What struck me most about Eddie Obeng’s TED talk (in addition to his overwhelming energy and speed) was his tone of almost desperate need to convince us that we need to break the habits of the past. I think about how long we’ve been talking about 21st century learning and skills and it seems like we still haven’t moved things that much, at least in the education setting. When he mentioned the “professionalizing” of implementation, it reminded me of how we often get bogged down in trying to implement some new program or strategy. Even if the implementation includes some measure of creativity or innovation, it can too quickly become outdated.
I think for us as educators it relates to what we know about mindset. We talk to our students about how making mistakes helps us learn but how much do we really encourage them to take risks. Obeng’s message about “smart failure” goes way beyond just helping people, or in our case students, see that their efforts to keep trying will pay off. In thinking about my driving question and student agency, I see a connection between agentive behavior and “smart failure”. If we accept that the “pace of change has overtaken the pace of learning”, then we have to be willing to take bigger, more creative risks. This requires us to create the conditions where students will be celebrated for trying something new and getting it wrong. This process is where the learning happens.
So for me, I think my role is to protect the process and create conditions where teachers and students know that trying new things, even if we fail, is a way to try to keep up with a future we have to guess at. I need to make sure that we take barriers away or remove obstacles so that the creative process can happen more freely. Some of those barriers are the structures and schedules we create as schools that are often based on tradition or because we’ve always done something the same way. I think the biggest barrier is the defined roles and routines for students and teachers. If we can really let our students be tinkerers with problems and ideas, they may fail but they can also recognize that failure is a stepping stone toward understanding the next day’s new set of rules.
I think for us as educators it relates to what we know about mindset. We talk to our students about how making mistakes helps us learn but how much do we really encourage them to take risks. Obeng’s message about “smart failure” goes way beyond just helping people, or in our case students, see that their efforts to keep trying will pay off. In thinking about my driving question and student agency, I see a connection between agentive behavior and “smart failure”. If we accept that the “pace of change has overtaken the pace of learning”, then we have to be willing to take bigger, more creative risks. This requires us to create the conditions where students will be celebrated for trying something new and getting it wrong. This process is where the learning happens.
So for me, I think my role is to protect the process and create conditions where teachers and students know that trying new things, even if we fail, is a way to try to keep up with a future we have to guess at. I need to make sure that we take barriers away or remove obstacles so that the creative process can happen more freely. Some of those barriers are the structures and schedules we create as schools that are often based on tradition or because we’ve always done something the same way. I think the biggest barrier is the defined roles and routines for students and teachers. If we can really let our students be tinkerers with problems and ideas, they may fail but they can also recognize that failure is a stepping stone toward understanding the next day’s new set of rules.