A failure is still a success, because you've learned from it and grown from it. How can we create an environment where we talk about failures? First full day of ISTE, I spend the morning going to poster sessions and playgrounds. Then I go to my first session. I thought I would go to ISTE and learn ALL the educational technology things (cue the all the things meme guy). I thought people would only share their successes, because that's often what we hear at conferences and see on social media. Wrong. So delightfully wrong I was. And I started seeing that at my first session titled "#EpicFailures by Women Leaders in Educational Technology #oktoplayoktofail." The panel consisted of Kelly Sain, Heather Lister, Sarah Thomas, Rusul Alrubail, Kim LeClaire, and Diane W. Doersch. In addition to the two quotes above that were taken from this panel, Heather Lister also said this during the discussion, "If we normalize sharing our failures, if others see people they idolize sharing failures, we'll realize there's no such thing as a perfect leader, but until we see that, we hold ourselves to it. It's doing everyone a favor to talk about failures." These brave, failure warriors gathered a large group of strangers in a room, shared their own failures, had us share out our career epic failures at our tables, and managed to make me feel empowered when I left the session. Talking about failure is vulnerable and scary, but once it's out there, and you see others sharing theirs, there truly is something freeing and empowering about that. Ironically I then proceeded to try to show up to my BYOD session an hour early, and then stumbled upon Carl Hooker having a Fail Fest in ISTE Central. One thing he mentioned was the barriers to creativity. He listed anxiety about being wrong, discomfort with unknown, fear of judgment, demand of perfection, wanting quick results, letting failure be wasted time, & lack of self esteem. The wasted time was one that stood out to me. Almost all educators are guilty of having panicked at some point when something in the plan and/or with technology went awry (myself included). But what if we used those moments differently? Maybe you could crowdsource ideas? (Okay, so x, y, and z didn't work. How should we go about this assignment?) Maybe you could use it as a way to model how you want your students to handle setbacks and failure. I know; easier said than done, but what if we could find a way to use those moments as teaching moments at least some of the time? My toddler is constantly reminding me that children are sponges. She is without a doubt my mini me. What she sees me do or hears me say, she often takes into her own behavior and vocabulary. It's definitely made me more mindful of what I say and do around her, and when I slip up and do not react to something ideally, I call myself out and say what I should have done. I am hoping she will learn more from those moments than from my slip ups. Administrators are encouraging us to take risks. Do teachers encourage students? Are students penalized for their risks? ...If you don't model fear and risk taking for your students, then who's going to do it? The following day when I went to see Nicholas Provenzano and Colleen Graves be Mad Scientist vs. Mad Maker, I heard these two quotes. It is great that more educators are giving themselves permission to fail and take creative risks. And it's amazing that several administrators are supporting this, but do we see this in the classroom? Are we giving our students room to fail? Are they penalized every time they take a risk and/or "fail" a task? More and more teachers are encouraging students to take creative risks, but these often still have hard consequences and deadlines. I was an overachieving, perfectionist in school. While I would want to push myself, I also would want to get the A. So if I thought my idea might not meet the deadline in time or kill my grade, I would've played it safe and not taken the risk. By no means am I saying to do away with deadlines or grades, but what if it was a little more fluid on some assignments? What if a student who took creative risks could document or prove their learning to you even though their project failed? I had heard some educators and leaders talk about the pros of failure and learned some first hand previously, but there was something different about hearing it from educators I admired, having it be such an open part of conversations, and being included in groups openly sharing their own failures. It turned all of that theory into reality for me. I feel more confident and empowered now to take bigger creative risks and to more openly share my fails with others. That section got longer than planned, so here's a TLDR: Fail hard, and fail again. Give yourself and your students permission to take creative risks. Look for ways to not penalize students who take creative risks and to use public classroom failures as teaching moments. Share failures and create a community in your school and your classroom where teachers and students feel comfortable sharing their failures too. other takeaways
Stay tuned I was also blown away by the connections ISTE can foster and global collaborations. I'm very excited about some of the resources and ideas that were shared for global collaboration or teaching SDGs. Some of those resources I'm still exploring, and I plan to write a follow up post to this after I explore them a bit more.
I have a lot of other notes and saw other great resources, but these are the ones I plan on implementing as soon as possible. If you missed it I tweeted a lot of stuff out during ISTE for the #notatiste crowd that you can see here, and I shared a version of my notes too. At some point I'll try to add the poster/playground resources to my notes.
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