Success through Failure: Try, Try, and Try Again

     As I continue throughout the weeks to learn more about how people view Math and how I can influence my students to be successful in Math. I received confirmation this week that it is important for me to teach my students that mistakes are a part of learning and failure is the first step to success.

Challenging Your Students

     I found it surprising when I viewed a video by renowned Math education expert Jo Boaler when she said that sometimes students should not be praised for correct work because it may encourage them to continue to seek that praise the easy way rather than challenging themselves. While I may not completely agree with this premise I do believe that we need to encourage our students to challenge themselves by increasing the level of difficulty. There is plenty of research to show that brain growth only occurs when it is forced to think hard about new ideas and struggle with them. If students do not continue to push themselves, they will not become better, just like in sports or music or any other activity. I remember in my teaching block having a student that clearly demonstrated that he was a level 4 student in Math and could exceed the expectations set for his grade level. It was clear to me that he was not being challenged with the work provided for him and he was losing his passion for Math because it became boring. I realized that as a teacher I should not just be comfortable with him meeting grade level expectations, but that I should push him to become better. I accomplished this by getting him to think about other scenarios than what the questions were asking and providing him with difficult, meaningful, real world problems that he would be interested in doing. What I learned from this experience is that once you learn where your students are at, you must adjust your instruction so that it is challenging for the student, but not beyond their reach.

Know Your Students

     Learning about your students is crucial to effective instruction, as I have learned through my experiences, because students view Math in different ways. For instance, in the picture below you see a set of black dots organized in a particular way. On the right hand side you can also see how different students in the class memorized the number of dots in their head through their own pattern. This shows how different we all are and the importance of differentiating your instruction to suits the needs of all your students.

Process Over Results

     Perhaps the most interesting idea I took away from this week was that students need to struggle in order to learn. Too often teachers only praise their students when they arrive at a correct answer. Instead we should be praising our students for going through the process and providing them with the necessary feedback to improve. We need to realize that struggle brings success and the process of working through the obstacles is what makes us better. This means that teachers should be instructing in a way that teaches students that mistakes are a part of learning and continuing to challenge their knowledge in order to gain a deeper knowledge on the subject.

Here is a video by Jo Boaler discussing the idea of learning from mistakes.