I have just read a blog post by @traintheteacher about being someone's worst teacher. I would have to agree with this thinking. Our failures are the best lessons! We don't want to put ourselves into that situation again and so we take all we can from it and try to adapt. How many times have we as teachers tried something in the classroom that was a disaster? I think we have those moments often but we are constantly reflecting and wondering how we can make the next attempt a success.
These are things that we are doing on a regular basis. So why is the word failure such a negative?
We try and get our students to make mistakes and learn from them. I don't know how many times I have told my students that mistakes are a great thing, as long as you learn from them. I think we have put so much pressure on ourselves to get everything right that we stress when things don't go according to plan. I think it's time we took a leaf out of our own book and relax about our failures and looked at them as lessons rather than a personal criticism. I have recently heard +Anne Kenneally @annekenn talk about the word fail and I have decided to take on her philosophy.
First
Attempt
In
Learning
Let's celebrate our First Attempts In Learning, share them with each other and learn from them!
HI Ksenia
ReplyDeleteI think you touch on something failure is not success's evil twin. More a teacher there to help guide our decision making process. I know I am hard on myself - I guess I was trying to point out that teachers are human, we deal with human beings we can't just copy a master teacher and assume it will work. Everything has to be adapted for our context.
Stephanie
Hi Steph!
DeleteI absolutely agree with you. I think your post ignited some of my own thoughts on the matter. I think this post is more a reflection of how I felt at the time (feeling a little overwhelmed by the start of the year with a new age group etc) and I know that I'm not the only one who feels that way. We are humans and things do go wrong for us. I do think we are too hard on ourselves. I think the point I was trying to make was that we need to realise that we are human and not beat ourselves up, but learn from our failures and try again WITHOUT beating ourselves up over it first.