Accepting Failure
Teacher Stories
Submitted by Timothy Boyle on February 14, 2012
A Big Idea that came out of my EduCon 2.4 experience was creating conditions in which failure is acceptable, useful, and fast. Students failing at something should be viewed as something instructive to both learner and educator. A classroom without risk damns those who don’t “get it” the first time. I really took to this idea and thought it related well to the kind of writing instruction I do with my 2nd grade classes.
So when my first group of 2nd graders came to me this week, I had the chance to apply some of this thinking into practice. One of the four skills 2nd graders are working on in the 3rd report card period is to edit their writing. This skill is a year-long process but I haven’t felt like they really understood what I meant by “edit”.
You can’t edit if you haven’t failed in some way. I needed some language to express this to the kids however.