Chapter Two: Why We Should Love Mistakes, Struggle, and Even Failure
DISCUSSION QUESTION
- We have all failed at something at least once. What have you failed at and how did it make you feel? Did it help you in the long run?
- Jo compares US math classrooms to those in Japan and China" while US teachers typically give students 30 repetitive problems to practice, teachers in Japan and China that she has seen gave no more than three problems to investigate and struggle through understanding (p. 53-54). In what ways, do either of these depictions resonate with your experiences when you were in school?
- How do you define struggle with respect to learning? How does your view of struggle influence your learning (in work and in life)?
- How can we support children (or others) to accept mistakes as a learning opportunity? Given that it's a whole cultural change, how can we help everyone around us learn to love mistakes, struggle and failure?
- After reading this chapter, in what ways do you feel more prepared to embrace struggle in your learning?
Again I continue to be really challenged by this book... particularly as someone who always throught of himself as being rather "gifted" at Mathematics...
ReplyDeleteI don't like struggling! probably the clearest example of this has been through completing Taumata Tahi of Te Ahu o te Reo Māori this term... it has been an amazing experience... challenging because it's been 100% online... but that has been the challenge. When I've struggled to understand something I've not always seen it through the the conclusion of actually "getting it" - I've given up, or stayed muted on the zoom session...
In Mathematics - I loved being able to churn out lots of right answers... but get - that it's the tricky ones - where we might have even made mistakes - but it is in making the mistakes we have learnt!
It does reinforce one thing regarding Mathematics - just self-marking is not enough... if the answer is wrong, you need to be able to work through the question to work out why you got it wrong! That is when the synapsis fire... when the Myelin is created... and the neural pathways of learning are enhanced.