This article by Alina Tugend was published in the May 17, 2011 edition of Education Week and is an article that I frequently re-read because I like it so much. And I hope that you will enjoy it as much as I have.
Our fourth grade teaching team used Carol Dweck's work this year in helping students to develop the growth mind sets, which Alina refers to in this article.
Working hard to get better grades, become a better baseball player, or improve in any area takes hard work along with set backs from which we can learn. "If we never have problems to solve, it's very hard to become problem solvers," goes the saying. And, it's true. Sheltering our students or our children from failures, mistakes, and problems does not prepare them to become active, engaged adults who will know how to learn from their mistakes and move forward.
Learning is filled with failures, just watch any child learning to read, any musician learning to play an instrument, any athlete learning a sport. Without failure, there is no learning.
And, now to Alina's article....
Why Wrong Is Not Always Bad
By Alina Tugend
The conversation about
schools and reform frequently focuses on how to do better. And doing better
usually translates into excellent grades, high test scores, and ultimately getting
into good colleges.
What we often lose in this
conversation is something else—the need to teach kids how to fail. Yes, that
four-letter word.
Now, I don’t mean failing
out of school. What I’m talking about is how so many of our children are
taught, covertly or overtly, that mistakes are something to avoid at all costs,
that there is only one right answer and if you don’t know it, well, you’re a
failure.
Of course I’m aware that in
too many schools, particularly in lower-income areas, too many children fail
all the time—fail to learn to read, to think critically, to even finish high
school. And that’s an important discussion.
But the flip side of this
problem—and yes, we more often see it in affluent schools—is also important.
Children who, in fact, are rarely or never allowed to fail.
So what’s wrong with that? A
lot. We’re creating, as one teacher told me, “victims of excellence.” Kids who
are afraid to take risks, to be creative, to be wrong. Because wrong is always
bad.
We grow up with a mixed message:
Making mistakes is a necessary learning tool, but we should avoid them.
Now, as a parent of a high
schooler and a middle schooler living in an area where many parents regularly
hire tutors and where the SUVs proudly sport decals from top colleges, I understand
this fear of failure.
Some of it’s real; I know my
sons have to do pretty well academically to get into a decent college. But that
reality gets so distorted, and the distortion becomes too easy to buy into—even
for those of us who don’t want to find ourselves focusing on results at the
expense of the process.
And that’s a real shame.
Because when we tell kids
that learning is all about the results, we teach them that mistakes are
something to be feared and avoided. We stifle their interest in experimenting
because experimenting means you’re going to screw up and blunder and fail. And
that’s too big a risk.
Here’s a fascinating
experiment that shows how children absorb what we say about effort vs. results.
CarolDweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford
University, has conducted groundbreaking research in this area. One of her
experiments asked 400 5th graders in New York City schools to take an easy
short test, on which almost all performed well. Half the children were praised
for “being really smart.” The other half were complimented for “having worked
really hard.”
Then the students were asked
to take a second test and given the option of either choosing one that was
pretty simple and that they would do well on, or one that was more challenging,
but on which they might make mistakes.
Of those students praised
for effort, 90 percent chose the harder test. Of those praised for being smart,
the majority chose the easy test.
And there have been similar
findings from similar research across age, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines. As
Professor Dweck told me: “One thing I’ve learned is that kids are exquisitely
attuned to the real message, and the real message is ‘Be smart.’ It’s not, ‘We
love it when you struggle or when you learn and make mistakes.’ ”
That’s not universally true.
For example, studies of North American (Canadian and American) and Asian
cultures—primarily Japanese, and to some extent Chinese—have found a large
difference in how mistakes are handled in preschool and elementary school
classrooms.
"We’re creating, as one teacher told me, ‘victims of
excellence.’ Kids who are afraid to take risks, to be creative, to be
wrong."
For example, JamesStigler, a psychology professor at the University of
California, Los Angeles, who has long researched comparisons between the two
cultures’ educational systems, says that in Japan a student can be asked to
work out a math problem in front of the whole class for a healthy period of
time—say, 12 minutes—even if he is doing it wrong.
The teacher might ask him to
explain why he came up with his answer and then might turn to the whole class
and ask who made similar mistakes. And unlike in an American class, students
are far more likely to acknowledge their own misunderstandings.
“For Americans,” Professor
Stigler says, “errors tend to be interpreted as an indication of failure in
learning the lesson. For Chinese and Japanese, they are an index of what still
needs to be learned.”
Much of this has to do with
deeply embedded cultures—a focus in Japan on members of the community helping
each other, rather than the individualism of American society. And I understand
the constraints on teachers in this country in terms of time and curriculum and
standardized tests.
But I think we can use these
ideas to try to refocus how we’re teaching children and what we’re telling them
about mistakes and failure.
One way we can do this is by
understanding the concepts of “fixed mind-sets” and “growth mind-sets.” Those
with fixed mind-sets, as Professor Dweck says, believe either we’re good at
something—whether it’s math or music or baseball—or we’re not. When we have
this fixed mind-set, mistakes serve no purpose but to highlight failure.
Those with what Professor
Dweck calls growth mind-sets, who believe that some people are better or worse
in certain areas, but we can all improve and develop our skills and abilities,
are much more likely to be able to accept mistakes because they know that
they’re part of learning.
And it’s been shown that
when students are taught about growth mind-sets, their motivation to learn
improves.
I do know this message about
the need for students to learn to blunder and fail resonates with teachers.
When they hear me speak about the role of mistakes, they nod and tell me
stories. Such as the 4th grade teacher who said she has high-performing
students who fall apart when taking standardized tests because they don’t know
what to do when they don’t know all the answers.
Or the high school art
teacher who talked about students who broke down when he critiqued their work.
“As an employer, I would
rather hire a good B or C student than an A student,” one teacher told me.
“They’re able to take risks and be challenged.”
Of course, much of this onus
to shift the way we look at and react to mistakes falls on parents. We have to
be willing to let our children struggle and fail and make mistakes without
always rushing in to protect them or fix the problem. We also have to be careful
not to give the contradictory message that mistakes are OK, except when they
count.
Let me end with an anecdote
about my 15-year-old son. He recently received a B-plus on a difficult research
paper that he had worked fairly hard on. My first instinct was
disappointment—it wasn’t an A. I asked to see the teacher’s comments. As I read
them, I realized that they were thorough and insightful; in fact, it was a
good, but not great paper.
I went over the comments
with him. The process was working exactly as it should. He was learning. And so
was I.
Alina Tugend writes the ShortCuts column for The New York Times. Her book, Better by Mistake:
The Unexpected Benefits of Being Wrong, was published in March by Riverhead.
She can be reached on Twitter at @atugend or at www.alinatugend.com.
The competitive market place that we currently have doesn’t
need such workers, and our educational system must and is changing to keep
pace. Where the industrial model was built on creating contained, controlled,
predictable, scalable, repeatable, and measurable systems, today’s model for
growth and development calls for a system that is creative, adaptive,
permeable, dynamic, systemic, and self-correcting. This new way of thinking is
radically different, and our schools are feeling the impact.
The analogy that is used in the article is the emergence of
steam engines used in transatlantic travel. They point out that, in the early
1800’s, steamships were fairly unreliable and used mainly on inland waters. By
1819, transatlantic trips were being made using a combination of sail and steam
engines, and by the early 1900’s sailing ship companies were out of business. “Adapt
or Die,” could be an applicable slogan.
Christiansen and Horn go on to say that research shows
“industries teach us that those that truly innovate – fundamentally
transforming the model, instead of just incorporating the technology into
established methods of operation – will have the final say.” They also offer that as online learning
evolves, students will be able to customize their experiences. That is to say,
they could have choices, though more expensive, in designing their college
experiences by taking classes on campus, socializing and living with other
students. The opportunities and combinations could become endless. Some
students may choose to “mix and match” their experiences by taking online
classes, living on a campus, living abroad, or attending
learning spaces such as Dev Bootcamp in
Chicago and San Francisco. 
