Immunity to Failure

 Well, the first week went well and second week is off to a fine start.

One thing I've noticed is my willingness (a very new willingness) to amend the syllabus on the fly.  To a large extent this is because this semester my classes have not required the student purchase books as most of what we're doing is available online.  I had no idea how much my. desire to not have the students feel like they'd wasted their money was influencing my rigid adherence to the syllabus.  It's really quite liberating.

What other insights?  Oh, one that I'm not sure I've mentioned (or one that's clearly on my mind because I'm mentioning it again) is that in my conversations with students at least 75% of them (though probably closer to 99% of them) have identified 'discussion' as something they'd like to improve.  When I ask what impedes discussion they say it's their fear of being judged/wrong.  Now, of course I know this.  When I talk to folks about teaching I spend a fair amount of time discussing the human fear of being cast out of the group and the way we interpret being told that we're mistaken as being told that we are not worthy of being in the group.  Students fear, we fear, being thought to be stupid.  I know this but I don't think I do enough in the classroom to address this.

Over the summer I read Tom and David Kelley's (of IDEO) book Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All and they being up the idea of "immunity to failure" -- at least I think it's them -- my copy of the book is at home — and I love this idea.  I'll have to do some work to find out if this is how the recent spate of work on grit is discussed but I love the phrasing of 'immunity to failure.'  The example that I used with a student when I was responding to his fear of failure was that of video games.  I asked him if he played video games (was pretty sure he does) and when he said that he did, I asked him what impact losing a life on a video game had on him.  Did it make him not want to play the game any more and, of course, he said it didn't.  When you play video games you get so used to losing that playing again is not only something we do but it's something we do compulsively.  So, far more than failure discouraging us it appears to motivate us.  My suspicion is that it isn't the failure that motivates us but the feeling that we were so close to succeeding or at least a confidence that another attempt might be successful.  So, the question is how can i get students to feel this way in class about talking.  Of course, in a video game no one is watching so it's just you but my sense is that even if someone is watching many people will want to try again before handing the controls over to someone else and letting them have a try.  There's something about our attitude to failure in some cases (with video games being a really clear example) that would be really helpful if I could get folks to have a similar attitude in the case of saying something in class.  

Historically, my approach was to reframe what they were calling 'failure' to say that not getting the right answer in class isn't a failure because it can further conversation, but this has not been a successful approach.  Learning from Creative Confidence, one thing to do is make failure inevitable.  If everyone fails then no one individual is going to feel stupid for failing.  If the expectations are crazy unreasonable, then doing less than perfectly (and, let's be honest, this is what many students identify as 'being stupid' or 'unworthy") is 100% expected.  The way that Kelley & Kelley achieve this is with crazy time constraints.  So, maybe I'll try that.  Have students write a paper in 20 minutes and that's all the time they can use?

I happened upon this link yesterday where the idea of a 4 sentence paper was shared and, quite frankly, I love the idea.  So, perhaps today in class I'll ask the students to do this and only give them, like, 5 minutes and then they can discuss what they've written with others and in that discussion further develop the ideas.  Yup, that's what I'm going to try.  I'll let you know how it goes!

ETA:

Worked well! Somehow class flew by but then gave students just 5 minutes to write the 4 sentences and then put them into breakout rooms with one other person to share.  I emphasized that I expected that these 4 sentences wouldn't be very good and that this said nothing about them but was only about the unreasonable time constraints.  With only two minutes left in class, 2 of the 18 students volunteered that they thought they felt better about those 4 sentences (which I noted is pretty much an outline of a paper) than they do on many of their papers.  I also prefaced this with an explanation of why I was doing it and the idea of immunity to failure and the example of video games.  So, a win for today.  We'll see about tomorrow