Tag: failure

I. Teachers demonstrate leadership. · III. Teachers know the content they teach. · IV. Teachers facilitate learning for their students. · V. Teachers reflect on their practice.

#kindersCAN Embrace Failure, and So Can We!

NathalieLudwigLeave a comment

You know it’s been a while away from the blog when this post has been sitting in your drafts for months and it features only pictures of last year’s students! It’s been quiet on here for a while, not because I haven’t been “Learning with the Littles,” but because I have not been as intentional as I’d like in terms of reflecting on that learning. I figured now is a better time than ever to stop neglecting the important process of teacher reflection and resume/finally share this post that sheds light on where I am right now in my journey!

Not so recently, I highlighted the imperfections of a typical day in Kindergarten, both to reflect the reality of a day in the life, and to begin bringing new meaning to the word failure. That post can be found here. Growing up, failure was something I avoided at ALL costs. Granted, it has never stopped me from trying like it might have for some, but until recently, failure has never been something I’ve embraced.  For a long time, I even struggled taking constructive criticism, because I felt like I had done a “bad job” or wasn’t “good.” I’m so thankful that failure never caused me to quit, but it DID affect my mindset negatively and cause me to dread any experience that could result in failure.

It breaks my heart to see how even Kindergarteners are already aware of failure, and many have developed fully negative connotations of the word. I really started to think about failure more when I read Hacking Project Based Learning. This idea stood out to me:

After reading this book, I went into the following school year ready to use the horrifying “f word”…failure…in my everyday language, but as a positive term. The Class Dojo growth mindset and perseverance videos have been the perfect outlet to integrate the word failure during morning meeting time. These videos help teach students the science behind exercising and growing our brains by doing challenging things, and how we can learn and grow from moments of failure by reflecting on our mistakes.

Our work around failure and attempt to bring the term new meaning was especially crucial in implementing my 3 Kenan Fellowship lessons during the previous school year. I created these science lessons in an attempt to bring a chemistry experience to Kindergartners. Some of the failure along the way has been on my end, and some on their end; but that is the beauty in learning alongside one another. Failure has led to learning for both them and me. Here are the 3 lessons I designed as a result of my fellowship, along with some of the fails along the way and how we responded to them:

Lesson One: Creating Adhesives and Testing Varying Force Among Samples

For this lesson, I created my own adhesive (wet glue) recipe that students would create batches of in table teams. It took lots of my own tests and tweaks for me to settle on the recipe we would implement in class. After the students learned some of the scientific vocabulary we’d be using and discovered real world examples of how adhesives impact our world, it was time for students to put my adhesive recipe into action! The day before they created, I modeled the process for them, making the wet glue and bonding different pairs of wooden craft sticks together with my own batch of adhesive just as they would do the following day.

When I came into school the next morning, NONE of my samples were bonded together anymore (*insert horrified emoji here*)!!!!!!! My mind all of a sudden went to the “worst” case scenario. I had volunteers coming today, all student ingredients pre-measured and ready, and students were SO amped up for the creation process……and what if THEY came in 24 hours after creating samples and none of THEIR samples had remained bonded?!?!?!!? In a Kindergartener’s world, that would lead to devastation and disappointment because the glue simply “didn’t work”! 

But when I thought back to what scientists do everyday, this actually seemed like a perfect comparison of failure scientists encounter daily. Even at LORD Corporation, scientists were creating failed sample after sample to get to the “just-right” creation they wanted. So I now had an example of my own failure to share with students, and one that could result in one of two learning paths that we could take as scientists:

  1. If the student samples were not bonded together the next day, I as a scientist, with the help of my students, needed to continue tweaking my adhesive recipe for us to try it again.
  2. Maybe students would have more success with their samples than I did, meaning we would need to further analyze what variables had impacted different levels of bonding among mine and theirs when we had all used the same adhesive recipe.

This was a REAL science moment, not failure as we often think of it. No matter how it ended for students, I was confident that both students and I could learn together through whatever “fails” came our way. When I shared what had happened to my samples, and that the same could happen to theirs, they were fully on board and understood that we would reflect and try again if all of our samples came apart the next day.

When testing day came, they were thrilled that most student samples stayed bonded the next day. We would determine the strength of the different tables’ wet glue batches by using a spring scale and measuring the force it took to pull the 2 bonded craft sticks apart. The whole goal was for students to see how different variables could cause different results of force, even when we all used the same adhesive recipe.

However during testing, I could still hear comments that showed me we had work to do on our mindset of failure:

  • “YES!!! Ours took more force to pull it apart! We won!”
  • “WE GOT TO 50 NEWTONS!!!!!!”
  • “Noooooo ours fell apart!!”
  • “UGH ours barely held together…only 5 Newtons to pull it apart!”

Those comments revealed a mindset that science was about winning and losing, not about learning and reflecting. It’s amazing how a learning experience is consumed by passing versus failing even in our youngest learners.

Lesson Two: 2D and 3D Wooden Structures Bonded with Varying Adhesives

See this post I mentioned earlier for a full list of imperfect moments from this particular lesson, that guided how I knew both I and my students needed to do some reflecting. It’s crazy how failure and imperfections can be embedded in such an amazing learning experience…or is it?

Lesson Three: The Culmination- Building Cargo Ships with Adhesives

Any STEM project is full of fails…and fails can easily become discouraging due to the mindset we so often maintain regarding failure. So last year, I created some unique steps to launching a product, from a combination of the engineering design process and LORD’s Stage Gate Business model. Rather than the traditional steps to create, test, and improve; I made the first of those steps “Create initial design,” in hopes that students would go ahead and expect failure, with the following step to “Test and tweak.” After my time at LORD, I saw that it’s the testing and tweaking that takes the most time, and that the initial creation hardly ever works. So when students also go into creation expecting to have to test and tweak, they aren’t as discouraged when their product doesn’t work at first.

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Before students started to create their cargo ships, I asked them to be on the lookout for fails…any little thing that went wrong, didn’t work, or needed tweaking as they designed. We would post “fails” to a failure board in the classroom after the initial creation.

IMG_3367During the creation, students definitely experienced frustrations. It was so beneficial for them to see the struggles involved in genuine, challenging learning. So often, students think learning should feel easy and they want to give up when it isn’t. Granted, there were different levels of struggle among different groups of students, based on who had more or less adult support and what materials, adhesives, and design they had decided on. But they persevered amazingly! I even caught a picture of one big fail moment – multiple open wet glue bottles, a glue spill on the foam and table, and a tipped over stool. This fail photo may look like a mess from the outside, but I felt like Ms. Frizzle from The Magic School Bus, embracing chaos and craziness that previously would have sent me over the edge. It’s like I had impacted my own mindset in efforts to impact theirs. We enjoyed sharing and posting fails on our own failure board after the lesson. Students were able to laugh them off and relay them with a positive mindset.

We reflected on what was easy and hard after the project. Failure shouldn’t just stop right after the fail- it’s what we DO with failure that matters. And journal reflection is a great way to think about and learn from challenges!

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When testing time came, they took their fails with determination and perseverance…after all, we were in the “Test and Tweak” phase and there would be plenty of time to improve the ships and keep testing!

My students and I still have work to do on embracing failure, after all, we each have years of the opposite mindset in the making to counteract. I hope that in education, we can continue to bring new meaning to the word failure, because it could take decades to counteract the damage. It will also take the consistency of students hearing a common positive message about failure from year to year of their schooling. And as long as grades and testing data have such a strong emphasis, it will be hard to reverse the damage being done to the way our students think and learn, which is also the way that most of their parents were trained to think and learn in school. But for now, I will hold onto these special moments…AMAZING moments of failure, imperfection, mistakes, struggle…and hope that my students will continue to remember the learning and success that can result from these moments.

II. Teachers establish a respectful environment for a diverse population of students. · IV. Teachers facilitate learning for their students. · V. Teachers reflect on their practice.

Behind the Scenes: Kindergarten in Real Life

NathalieLudwig1 Comment

No matter what you see me showcasing from my classroom and the amazing world of Kindergarten…there is a real life element that is ever-present, though you may not always see it or think of it. After all, my students have been alive for only 5 or 6 years; though that real life element still exists in classrooms of all ages. In the day-to-day routines, students are so busy stepping up to meet the immense curriculum demands, along with my own high expectations for structure and hard work, that I often forget how young they are. It’s the little imperfections that bring me back to reality and remind me how little they really are. And many of the imperfections I encounter daily as an educator aren’t even related to the students themselves! There are so many intricate pieces of the job that make being an educator highly stressful and highly demanding.

One really tough day, I found myself adding a post to Twitter about an incredible learning experience where my students had really blown me away!

After posting it, I felt a little odd, seeing as it had been an extremely difficult day. I had even spent the majority of my lunch break crying about an upsetting situation with one of my families, while my team comforted and gave me advice. Any form of social media or online post usually tends to highlight the positives, but there is also a real life element there we don’t always see. I am not a magician, and the amazing classroom experiences I showcase are never perfect.  My students and I are human, so it is important that we don’t let mistakes, chaotic moments, and imperfections discourage us. They happen in every classroom everyday…and of course beyond the classroom walls as well! It’s how we reflect on and handle those mistakes that matters.

I’m going to do something a little out of the ordinary and take the time to highlight the not so perfect moments of this particular day, the same day where I posted the above Twitter post. So here is a different view of this day – a day that included a lesson that in many ways, I considered to be a huge success! And if you manage to get through the whole school day bulleted below, you may be in for some laughs along the way…

  • You know it’s gonna be a rough day when you find yourself at Walmart at 6:30AM buying supplies you forgot you needed. It was a big day with more than usual added pressure. In the afternoon, I would be implementing one of my Kenan Fellow lessons where students would be exploring all different types of adhesives and building structures (see more about that here)! A photographer, observing visitors, and parent volunteers were coming for the lesson. It was in the middle of the night that I had made the decision to go to Walmart before school. I had woken up around 2AM realizing that I needed enough craft sticks for 20 students to rotate and build structures at 5 different stations. I was doing some crazy middle-of-the-night math…if 20 students used 10 craft sticks at each of the 5 stations, then I could need up to 1,000 craft sticks?!?!?! What if they went crazy and used more than 10 craft sticks at a table???? That was when I knew I’d be starting my day at Walmart.
    • Sidenote- it was POURING DOWN RAIN that morning….just a little added depression.
  • I pulled into school ready to get inside and get all my velcro dots cut in half and added to craft sticks, along with the many other lesson elements I needed to prepare. Right before getting out of my car I checked my parent messages, only to find a very upsetting message from a parent revealing an entire situation that needed to be handled right then and there. I had gotten to school an hour and a half early to prepare for the day, yet this situation consumed my whole morning prior to the arrival bell ringing!
  • I got through the morning alright. Then SURPRISE! Students will be eating lunch in the classrooms today. Those situations are never thrilling, particularly when the room should ideally look clean for the photographer who is coming later. It also makes my own lunch break shorter while I supervise students in the room and my assistant takes lunch buyers to the cafeteria and back. However many teachers don’t get a “duty free” lunch, so I am thankful for any lunch break I can get.
  • My team and I ate lunch in the hallway while the assistants supervised students eating in classrooms. I was late to our 30 minute lunch, as I had been supervising students with lunch boxes in the classroom and assembling all the velcro dot craft sticks I hadn’t gotten to in the morning. And as mentioned earlier, I cried through most of that lunch once I did arrive, still emotional from the student/parent situation that had come up earlier and was still not fully resolved.
  • I picked my students up from specials right before our big, exciting lesson. I gave them a little pep talk about showing self-control in the hallway all the way back to the classroom to earn our fun adhesive exploration lesson. Less than 30 seconds later, I turned around to witness a student spanking another right on the bottom, followed by a combination of laughing, yelling, and tattling.
  • Time for a fresh start, refocus, and ANOTHER pep talk on the carpet 5 minutes before visitors are scheduled to arrive. 30 seconds in and I hear the words, “I did pee pee.” I look down, and there was a puddle of pee on the classroom rug. This was the 2nd potty accident I had helped with in the classroom that day.
  • I call a custodian, and while we wait, I threw some paper towels on the spot to soak it up. The students were amazingly patient and quiet during this little mis-hap, which made me proud.
  • The lesson goes on, potty accident soaking into the carpet and all. We rearranged students to new places on the carpet, and those routine switch-ups of course set off 2 of my students. It caused them to react anxiously and impulsively throughout the entire time I gave directions during the whole group part of the lesson.
  • We were not as far into our shapes/geometry unit as I had hoped before getting to this lesson, where students would build 2D and 3D structures. Visitors watched eagerly as we reviewed the difference between 2D and 3D shapes. During this review, students basically acted like they had never heard the terms 2D or 3D, always a great feeling for a teacher! Inside I was cringing, but I tried not to let it discourage me too much…I instead looked at this lesson as an opportunity to reinforce these apparently unknown concepts, as students built flat and solid structures. If they didn’t know the terms before the lesson, hopefully they would by the end!
  • When it was time to rotate after the first center, I realized I hadn’t discussed any sort of clean-up procedures. And that was very evident as we cleaned up. Students were so excited and distracted that it was pure chaos…they were running around the room with their sticky structures, materials were spilled all over the place, and it was all I could do to get students to freeze and listen to procedures.
  • 2nd rotation in, and the custodian finally makes it down to clean the rug, which the photographer is doing a great job of avoiding in photos. The custodian starts up the carpet cleaning machine, which lets off a terrible odor and makes it so that none of us can hear one another. Students continued building their structures amidst the distractions, only a couple of students set off by the noise and change in routine.
  • When you’re trying a lesson for the first time, there is a lot of unknown and risk-taking involved. I had planned to implement some accountability into the lesson by having students carry a recording sheet with them from station to station, to record structures created and what adhesive was used. Students were so engaged in the building of structures that many recording sheets were untouched and blank at the end of the 5 rotations.

It would be easy to call it quits after this list of “fails” but that is why teaching has caused me to re-think the meaning and implications of the word failure. Sure, if I didn’t reflect on or change any of my practices after that lesson, there might be a problem; but reflection is the entire purpose embedded in failure. I have worked so hard this year to help my students accept and even appreciate failure, and I have to do the same thing with failures of my own. There are many instructional tweaks that I would make if I tried this lesson again. But here are my big takeaways from my reflection on failure itself…the failure that happened throughout this lesson, along with the fails we educators experience every day.

  1. You can’t always control what happens in the classroom, and even when you can, you don’t always facilitate each moment of the day perfectly. Instead, what’s important is how you respond to those “fails” in the moment and reflect on them for future instruction.
  2. It’s important to highlight the imperfections, as well as the awesome moments, that happen in the classroom. Not only should parents and community members be aware of the reality of education, but other teachers need to know they are not alone in these moments.
  3. The “fails” in life are what help us learn, not just in the classroom, but beyond. We should all be more honest about the imperfect parts. They often have just as much or more value.
  4. Failure is ever-present. No matter how amazing something looks on social media or however else it is displayed outwardly to the world, there were imperfect moments along the way too…in every single case.

Coming soon: more on how failure, yes failure, has become a central part of our classroom conversations, reflections, and learning.