Updated 5_3_2011 due to the original YouTube video no longer being available. I had been wanting to write about being wrong or in some cases failure. Not every idea I have is a winner by any stretch of my imagination. The thing is though that I am willing to try and at time fail big in public. I had to do a major mea culpa earlier in the year when I had to get the students who were under 13 to delete the Google accounts I showed them how to create. I was wrong to do that an made it right or as right as I could. I am not saying we need to celebrate failures or being wrong like we do being right or succeeding in what we try, but let’s balance it a bit. People, and therefore schools are not always right or successful. Some of the things we do just do not work or do not work anymore.

I had the following TED Talk by Kathryn Shultz in my TED app on my iPad to watch. I had not yet watched it and then came an email from Patti Donnelly, a fellow teacher, who said she had played it to her class. I like the message it sends as I think there is a lot to showing our students that sometimes being wrong is in fact, being right.

Old post from January 2011.

Each day I learn from what I do wrong and try to reflect to be a better educator. Jason Ramsden just shared this link via Twitter and I thought it worthy of a post before I leave school. When I was a Science teacher most of the experiments we would do in class would work, not all but most. I used to tell my students that most scientists are wrong most of the time, but if they are right once, it can be a successful career. I hope I continue to fail and learn from it and I hope my students do the same.

I did find a solid movie by Robert Marzano where he discusses Responding to Failure so thought I would add it here again.