Failing Forward

Post date: Aug 19, 2016 5:28:48 PM

When I was teaching high school, my wife came to visit my classroom as a guest speaker. At the time, she was an astrophysicist working for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and she was also almost nine months pregnant. She inspired my students about how the Sun works and I think my students were amazed. When she left, my students said, "Mr. d'Alessio, your child is going to be SO SMART! You're smart and your wife is smart." I vigorously disagreed and replied, "Actually, my child will be born stupid, just like everybody else." And, he was. Despite the obvious instincts and biological imperative, he couldn't even figure out how to drink milk in his first few minutes. I watched as he learned how to do it. At first he was unable to put the nipple in his mouth. He tried and tried. Once he figured that out, he failed to latch on with enough suction. More tries. Then, he coughed and sputtered when milk finally started flowing but he didn't know how to swallow. As he continued to fail, we praised his strong efforts and perseverance. Finally, success! We all start out like he did -- without knowledge and experience and faced with repeated failures. And we all have the power to learn and grow. 

The reason we fail is because we try something new. This is especially true in science and engineering where we are trying to discover something that nobody has ever discovered or build something that nobody has ever built before. Of course we will fail! Here are some great resources about how engineering design tasks are great opportunities to frame failure in terms of growth:

Failing Forward (I stole their title for this blog post)

A bullet list of tips. Also includes a link to Engineering Design "Talk Moves."

Tinkering with Failure

An academic paper from the folks at the Exploratorium science museum about how to value iterative design over end products and how girls in particular might view iterative engineering design differently than boys.

The idea of failure is embedded within the engineering design process articulated in the CA NGSS in the "Optimize" stage when students progressively improve their designs. There are many different ways that people depict the engineering design process (do a google image search and see a few), but all of them are shown as a cycle specifically because we are expected to 'fail' and then improve.