This weekend I was watching Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. My feelings about the movie were mixed. However, one thing about the movie that I found delightfully refreshing was the opportunity to see an on screen heroine boldly and actively pursuing what is right and just. Watching Alice constantly propelling herself forward toward her goal tapped in to the desire I have for my students to do the same. It left a question echoing in my mind.
How do you get students to jump down the rabbit hole?
One of my continuing challenges as an educator is to create an environment in which my students feel safe taking chances. I have written on this topic before, and I feel it is an appropriate time to return to it now that I have some experience attempting to create such an environment. My first impulse was to shield and protect my students from failure. I figured, if they took a chance and succeeded they would be more comfortable taking them in the future. When lesson planning, I tried to think of all the possible ways my students could make a mistake and then created safeguards within a lesson plan to ensure no such hiccups occurred.
This was very silly.
Obviously, it is impossible to think of everything that can go wrong, and attempting such a feat is hugely counterproductive. The message I ended up sending to my students was that you should always be cautious and do things perfectly the first time you try. It is completely possible that they came away from my lessons believing that doing a good job requires following a set of explicit and detailed instructions and creating an end product that fits a strict set of criteria. Planning lessons in this way makes it impossible for students to get comfortable taking chances because there are no chances to be taken.
Then last night all the thoughts that have been swirling around in my head regarding chance taking finally conga lined into a single stream of conscious thought.
Alice can fall because she has fallen before.
In Burton’s adaptation of the tale, Alice is returning to Wonderland as a young woman. Which means when she jumps into that rabbit hole she can do it without batting an eye because she has done it before and it turned out fine. This isn’t a perfect metaphor. In the movie Alice does not remember having been to Wonderland before and she thinks she is in a dream, but stick with me on this.
When I think of my own life and the moments when I have exhausted my ability to analyze, criticize, categorize, and every other “ize” you can think of for a decision, experience with falling is what allows me to finally say, “what the hell” and go for it. I have lept into the murky unknowns of life before, I have fallen into the blackness, and I have hit the ground at the bottom.'
Sometimes that ground is an embracing plushy surface that allows me to get up immediately and move on feeling glad that I jumped. Sometimes it is fitted with long jagged spikes that leave my body mangled and leave me seriously questioning why I ever thought jumping was anything but insane.
What always saved me from remaining impaled, hurt, and defeated was that during my early “spikes at the bottom” experiences is that someone was there. Many people actually were there to say, "Wow Erin, you really f-ed this up, but you are not done, you are not defeated. Get up, learn from what has happened, and move forward." This was essential, because I learned that I could make mistakes. I could make huge mistakes, and with time and perseverance, I could recover and move forward.
I need to let my students hit the spikes.
However, when they do, I need to be there to help them stitch up the wounds and move forward. Hopefully that way, when they come to a rabbit hole in the future, they will jump with the understanding that regardless of what awaits them at the bottom, they will learn many valuable things about themselves and about life. More importantly, they will know that no matter what awaits them they possess the strength to propel themselves toward their dreams for the future.But what is the best way to do that?
How do you get students to jump down the rabbit hole?
One of my continuing challenges as an educator is to create an environment in which my students feel safe taking chances. I have written on this topic before, and I feel it is an appropriate time to return to it now that I have some experience attempting to create such an environment. My first impulse was to shield and protect my students from failure. I figured, if they took a chance and succeeded they would be more comfortable taking them in the future. When lesson planning, I tried to think of all the possible ways my students could make a mistake and then created safeguards within a lesson plan to ensure no such hiccups occurred.
This was very silly.
Obviously, it is impossible to think of everything that can go wrong, and attempting such a feat is hugely counterproductive. The message I ended up sending to my students was that you should always be cautious and do things perfectly the first time you try. It is completely possible that they came away from my lessons believing that doing a good job requires following a set of explicit and detailed instructions and creating an end product that fits a strict set of criteria. Planning lessons in this way makes it impossible for students to get comfortable taking chances because there are no chances to be taken.
Then last night all the thoughts that have been swirling around in my head regarding chance taking finally conga lined into a single stream of conscious thought.
Alice can fall because she has fallen before.
In Burton’s adaptation of the tale, Alice is returning to Wonderland as a young woman. Which means when she jumps into that rabbit hole she can do it without batting an eye because she has done it before and it turned out fine. This isn’t a perfect metaphor. In the movie Alice does not remember having been to Wonderland before and she thinks she is in a dream, but stick with me on this.
When I think of my own life and the moments when I have exhausted my ability to analyze, criticize, categorize, and every other “ize” you can think of for a decision, experience with falling is what allows me to finally say, “what the hell” and go for it. I have lept into the murky unknowns of life before, I have fallen into the blackness, and I have hit the ground at the bottom.'
Sometimes that ground is an embracing plushy surface that allows me to get up immediately and move on feeling glad that I jumped. Sometimes it is fitted with long jagged spikes that leave my body mangled and leave me seriously questioning why I ever thought jumping was anything but insane.
What always saved me from remaining impaled, hurt, and defeated was that during my early “spikes at the bottom” experiences is that someone was there. Many people actually were there to say, "Wow Erin, you really f-ed this up, but you are not done, you are not defeated. Get up, learn from what has happened, and move forward." This was essential, because I learned that I could make mistakes. I could make huge mistakes, and with time and perseverance, I could recover and move forward.
I need to let my students hit the spikes.
However, when they do, I need to be there to help them stitch up the wounds and move forward. Hopefully that way, when they come to a rabbit hole in the future, they will jump with the understanding that regardless of what awaits them at the bottom, they will learn many valuable things about themselves and about life. More importantly, they will know that no matter what awaits them they possess the strength to propel themselves toward their dreams for the future.But what is the best way to do that?
You're figuring it out, Erin. Think about who your students are and how their life experiences so far have been different from yours! The chief difference is that you have always--and always will--have someone there to help you up no matter how hard or how far you have fallen. You've always known that. That's one reason why you can BEGIN your new experiences with that careful planning. Your students, on the other hand (if I'm reading your descriptions correctly) come from life situations that do not include those "built in" life supporters. Your job, therefore, in your classroom, is to let them know that you're there not only to pick them up but to show them how they can pick themselves up, if need be, and also where to find those they can trust to help. We all travel similar roads between those "Joys" and "Sorrows," but some of us are luckier than others in finding others with whom to dance. Thanks for being my partner now and then :)
ReplyDeleteI think this is what you're talking about...
ReplyDeleteI have my students do a recitation of a huge chunk of text from the Odyssey. They panic when I first give the assignment, and it takes some careful work to make them OK with the idea.
I tell them over and over and over again that the worst thing that can happen is that they fail. The first time I say this they look at me like I have three heads. But I keep saying it. The worst thing that can happen is that they fail, and they stutter and forget what they're going to say, and blush, and stammer, and feel like idiots and are sure they look stupid. BUT...every other person in the classroom has the exact same fear and will feel nothing but sympathy and will not judge for one single moment. And, of course, I would stop any student before it becomes too tragic and we'd try again another day.
And then we talk about the value of rehearsal, blah blah blah. And this is all based on the premise that the students trust me and we've established a good relationship with each other and all that ahead of time.
It works. Every time it works. They are terrified, but they jump on the spikes.
Fear of failure and the paralysis it generates is something that I've been dealing with a lot lately. It has a similar and equally harmful relative in the fear of taking risks.
ReplyDeleteI've recently had several experiences where I've sat in a room full of experience, intelligent engineers and watched various people rule out all the good ideas because they were different from the status quo, and therefore "risky." When confronted about what was actually being risked, the answer was usually "things might not go perfectly"—as if they ever do.
What I've noticed most is that people seem to focus on the tiniest things when they get into this hysterical risk-aversion mindset. We spent an entire week arguing about the risk posed by a few small innovations, to the point where we didn't have any time to discuss the large architectural issues that would have actually justified the combined attention of a conference room full of highly paid software architects.
(Don't get me started on the fact unanimous consensus is the worst possible way to reach any decision. If everyone has the same idea, it isn't really a decision at all.)
When I used to do walk-up math tutoring, I used to notice the same thing. Fear of failure or misstep was by far the primary reason why the students I saw needed help. Most of them already knew what to do, but they were too afraid to get started. Students would be paralyzed by the fear of taking one false step, even when they could backtrack easily with their pencil.
Even more striking, lots of these students would worry over small notational issues and let this stop them from working a problem that they knew how to solve.
This vaguely reminds me of the so-called "big lie." We tend to let our fears and uncertainties of the little things blind us to the big picture, even if that big picture looks really good.
PS: I enjoyed Alice in Wonderland—not because of the mediocre script & directing, or Johnny Depp's terrible performance, but because of Mia Wasikowska. She's been memorably good in everything she's done. Her sequence in the first season of In Treatment was one of the most compelling and memorable things ever on television. (That whole season is absolutely worth getting the DVDs if you haven't seen it.) I'm looking forward to her Jane Eyre in a few months.
I believe that creating a safe environment where students trust that they can take a chance is central to what I am trying to do. I also believe that I must not only be there when that chance does not pay off, but actually build students confidence in their ability to overcome failure on their own. I deeply appreciate all of the comments on this post so far, and I want to probe this question a little further.
ReplyDeleteI have two basic questions.
1. Can you design activities where failure is a very real possibility even if you do everything right?
2. If you can (which I think you can), how do you do so in a way so that the activity ends up being a positive experience of confronting, learning from, and overcoming "failure"?
That's where I am right now...