that can have several
“right” expressions, as opposed to a single “right” answer. Along the way, students learn to appreciate how
failure often leads — inadvertently4 — to new discoveries and inventions.
[1]
1. Improvisation (noun) the act of doing something without preparation
2. a style of teaching in which the educator largely lectures
3. a style of teaching in which the educator provides students with occasional assistance while they work
through something
1
Research suggests students learn more this way, too.
Learning from mistakes is hardly a new teaching or life philosophy. A century ago, after five months and more
than 9,000 experiments, famed inventor Thomas Edison still wasn’t able to make a new type of storage battery
work, according to a 1910 authorized biography. When a colleague pointed out all that effort had failed to yield
any results, Edison retorted: “Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things
that won’t work.”
That adage5
is as enduring in the humanities as it is in science. Irish playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett,
who died in 1989, said: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
To grow, accept failure
Although it seems axiomatic6
that we learn and grow through trial and error, few studies have looked
specifically at how making mistakes affects a student’s ability to learn. Even so, a teaching approach that
embraces this style of learning has been gaining traction in K-12 and university curricula. It’s called inquiry-
based learning, which basically means that students uncover knowledge by themselves. It is also sometimes
called problem- or discovery-based learning.
At the forefront of the movement to spread inquiry-based learning is Mary Walker, a clinical professor in the
natural sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. She also is associate director of the UTeach program there.
Since 1997, it has trained college students to teach STEM7
subjects in high schools using inquiry-based
instruction. At its core, this method encourages students to risk making mistakes and to work together in
experimenting and solving problems.
“If you’re engaged in a hard problem, you’re developing an attitude that failure is okay,” says Walker. “Accepting
failure helps you learn,” she notes. Moreover, you’re learning by working together.
One lesson plan that UTeach participants learn involves the design and construction of a pinhole camera.
Teachers in training must apply concepts from all four STEM disciplines — science, technology, engineering and
mathematics. Students use materials such as an old shoebox, oatmeal container and parchment paper.
“Despite the apparent simplicity of the materials provided,” Walker notes that “the challenge requires
knowledge of light and optics,8
engineering design processes (such as meeting the customer needs),
mathematical modeling and scientific experimentation.”
To date, more than 6,800 math and science majors are enrolled in UTeach secondary STEM teacher-preparation
programs at 44 universities in 21 states and the District of Columbia. More than 2,144 graduates have finished
the program. Nationally, 97 percent of graduates earn teaching credentials, and 87 percent enter teaching.
[5]
[10]
4. Inadvertent (adjective) not resulting from deliberate planning, unintentional
5. a saying that expresses a common experience or observation
6. unquestionable, taken for granted
7. Science, Technology, Engineering and Math
8. the scientific study of sight and the behavior of light
2
So far, 76 percent of UTeach graduates who entered the classroom are still teaching, according to Walker.
That’s a higher retention9
rate, she notes, than national averages derived from sources such as the Schools and
Staffing Survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics.
Walker anticipates that UTeach programs nationwide will produce close to 10 percent of President Obama’s
goal of bringing 100,000 new STEM teachers into secondary schools by 2021.
Don’t assume failing is the same as failing
More data have emerged about student-centered instruction. As Walker suggests, the technique often goes hand-
in-hand with inquiry-based learning. Students often teach and mentor one another.
Ellen Granger, who heads the Office of Science Teaching Activities at Florida State University (which has its own
UTeach program), published one such study in 2012. It compared how student-centered versus teacher-
centered approaches affected fourth- and fifth-grade students’ understanding of space-science concepts. The
researchers found that learning outcomes were higher for students who enrolled in science classes that take a
student-centered approach. Some of these effects were both significant and persistent. For instance, her team
measured a positive influence on scores for tests administered 5.5 months after the original instruction.
Granger’s subjects were fourth and fifth graders. But taken together with other studies on student learning, she
says, the results appear to apply to all students — from kindergarten through college. “It doesn’t matter
whether we’re talking about K-5, 9-12 or undergraduates,” she says. “We’re finding the same things... When you
must do the sense-making, you learn better.”
By sense-making, she means that the students must actively engage in making sense of a concept or process.
Teachers should not just explain how something works. Their students must instead attempt to think critically,
guided by a teacher’s careful questioning. An added bonus: Students seem to take pride in figuring things out
by themselves.
Biologist and science educator Joseph Levine co-authored b, a widely used high school textbook. This educator
at the Museum Institute for Teaching Science at the Marine Biological Laboratory, in Woods Hole, Mass., also is
trying to put inquiry-based learning into practice. His tactic: Enticing10 teachers to leave their classrooms for
some time out in the field. Along with colleague Barbara Bentley, the two take teachers to the tropical forests of
Costa Rica for two weeks of professional training. Their goal: Inspire the instructors to teach more hands-on
practices.
“Science is always dynamic11 and changing,” says Levine. It’s much more complicated than any simple cookbook
experiment, he maintains. “Students come up with their own questions and test their hypotheses using data. It
creates lots of opportunities for making mistakes.”
[15]
9. Retention (noun) the act of keeping someone or something
10. Entice (verb) to tempt someone by offering them something appealing
11. Dynamic (adjective) characterized by constant change, activity, or progress
3
A related approach is also seeping into K-12 math education. Common Core is a set of educational standards
that 43 states and the District of Columbia have adopted. The set includes eight math practices that teachers
are being asked to encourage their students to develop. The first: “Make sense of problems and persevere12 in
solving them.” The idea is to push students to make educated guesses. Then those students should not just to
jump to a solution, but instead test different ways to solve their problems.
Making Edison proud
Emily Hogan teaches eighth grade at Westlake Middle School in Broomfield, Colo. She literally puts this practice
in motion in her physical science classes. And she does so in ways that would have made Edison proud.
One sunny day last year, her students were busy demonstrating Newton’s three laws of motion. Hogan had
given each student the same tool kit. It consisted of a plastic foam dinner plate, a balloon, a small plastic stirrer
straw, a sharp pencil and masking tape. The students used their kits to make “rocket-powered” racing cars.
Sergio Montoya finished his beta version and sprang to the front of the classroom, where his fellow students
were already testing how far across the floor their cars would race. Sergio blew up his balloon and released his
racer. It zoomed forward 1 meter or so, crashed into several other racers and then wobbled to a stop.
The boy picked it up and, like a doctor examining a patient’s broken leg, diagnosed its weakness. “Mine had too
much tape on the front, so it would lean to one side,” he said. The balloon also had a leak, Sergio discovered.
Despite these problems, the experiment yielded some real results.
Along the way, Sergio also proudly reeled off, in his own words, what he had learned of Newton’s first law of
motion through his direct experience: “When an object stays in motion, unless another force acts upon it, it’ll
stay the course,” Sergio said. And a classmate standing behind him was echoing those words.
The next day, Sergio’s newly tweaked car won the class’ race. This was a Yahoo! — not wahoo — moment. And
his gleaming grin said it all.
Add 9 quotes from the article New math: Fail + try again = real learning Teachers increasingly urge students to risk failing as a route to ultimate success By Susan Moran 2015, that shows Emotional Intelligence and it must be in quotation marks. Include a parenthetical citation in MLA format after the quote.
1 answer
Here are nine quotes from the article that demonstrate aspects of Emotional Intelligence, each accompanied by the appropriate MLA citation:
"We should embrace and celebrate mistakes, because we couldn’t grow and create cool things without them.” (Moran)
“If you’re engaged in a hard problem, you’re developing an attitude that failure is okay." (Moran)
“Accepting failure helps you learn.” (Moran)
“When you must do the sense-making, you learn better.” (Moran)
“It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about K-5, 9-12 or undergraduates... We’re finding the same things.” (Moran)
“Students come up with their own questions and test their hypotheses using data. It creates lots of opportunities for making mistakes.” (Moran)
“The idea is to push students to make educated guesses.” (Moran)
“Despite these problems, the experiment yielded some real results.” (Moran)
"When an object stays in motion, unless another force acts upon it, it’ll stay the course." (Moran)
Be sure to format your citations according to the required style in your specific format (such as a works cited page).
2 answers