Gwen Mueller is an IT Professional, #dnd Gamer-girl, #coffee drinker, geek in Secondary Education, editor on tumblr #education, curating #science, and #tech resources to inspire lifelong learning with 1/4 cup of #fun.
Showing 23 posts tagged fail
In school, learned helplessness relates to poor grades and behavior problems. Learned helpless children doubt their ability to overcome their academic difficulties.
“My research shows that praise for intelligence or ability backfires,” said Dweck, who co-authored a seminal research paper on the effects of praise on motivation and performance. “What we’ve shown is that when you praise someone, say, ‘You’re smart at this,’ the next time they struggle, they think they’re not. It’s really about praising the process they engage in, not how smart they are or how good they are at it, but taking on difficulty, trying many different strategies, sticking to it and achieving over time.”
But what some might not know is that this paradox is strongest for girls.
Parents have few options when moving kids from failing public schools
Watson’s experience points to a key failure in New Orleans’ lauded landscape of choice-based educational reform: In a city where parental options abound, how many of the choices are reputable ones?
“Fundamentally, the letter of the law is that if they’re in a failing school, then parents ought to be given the option of a better school for their child,” said Adam Emerson, director of the Program on Parental Choice for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington, D.C., education think tank. “If parents are getting options that aren’t doing any better than what their child is currently in right now, that’s a problem.”
photo via flickr:CC | John Edwards 2008
Where MOOCs Miss the Mark: The Student-Teacher Relationship
For students who know what they want and when they want it in terms of online content, MOOCs are a fabulous new option to build and construct personalized learning ecosystems.
Unfortunately, for many learners, MOOCs lack the possibility of mentorship and close guidance that comes through the building of a meaningful relationship between student and teacher.
![theatlantic suggests:
Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail
You see, teachers don’t just teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. We teach responsibility, organization, manners, restraint, and foresight. These skills may not get assessed on standardized testing, but as children plot their journey into adulthood, they are, by far, the most important life skills I teach.
I’m not suggesting that parents place blind trust in their children’s teachers; I would never do such a thing myself. But children make mistakes, and when they do, it’s vital that parents remember that the educational benefits of consequences are a gift, not a dereliction of duty. Year after year, my “best” students — the ones who are happiest and successful in their lives — are the students who were allowed to fail, held responsible for missteps, and challenged to be the best people they could be in the face of their mistakes.
Read more. [Images: Shutterstock]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/83b8d6adfac747fa8b86429a85d5dcd3/tumblr_mhegizGGTQ1qcokc4o1_500.jpg)
High-res
theatlantic suggests:
Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail
You see, teachers don’t just teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. We teach responsibility, organization, manners, restraint, and foresight. These skills may not get assessed on standardized testing, but as children plot their journey into adulthood, they are, by far, the most important life skills I teach.
I’m not suggesting that parents place blind trust in their children’s teachers; I would never do such a thing myself. But children make mistakes, and when they do, it’s vital that parents remember that the educational benefits of consequences are a gift, not a dereliction of duty. Year after year, my “best” students — the ones who are happiest and successful in their lives — are the students who were allowed to fail, held responsible for missteps, and challenged to be the best people they could be in the face of their mistakes.
Read more. [Images: Shutterstock]
Understanding the Gates Foundation’s Measuring Effective Teachers Project
So, rather than having “figured out what makes a good teacher” the Gates Foundation has learned very little in this project about effective teaching practices. The project was an expensive flop. Let’s not compound the error by adopting this expensive flop as the basis for centrally imposed, mechanistic teacher evaluation systems nationwide.
photo via flickr:CC | Lester Public Library
“I am starting to think that the trick is not getting students and ourselves to be okay with failure, but to care enough about the learning that failure is not something they will do everything to avoid.”
Is failure rare?
Is failure useful?
What determines the impact of failure?
In the real world, problems rarely come neatly packaged, so being able to discern their deep structure is key. But, Kapur notes, none of us like to fail, no matter how often Silicon Valley entrepreneurs praise the salutary effects of an idea that flops or a start-up that crashes and burns. So, he says, we need to “design for productive failure” by building it into the learning process.
We are failing too many boys in the enjoyment of reading
The findings of the National Literacy Trust’s report into boys’ reading are announced today. It reveals again that boys are falling behind in reading and that attitudes to reading between boys and girls are widening even further. Incredibly three out of four schools in the UK are concerned about boys’ reading, and 60,000 boys aren’t reaching the required levels of reading at 11. But what can be done about it?
photo via flickr:CC | Bruce McKay Yellow Snow Photography
Choose your words carefully to promote a growth mindset:
Could a casual comment—something as simple as “Boys are really good at this game”—make children perform less well on a given task? That’s what a new paper suggests.
High-res
I asked if teachers can make mistakes; and thankfully, overwhelmingly you said YES! Summary: teachers are human, and mistakes are a part of learning.
“When you remove the fear of failure, impossible things suddenly become possible.”
“What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” asks Regina Dugan, then director of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In this breathtaking talk she describes some of the extraordinary projects — a robotic hummingbird, a prosthetic arm controlled by thought, and, well, the internet — that her agency has created by not worrying that they might fail.
Meet the ‘worst’ 8th grade math teacher in NYC
For 10 months, Carolyn Abbott waited for the other shoe to drop. In April 2011, Abbott, who teaches mathematics to seventh- and eighth-graders at the Anderson School, a citywide gifted-and-talented school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, received some startling news.
She was, according to this report, the worst eighth-grade math teacher in New York City, where she has taught since 2007.
photo via flickr:CC | William Mewes
“Failure in the classroom is frequently a very private affair. The norm in collegial conversation and in published pedagogical scholarship is to share success stories. We do need to learn about what does work, but often there is more learning potential when we try something and it doesn’t work. The problem, of course, is that learning from failure is rarely a pleasant experience.”
