Failure

One of the things that bothers me as a teacher is when students are afraid to try. Often they are afraid of failure.

How do we teach our children not to be afraid of failing? How do we show them it is often through failure that we grow? That taking risks and missing the mark is a great idea?

We have to demonstrate it.

And this week I did.

Two of my project ideas this past week failed, one almost totally and the other only a little bit.

First, I had wanted to have my students learn to use Google search better. One of the best ways to learn anything is to teach it to others. So I planned on having my students teach themselves how to do better Google searches and then go and teach other classes. I still think the the core of this idea is worth considering, but the way I went about it didn't work. The material I gave them was too tough, and the instructions not clear enough. What's more I was startled to find that at least a third of them didn't care about getting better at Google searches. To their mind Google was good enough without really understanding it.

So I've had to shelve the project for a time. I still want to try it, since I think it would be really valuable on many levels, but I need to re-think my original approach.

The second project that failed was an attempt to allow for differentiated instruction in spelling lessons. I had each student creating their own spelling lists, then they were going to create assignments for each other to complete based on those spelling lists. Once again, the core idea is really good, but the implementation went a little awry. The idea of having the students designing the assignments failed. You see, we had some students sick, some technical difficulty with some of the software we tried to use, and we had some students who just couldn't get their work in on time, which meant other students didn't have assignments to do. In the end I made up some spelling assignments for everyone instead, and I think I will continue to do so for the next while. We may come back to creating assignments for each other later.

All in all, an awesome series of lessons learned by me and my students!

I hope that my failures will make my classroom a safer place for my students to take risks and try bold things.

Guinea Pigs

It's already the second week of school!

I am enjoying working with my students so much.



I warned my students that they would be Guinea Pigs this year. I am trying all sorts of new things.

One of the things we've started is a blog for each student.

Here's a sample of their reactions to the first weeks of school.

http://hhcsgr7bmadelinez.blogspot.ca/

http://hhcsgr7bjaded.blogspot.ca/

http://hhcsgr7bjustins.blogspot.ca/

http://hhcsgr7bryand.blogspot.ca/

http://hhcsgr7bhaleyd.blogspot.ca/

Check out their work so far, encourage them by leaving a comment!