Learning from FAILURE

If I say that as a student I was terrified of failure, I would not be alone.  I was never taught with productive failure.  It teaches students to embrace failure as a part of problem-solving.  It is defined as "a learning design that affords students opportunities to generate solutions to a novel problem that targets a concept they have not learned yet, followed by consolidation and knowledge assembly where they learn the targeted concept" (Song, 2018). 

In other words, failure can enhance student learning by allowing them to test their own hypotheses and to see how something works and then learning how or why they were wrong and the material they were working towards.  It encompasses active learning and gives students the chance to scaffold their own learning, as well as teaching them how to use design thinking processes later in life.

Even when students are told that failure is okay and leads to growth, it is still a source of anxiety.   Feigenbaum (2021) suggests one way to combat this is with generative failure using these principles:

1) To get something right, first you have to get it wrong (many times for more complicated skills or tasks);

2) Innovation and learning are iterative and messy; and 

3) That messiness needs to be embraced, as well as feedback, to pursue a "productive and happy life." 

I was able to fully embrace this messiness in learning when I became a librarian.  I was encouraged to experiment and test.  We created new websites, and then did user experience and usability testing which led to changes (not failure, but growth!) to make our website work for our users.

My own experiences and this research, especially of productive failure, will be used in the future as I redesign my information literacy lesson plans.  I plan on building in time for students to try their own research before we talk about what they did and how close it is to the tactics I want to try.  We can compare and contrast results -- what part of what they tried first will they continue doing? What parts from the instruction will they incorporate?

  References:

Feigenbaum, P. (2021). Telling students it's O.K. to fail, but showing them it isn't: Dissonant paradigms of failure in higher education. Teaching & Learning Inquiry, 9(1). https://dx.doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.9.1.3

Song, Y. (2018). Improving primary students' collaborative problem solving competency in project-based science learning with productive failure instructional design in a seamless learning environment. Educational Technology Research & Development, (4).