A Challenge: Are You Encouraging Your Students To Fail Enough?

Part 1

Here's a puzzle for you:

In this puzzle, three numbers: 16, 14 and 38, need to be assigned to one of the rows of numbers below. To which row should each number be assigned?

Before I give you the answer, I have a question for you:  

How long would you work on this problem before you gave up?

Now, if you don't want the pleasure of grappling with puzzle this on your own, the answer is at the end of this post. Click 'Read More' at the bottom to get there.

Here's a related question:

How long do you want your students to work at a puzzling problem before they give up?

How long they will depends upon many things -- their incentives, the time of day, their feeling about the particular content of the challenge, peer pressure -- but it primarily depends upon a character quality we usually call "perseverance."  Kurt Hahn, founder of Outward Bound, called it "tenacity of pursuit."

Perseverance is so important, we make up aphorisms to teach it ("If at first you don't succeed, try, try again") and create seemingly hundreds of posters to inspire it in employees and students:

Perseverance: Cliffhanger. Digital image. Art.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Oct. 2012.

But, in order to build the confidence to tackle problems despite failure, students need to encounter failure.

In fact, if we really want students to learn, we should probably increase the number of times they fail.  Tom Watson, arguably one of the greatest golfers of all time, and therefore an expert on perseverance, observed: "If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate."  In the business world, the best model seems to be to make many attempts, ignore your failures, focus on a success and try to replicate it.

Yet in schools, we do anything but encourage students to fail.  We demonize failure.  We record failure. We make failure permanent.

In doing so, we encourage our students to avoid failure -- and many of our kids do this by avoiding trying altogether.

If author Orson Scott Card is right, and "the essence of training is to allow error without consequence," then we need to change how we do things in schools.  The Marines thought Card was right.  They required that all of the cadets in their officer training program read his sci-fi novel, Ender's Game.  Marines fail again and again in their training programs, so that they don't fail in the field.

Believe it or not, in this respect we could actually take a lesson from video games, not because they are electronic or flashy, but because they ignore failure altogether (some simple ideas follow).

So, what about you?  Do you see enough of your students tackling difficult problems and persisting when they don't get it right away? How many times can a student completely fail at something major in your class before they can no longer earn an A?  How long does a student's failure follow him or her in your gradebook?

Below are some suggestions, from the trivial to the terrifying  -- from a single sentence that makes students more persistent, to a radical grading overhaul -- that might change your teaching practice, and allow your students to fail more now, and succeed more down the road.  (More to come in a subsequent post)


My challenge to you is to give one a try.  Hey, you might fail, but learning is hard, and mistakes are common.

Suggestion 1: Tell students that learning is hard, and mistakes are common.

Helmeted Boy On Training Wheels. Wikimedia Commons.

A study published in the American Psychological Association showed that just telling students that learning was difficult and mistakes are common helped reduce the stress that students felt during a task, and increase their willingness to work hard on difficult problems.  What's more, groups which were told this achieved better academically on a content test ("Reducing Academic Pressure").

The effects were probably temporary, but you have to admit, that's a lot of bang for the buck: a single sentence.

Suggestion 2: Be like a video game.

Ignore failure.  Allow for multiple opportunities to practice, gradually increase difficulty, hold inflexibly high standards, and create "feats" or "missions" to challenge and inspire kids.

Ignore failure -- allow for multiple opportunities to practice.  (or rather, make it weightless)
In a video game, if you fail, you just start over.  The game doesn't care how many times you've tried to master a level.  If you master a level, you've mastered a level.  Most of us will try again and again just for the pure intrinsic thrill of having beaten the darned thing.

One of these boys is failing:

Max and Simon, Page, AZ. Personal photograph by author. 2012.

Yes, these are my sons, and yes, they're playing a video game.  We had some long car trips this summer, and were broken down in Page, AZ for 3 days, and the drug of choice was a game called Jetpack Joyride.  It's a stupid game, and incredibly addictive.  In the picture above, my older son just failed; he crashed his animated character into an electric shocker death thingie.

So, what will he do?  He'll play again.  And again.  Until he gets past it. 

The remarkable and terrifying thing about this particular game is it keeps track of how much you've played and how much you've lost:

Now, I'm not particularly proud about how much time my kids spent playing video games this summer.  (We actually have pretty firm limits on screen time in our home.)  But if you look carefully, you'll see that my boys and I played for a combined total of 29-plus hours.  They completed 163 missions.  And they played 1,558 games.  That's a remarkable (Max would say "epic") number of failures.

In fact, that means that for every mission they completed, they failed 10 times.  And they wanted to keep trying.  Could that happen in your class?

Now this is the tricky part -- video games are really, really good at giving immediate, copious, and unending feedback.  But we can't do that -- we're not computers, and the information we're evaluating is much, much more complex:  How well does this essay work?  How well does the student understand the Bohr model of atoms?  What did that performance do that was worthy? How well does that argument explain the longevity of the 30 Years' War?

So the challenge for us is to find ways to let students have multiple opportunities for practice, with feedback, before we grade their work.   What if you had them score each others' work -- and only turn it in once they had two colleagues who rated their work at a certain level?

What if you conferenced quickly: scrutinize a piece of work for 30 seconds to skim, and give the student a single target for the next revision?

Differentiate!  Some students need more practice than others -- What if your more skilled students could advise, comment, and mentor your less proficient students in lieu of repeating an assignment they'd already succeeded at?  The higher skill students benefit from this too, as Annie Murphy Paul has written about in her article, "The Protégé Effect."

What are your ideas? What part of this is crazy?

Next post:  Do-overs, creating feats to inspire, changing the way grades are calculated, and more!  

Oh, yes, as promised - the answer to the puzzle is: Row A are numbers made only of curves, Row B contains digits made of curves and straight lines, and Row C has numbers with straight lines only. So, 16 goes in B, 14 goes in C, and 38 goes in A.


Work Cited:
"Reducing Academic Pressure May Help Children Succeed." American Psychological Association. American Psychological Association, 12 Mar. 2012. Web. 22 May 2012.