Technolandy

Day 6 (of SOL 2025) Summer of Learning… Dear Dr Kennedy @chrkennedy failure

In his annual year end blog, Chris had some good questions… here is question 

6. How might we reframe ‘failure’ as a necessary part of learning and innovation in our schools?

First Attempts In Learning is cute, but until we take away the extrinsic incentives to be successful (from the smelly stickers to the red pen) learning journeys will always be a comparison to others rather than against oneself.

Real life applications and modelling how to recover when something doesn’t go correctly – it’s one reason why I have enjoyed bringing TaskMaster into the school environment. Likewise with Project Based Learning – mistakes will be made… then corrected… and when the focus is on the learning rather than the final project… even something not even finished still has value on the learning journey…. Heck even DaVinci failed at finishing… pretty much everything… and still seen as a genius to emulate… 

Maybe a reflection on the failure can turn those zeros into something that is not so mathematically punishing… heck, why do we determine 50% as the pass fail barrier (uh oh, here I go) when for some a 90 can be felt as a fail, and others a 20 can be a big success! Metaphorically, I don’t want my pilot to have anything less than 100% yet if my Mariners could average 30% in hitting… I’d be more obnoxious than I usually am…😎   What if students could have different percentiles for pass/fail? Then we can negotiate the rest of those horrible letters that are still part of our grade 10-12 graduation path… cuz we talk about Edison failing 1000 times before the one needed time that the lightbulb worked (though we can dig into that and more likely he fired 1000 underlings before stealing the working prototype and getting the patent in before anyone else…) 

Anyways, failure is part of learning, but it shouldn’t be punishing on the final summation of learning, but part of the broader learning journey that we are all on.

Imagine getting credit for something you didn’t do… oh wait, isn’t that a big component of why group projects used to be organized… oops maybe I’m spilling too much tea…