Middle School science teacher Mo Poxon explains, “At Marin Horizon, we give kids a safe space to fail spectacularly and learn from that. It’s one of the things I love about the teaching philosophy here.”
As a reminder that failure is not something to fear, she has created the Wall of Epic Fails in her classroom.
To be clear, explains Mo, we are not striving for failure, but neither do we want students to be afraid of it. That’s why she created the wall about ten years ago.
“I think in education in general, truly, kids are often afraid to try things. They’re stuck because they’re afraid of failing, afraid of looking bad, or getting a bad grade or whatever that fear of failure involves.”
The current wall features unsuccessful wind turbines, elements from Rube Goldberg machines, and remnants of a neural network. All those designs were epic fails. They illustrate examples of shoddy engineering, hours of student frustration, and lack of planning and design. Things that almost all inventors and engineers experience. Ultimately most of the kids, through tenacity and determination, went on to produce winning products or solutions.
Failure hurts, but that’s the point. That pain helps you learn more deeply.
So what’s it feel like to fail, and how does that help us learn? Mo explains that mistakes actually impact your limbic system. They spark a bit of the brain, create a little emotional frisson, so that when you do find success, you’re more likely to remember it because of that pain of disappointment. It literally activates part of the brain that helps learning and retention.
Eighth grader Griffin described a recent science and engineering project – a Rube Goldberg Machine – that tested his resolve. He and his team designed a sequence with falling dominos ahead of another sequence where a wooden bar on a hinge would drop and create a vibration to get a ball moving down a track. But the wooden bar kept falling too early, triggered by the dominoes. Explained Griffin, “Every single time we tried it, over and over again, no matter what we did, that thing would always fall too early. It took us over a week to get it to finally work!”
We asked him, Was this a valuable process? Griffin responded, “Yeah, I think it was. We really liked our machine and since we put so much time into it, we wanted it to work. It felt really good on the [demonstration day] because it worked perfectly.”
Asked how he feels about failure, Griffin explained, “I really do feel comfortable. Like especially with stuff we build and also in math. It feels really good to understand your mistake and know how you can fix it. And once you do it and remember it the next time, that feels good.”
Success, when hard won, is all the sweeter.
Creating a true desire to know.
Mo doesn’t ascribe to spoon feeding students information, rather, she hopes to inspire a need to know, a desire to know. And rather than “teaching” her students, Mo explains that she’s creating opportunities for them to learn, and opportunities for them to take ownership of their learning.
“We don’t just assign them a list of vocabulary and tell them you need to know force and energy, acceleration, and Newton’s three laws of motion. You’re not just delivering a curriculum, you’re creating a curriculum that inspires that ‘need to know.’”
In her classroom, students often ask her, “Should I do this?” And Mo’s reply as often as not is, “I don’t know. Why don’t you try it and see what happens?” She laughs and explains, “Frankly, sometimes I know darn well that they’re going to fail.” But it’s part of the process. Lots of trial and error. This year’s seventh and eighth graders who are building pumpkin catapults will launch and relaunch their machines over and over again, failing, observing, and redesigning along the way. It’s an important process.
Sometimes Mo finds that she doesn’t have all the answers, either. Two years ago, she suggested that a team’s catapult would not work and encouraged a change of plan. But the team of students was absolutely determined. They failed epically along the way, but ended up breaking the school’s record for the pumpkin catapult launch!
“I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.” ― Albert Einstein