Among our other goals at Critical Thinking Works, we want to meet the needs of real teachers and school leaders.
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In a recent article for Education Week, columnist Alina Tugend explores “Why Wrong is Not Always Bad,” and argues that we “need to teach kids how to fail.”
Of course, in education now we are more likely to talk about why failure is not an option rather than about teaching students to fail, but what I would actually say this article articulates is that we are failing to teach students something important if we are teaching them to focus on a single right answer at the expense of learning to think and reason their way through complex ideas.
She writes “[W]hen we tell kids that learning is all about the results, we teach them that mistakes are something to be feared and voided. We stifle their interest in experimenting because experimenting means you’re going to screw up and blunder and fail. And that’s too big a risk.”
It’s true…wrong is not always bad, and we need to teach students persistence when they are not immediately correct. We also need to teach them to go deeper than their immediate answer, even if that answer is technically “correct.”
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