[squeakland] Testing and education

[karl ramberg]

On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 5:45 PM, Steve Thomas <sthomas1 at gosargon.com> wrote:
> I think culture plays a very important role in learning.  One of the first
> things I do when teaching (school or sports) a new group of kids is to
> encourage them to make mistakes and how to handle them.  A couple of phrases
> I use are:
>
> If you aren't making mistakes, you aren't trying hard enough.
> Congratulations you made a mistake, now what can we learn from it?
> Learn from the mistakes of others, you don't have enough time to make them
> all yourself.
>
> I also tend to model mistake making (sometimes intentionally :)
>
> In dealing mistakes I use the bathroom analogy (stolen from PCA,  nytimes
> article here on flushing mistakes and filling their emotional tanks, which
> is equally important).

Good article
All this is so obvious but is also so easy to forget.
Bad impulse control is bad for teaching and it's easy to create a
environment where everyone are nervous about making mistakes and that
is quite destructive for having a creative, fun and engaging
experience.

Karl
>
> Another point in slate article Karl shared is this, when talking about the
> test quesiton:
>
> "if the question was such that everyone got the right answer, then it
> wouldn’t be a good question."
>
>
> I recall Ken Blanchard talking about giving the kids the answers to the
> final exam and all the other teachers and his chairman getting upset.  His
> comment was he wanted ALL the kids to succeed (and learn).  There
> is definitely something wrong with a culture that focuses more on
> identifying the select few than helping all to succeed.
>
> All that said, my mind being full of contradictions and having heard
> objections to the above approaches...
> I have a hard time imaging my boss coming to me and saying "Congratulations
> Steve you made another mistake!!!".  Yet I can imagine and have heard her
> say "You did your best, under similar circumstances and pressures I would
> have done the same thing, move on and lets get it right."  The above
> approaches do focus on learning and doing your best.  But I believe they do
> so in a way that encourages more kids to succeed and be happy.  More on how
> to do that in a future blog post.
>
> Stephen
>
> On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 10:37 AM, karl ramberg <karlramberg at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Article in Slate:
>>
>> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/06/maker_faire_and_science_education_american_kids_should_be_building_rockets_and_robots_not_taking_standardized_tests_.html
>>
>> One thing I experience with making stuff : I learn more from thing
>> that I do wrong or fail at than things I do that happen to work or be
>> right.
>> It is sad when school punish mistakes. Mistakes are a opportunity to
>> investigate and see what went wrong. And by doing that you learn.
>>
>>
>> Karl
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>
>